GTC: GTC 0.3

[Sebastien Loisel <Sebastien.Loisel@Eng.Sun.COM>]

I am about to upload to the CVS what I expect to be GTC 0.3.

I've added texturing to the scene graph. I was using the gtcImage stuff that 
Quentin made but there were some problems. (For instance, the PPM loading 
routine was not allocating enough memory, the palette pointer was left 
uninitialized so that the texture binding function thought this image was 
palettized, some more stuff.) Therefore, I hacked together a very short PPM 
load-and-bind routine, which is in texture.c. A cleanup of texture.c seems to be 
in order to make all this texture loading code work inside the gfxclient.c 
client. (Quentin, tu peux jeter un coup d'oeil?)

I've also been thinking about this and I think I have a super cool idea. As it 
is, gfxclient is (almost) independant of the game you're playing. The only 
dependancy is that the meshes and textures are right now hard coded into the 
client. I always intended to let the server tell the client what meshes and 
textures to load, I just haven't got around to it.

Once this dependency is removed, we essentially have a browser.

If we endow the server with good scripting that makes it really hard for you to 
shoot yourself in the foot, and also a modeller (ewave), we have a game 
development kit which even webmasters can use. This would be super cool.

We might even be able to make a windows version of the browser. There are two 
hurdles. One, we would need to glutify the client. Two, we need to winsockify 
speaker. Winsock has a select; of course we can't use it to check for GUI events 
but that's ok, we can just select on the socket and call the GLUT main loop when 
we receive packets, to allow for GUI processing.

Regarding SWIG. I thought maybe I'd try to make my own but I'm realizing that 
doing that might jeopardize the library (it would take a lot of time). The 
alternative is to make a SWIG-friendly C wrapper around anything useful and then 
generate the language bindings with SWIG. The alternative is that we hand-code 
our bindings. I suggest we start with Python.

The real 0.3 will require that I do some Makefile.am cleanups and tweaks (for 
the "make dist" to work). Therefore, 0.3 will happen over the week-end.

Happy trails.

Sebastien Loisel -- McGill University -- Sun Microsystems
http://www.math.mcgill.ca/~loisel/

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