Regarding Crystal Space and PengiunPlay

[Jorrit Tyberghein <Jorrit.Tyberghein@uz.kuleuven.ac.be>]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to this list. I was invited here by Christian Reiniger in order to investigate
the possibility of merging Crystal Space with PengiunPlay (or at least making
a port of Crystal Space to PengiunPlay).

Crystal Space is a free (LGPL) 3D engine based on portals. Currently it's mainly
useful for indoor environments (due to the portal approach) but there is work being
done on a landscape engine which would be integrated with Crystal Space.

I've always been a little sceptical about a possible merge because I'm not sure
that the goals of both projects are similar and compatible.

As far as I understand it PengiunPlay tries to be a 'working environment to create
and port game and multimedia applications to the Linux OS' (quote from the
WEB page). So two important features are: general game SDK and Linux.

The Crystal Space project is mainly developed in Linux but it's main goal is
not a Linux SDK. In fact at this moment Windows is considered one of the major
platforms (however I still consider Linux the major platform :-)
At this point Crystal Space runs under Linux (with X support, SVGALIB support
or GGI supprt), general Unix, DOS, Windows (32-bit only), OS/2, Amiga,
Macintosh (port broken currently) and SGI.

As a consequence Crystal Space also supports Direct3D directly (at least the
Windows port does) (OpenGL is planned for the future).

So as such, I think that a merge would be difficult to do (both are large projects
in any case).

However, I see a possibility in writing a port for Crystal Space which
directly supports PengiunPlay (just as there are ports for OS/2, Windows, ...).
So PengiunPlay could just be seen as another platform to support.
Crystal Space already has a port to GGI and I understand PengiunPlay
uses this as well?

In such a port I also see the possibility for more advance features as allowing
PengiunPlay textures or bitmaps (or whatever they are called) to be used
as Crystal Space textures for polygons. That way one could use the standard
PengiunPlay interface for manipulating Crystal Space textures.

What does everybody think about this?

More information about Crystal Space and the possibility to download can be
found on:
        http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/3856/


Greetings,

--
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Jorrit.Tyberghein@uz.kuleuven.ac.be, University Hospitals KU Leuven BELGIUM

"I could send you a bone with a file in it, only you'd eat it."
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
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