New Linux Game SDK Project - Please Read This If Nothing Further

[root <colskywalker@thepentagon.com>]

  The Pheonix GSDK

   To be successful, any major game software development kit must have
the
following libraries:

Networking - including ipx/spx, tcp/ip, direct phone line connection,
and
serial connection.

Sound - to play any sound on most sound cards taking advantage of the
soundcard's capabilities as much as possible.

3D Sound - play sounds simulating them being at a certain relative point
in
space to the listener.

Input - to take input from joysticks, keyboard, and mouse, for use by
the
game, must support all major brands and products directly.

Graphics - graphics being the base of all games makes this a must, they
must
be quick, able to use hardware, and easily used.

3D Graphics - 3D Graphics being a must, yet difficult to write for,
OpenGl
should be standard issue in the form of mesa.  Mesa however needs
greater
support as will be noted later.

GUI - There is 2 increasingly popular GUI libraries available, GTk, and
QT,
and 2 increasingly popular GUIs, GNOME and KDE respectively.  A
succesful
GSDK must be able to determine what of these is available for use, and
use
them accordingly, and fallback on it's own when none are available.

   All of this by my research, my consulting with other programmers, my
personal experience, and my consulting with gamers, has been determined
to
be true.

   Graphics and sound hardware manufacturers need to be made aware
of standard Linux driver structures and requests be made to use them.  I
am
sure that hardware manufacturers will write drivers for Linux if it is
made
known that it is wanted.  As it is now, the Linux community has been so
self-sufficient and autononymous in this respect that it has never truly

been necesary.  Yet, with today's "trade secrets" and information that
is
available only with money and an NDA,something that with sound and video

was not usually needed to write drivers up until a few years ago, this
has
become increasingly difficult to do.  Therefore standard sound and video

driver structure must be made known to the manufacturers and requests be

made to them for drivers.  The highest priorities for drivers are Mesa
and
X-Servers.

   In the area of input, information on different joysticks is usually
available freely, with analog joysticks, and with an NDA on USB and
other
digital type sticks.  The knowledge to program the mouse and keyboard is

quite easily obtained and implemented.

   Networking has information out there, but it must be implemented in a
way
simple for game programmers to use, and in a way convenient for them.

   3D sound needs a Linux API, drivers would need to be created by
hardware
manufacturers in most cases (but not all).

   If a large number of programmers contributed toward this, a strong
set
of goals set, a first release would be available quite quickly!  It does
not
take much, just a guy to say "Sure I'll do that!" "Hey, I can write the
keyboard
Library." "I can design a 3D Sound driver structure." Just one thing
from each
person out of a lot of people and it could be done quickly.

  With this in mind, I request that all programmers interested in a
Linux GSDK
attend a meeting, 3 April 1999, at 22:00GMT (also known as UTC or ZULU
time),
this is 5:00pm EST, on the IRC network of Undernet (recomended server is

dallas.tx.us.undernet.org, to avoid network splits, it is recomended
that all
who plan to attend use this server), in the channel #PheonixGSDK (for
those
interested I used Pheonix GSDK because I thought it sounded cool :-).

   Items on the agenda will be a taking of names of people who will be
interested
in the project, a tentative designing of some of the APIs, a call for a
mailing
campaign, and other information.

    I realize this has all been attempted before...and there are APIs
for the
different parts of this, but none focus on the game programmer, nor are
they
convenient for him.  Some people will mention PenguinPlay.  PPlay has
great ideas
but they are not being acted on, which makes the ideas useless.

   I hope anyone whom i send this to attends at least to hear me out.
If you do
not like my ideas, then that is fine, everyone is entitled to their own
opinion.



                Sincerely,
                Derek Greene

P.S.- Please excuse any poor grammar, or misspelled words, I didn't use
a spell checker,
and I'm from the American south. :-)