GTC: Re: GTC blurb

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

Yeah, ok, sorry for the delay. At least I made the developer
accounts for you guys. :) This week has been rough.

Here are my comments on the blurb. Mostly cosmetic changes.

Subject: Game ToolChest (GTC) project announcement

>The GTC (Game ToolChest) project is developing an LGPL'd library 
>for doing many things that are useful to 3d games. Currently, a 3d 
>library is in progress which sites on top of OpenGL (a "visual 

library is in progress which sits on top of OpenGL (a "visual 

>simulation" library.). Although at present GTC doesn't have very 

simulation" library). Although at present GTC doesn't have very 

>many features, some fancy collision detection has been 
>implemented. There's also a networking library, which is supposed 

"supposed to"? does it? if it does, say that it does. :)

>to simplify the packing of data and communication. The socket API 
>of Unix is good and simple so there isn't all that much to do but 
>it still does some useful work.
>
>One of the goals of GTC is to provide new functionality, not just 
>another API to do something which other APIs already offer. There 
>is a large number of game programming libraries out there, though 

are a large number of game programming libraries out there, though 

>there are only a few libre ones for 3d gfx. To my knowledge, PLib 
>is the other good 3d library. Its unique feature from my 

provide a url for PLib?

>standpoint is the widget set it provides on top of OpenGL.
>
>Eventually we intend to provide bindings for many languages. To 
>best achieve that goal, we are using C for the core library. This 
>means that the library is already usable in C++ though C++ class 
>wrappers would make it more esthetically pleasing. We hope to get 

wrappers would make it more aesthetically pleasing. We hope to get 

>scheme, perl and python bindings eventually, perhaps even export a 
>CORBA interface. Since the API hasn't stabilized yet, we can not 
>start work on the language bindings.
>
>Included is a space shooter where you fly in a space armada of 
>ducks (only mesh I had). There's a single player version and a 
>client/server multi player networked version.
>
>This is a list of what we're currently working on and what we 
>need.
>
>* Gfx stuff: loading meshes, textures, skeleton, LOD meshes, 
>projected shadows, streaming video...
>
>* Collision detection. At the moment a pruning step is 
>implemented. If there are N objects flying around, there are 
>N(N-1)/2 possible colliding pairs. A naive algorithm tests all 
>pairs, that is slow. I implemented an algorithm which tries to 
>prune the number of pairs it needs to check. After the pruning is 
>done, remaining pairs need to be checked more exactly, this hasn't 
>been done yet.
>
>* Reducing the bandwidth required by the generic client. Currently 
>we have a generic client which should work for any game made with 
>GTC. The architecture is such that the game programmer can almost 
>forget about the network and multi-player aspects. However, 
>bandwidth usage could be greatly reduced very easily.
>
>* API documentation. It is not stable enough yet to be worth 
>documenting but eventually this will need to be done. Current 
>documentation is outdated.
>
>* We should be educated about CORBA. It may be that CORBA is 
>useless to us now but it wouldn't hurt to check and make sure.
>
>* Content. We need to have some objects to work with.

there should be a paragraph that points at current website,
downloadables, etc. the main point of the blurb should
be to highlight currently-done features and things that people
can test. the goal is not so much to attract developers as to
attract attention, and from there you'll end up with people with
suggestions about what else it can be used for, etc. especially if
you explicitly mention that. putting this sort of nontechnical
information towards the top of the blurb will ensure that more people
read it.
and also, you're free to call yourself a 'seul project' if you want
to be. :)

looks like an excellent start though.

thanks,
--roger

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