random thoughts

[WareWolf@chris2.mayn.de (WareWolf)]

Hi,


There are some questions i'd like to see cleared. They're mainly
concerning the gfx subsystem, but some apply to the entire project.
(So, please, read on ;)


Homepage/ftp space
------------------

Do we already have a new homepage and/or ftp space? If yes - what's the  
URL?

Will the accounts be transferred, too?

BTW: Does the "sunsite" in the server name stand for gigantic bandwidth,  
almost unlimited space and wonderful stability?? ;)


Portability
-----------

The faq on our homepage states that the primary target system for PPlay
is Linux, other OSses would be supported only eventually.

What's the general view on this? Should portability (and with this the
preparation of ports to many other platforms) be a central issue of
PenguinPlay?

IMHO it won't be enough to provide an excellent SDK while staying under
Linux. Especially most commercial game producers would not want to switch
to Linux simply because a good SDK exists for it.

But if PenguinPlay would exist for Linux _and_ Win32, i'm sure many of
these companies would use it for developing games under Win32. And -
because it simply is almost no work - they would also create Binaries for
PPlay/Linux.i86 (and perhaps even PPlay/Rhapsody.ppc and PPlay/Linux.Alpha
and and and... ;)


Token prefixes
--------------

AFAIK there is yet no "official" list of the token prefixes for the
different parts of PPlay. The only one I know for sure is ppg for the
graphics part.

We should now select a definite list of them  and put it on the Homepage
(would you be so kind, Garrett ? ;)

My suggestion:

ppg     -       Graphics
ppn     -       Network
ppi     -       Input
pps     -       Sound

In this list several central parts are not covered, simply because I don't
know where to put them:

* Threads support / System Event manager
* GUI
* File - I/O ("normal" and networked)
* KI
* 3D Object management (including bones support etc)
* Utilities (Modeler, Map editor, ...)


Demos / recorded sessions
-------------------------

It should be possible to support non-interactive demos and recording of
sessions.
To one part this propably could be done through the ability of the Input
part to accept faked input.
As this is by far not enough (especially with "intelligent" enemies etc)
the concepts for "person" etc should provide some facilities to support
situation recording.

Just a thought.


Screen resolution / color depth
-------------------------------

How tolerant about varying screen resolutions and color depths should
Penguinplay be?

As we use GGI for all graphics, it should be possible to select even the
really weird resolutions quite easily (somehow like for XFree).
Considering this it propably would be good to prepare the game for being
confronted with many resolutions and colordepths, not just 1-3 fixed ones
(as supported by current games).

For the 3d part this should be no great problem, as it is based on vectors
and thus easy to scale. And as we use OpenGL even different color depths
should be no great problem (who knows more about this?)

For 2d it is a bit more difficult, as most 2d graphics are pixmap based
and thus not ideal for "on-the-fly" rescaling.

For "usual" static pixmaps rescaling and colordepth changes could be done
when they are loaded from disk, but it gets really hard for animations and
very small pixmaps (e.g. letters (= characters)).

Text would propably not need rescaling (quite often users even select the
higher resolution because they want to have more text on the screen), but
animations certainly do.

Any ideas?


ppg2DImage
----------

What do we want the general class for 2d images (I call it here
ppg2DImage) to support?

Up to now we named:

* static pixmaps in different encodings (raw, rle, transparency_rle, ...
(list easily extensible))
* pixmap animations in different encodings and with different behavior
(run_cyclic, run_once, ...), animation speed etc.

Here are some I would like to support, too:

* 2d vector images (consisting of several vector objects)
* colors (yes, that's no typo ;-)
  This would enable us to replace bitmaps with uniformly colored surfaces
without losing type safety.


ppgImage
--------

Will there be a general type (here called ppgImage) describing all images,
i.e. ppg2DImages _and_ 3D objects?

This would allow e.g. the GUI to use 3D objects as components.
But it could of course prove difficult, as the width and height of a 3d
object depends on too many factors.


Ok, that's all for now ;)

Cu
        Christian


Christian Reiniger (Germany)
e-mail: warewolf@chris2.mayn.de