GTC: GTC blurb

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

Roger, I made the modifications you suggested. See if this is 
better. As you suggested, I made it much less technical and more 
like a brochure. I've also spaced it out a bit to make it easier to 
read.

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GTC

The GTC (Game ToolChest) project is developing an LGPL'd library 
for doing many things that are useful to 3d games. The web site
is http://gtc.seul.org/. You can download the 0.2 release from
http://gtc.seul.org/gtc-0.2.tar.gz. You will need a recent release
of Mesa (or some other OpenGL 1.1 implementation). After compiling, 
you can cd into the demos directory and run "flyingducks", which 
will let you fly in space through an armada of space ducks, which 
you can also shoot. You can also try the multi-player version by 
starting a server with "duckserver" and connecting to the server 
with "gfxclient".

GTC is part of the SEUL project (http://www.seul.org/).

Please download the code and try it out. If you have any comments, 
suggestions or if you want to participate, e-mail me at 
loisel@math.mcgill.ca. Your input is very valuable to us.



Currently, a 3d  library is in progress which sits on top of OpenGL 
(a "visual 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 simplifies 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 
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 
(http://www.woodsoup.org/projs/plib/) is the other good 3d library. 
Its unique feature from my standpoint is the widget set it provides 
on top of OpenGL.



What's done:
* Basic networking code.
* Basic meshes and setup code.
* Scene graph & basic collision detection.
* Generic client which ought to work for any game implementation.
* A demo mini-game (shoot space ducks).


TODO:

* Gfx stuff: loading meshes, textures, skeleton, LOD meshes, 
projected shadows, streaming video...

* Collision detection. This is half done.

* Reducing the bandwidth required by the generic client.

* 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.

* Language bindings. We really really want to be able to use GTC 
from many many languages: C++, Perl, Python, Guile, etc...

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