RE: [org] Aiming for Release 1

[Justin Bradford <justin@ukans.edu>]

Hi. You don't know me. I just lurk here, but I'm involved or at least
actively monitoring a number of other related projects, so I thought I'd
add few comments.

> > Penguin3D
> >       <fill in>
> 
> Mesa, as we decided we would use OpenGL and that is the only viable solution on
> Linux right now. However the integration with libggi could be a problem. If it
> does not work right now, then PenguinGraphics developers should seriously
> consider to improve this aspect and fix Mesa ;-)

As someone else here mentioned, XFree86 4.0 has GLX support, which will be
used by Precision Insight's Direct Rendering Infrastructure to push data
to XMesa or 3D X drivers. XFree will have diverse 3D hardware support
before most other projects, including GGI and accelerated Mesa, and not
all of that code will be open. This could also be a big problem.
However, GGI can render onto X. If GGI is eventually upgraded to render on
the 3D DRI, Penguin3D could still make use of it (as long as the
OpenGL->GGI component works as mentioned above).
However, this would mean:
game->OpenGL->GGI->OpenGL->DRI/GLX->(Xmesa|X 3D driver)
Of course 2D would be:
game->pplay2d->GGI->DGA (or maybe just straight Xlib)->X driver

Of course a game doesn't have to run in X, but I'm inclined to think most
people don't want to shut down X to play a game (although virtual console
switching is still a possibility) and, as I mentioned before, the best 3D
support will probably be in X. I say that because I've run 3D accelerated
4.0 betas on one chipset (Permedia), and I've seen discussion going around
about several projects I'm not involved in (including nVidia and 3Dfx).
As far as I know, none of these will have completely open source.
(with the exception of Matrox's 3D driver).

In an ideal world, all of our graphics hardware would be supported in GGI
and X would run on that, but there's not much you can do, except maybe
make an X driver wrapper for GGI use.

> > PenguinSound
> >       <fill in>
> 
> Whatever has been done so far ?

ALSA is the only long-term choice. OSS is horrible and going nowhere. ALSA
won't be a standard for a while yet, but the interface is far more
powerful and flexible than OSS (or any Windows sound implementation for
that matter -- BeOS is its only competitor). It will have support for
hardware mixing, multichannel outputs, and 3D sound eventually.

> > PenguinNet
> >       <fill in>
> 
> Definitely Zombie. The new version is very promising.

For robustness, modem and direct connection support would be good, too.


Just my late night ramblings...

Justin Bradford
justin@ukans.edu