Re: [AD] 4.3 display update methods

[Robert O. <ROh...@nv...>]

One of the big issues with Allegro 4.x is that you cannot easily write
an application that runs efficiently on all OSes/platforms (see the
acquire_bitmap() debacle).

I'm not too happy with letting applications be coded in one of many
ways. This forces all drivers to implement all paths (FLIP/UPDATE) and
then hope that the driver writers can optimize all paths so they don't
suck.

IMO, what we *should* is pick *one* path and then figure out how to
optimize this in Allegro on a per-driver basis.

I favor FLIP/RETAINED, just because it can give Allegro more visibility
into what apps are potentially doing. UPDATE is, ultimately, a dead-end.
It's not in Windows Vista anymore, which just leaves a subset of X users
(and old Windows users) as the only clients. This doesn't strike me as
very compelling.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: all...@li... [mailto:alleg-
> dev...@li...] On Behalf Of Peter Hull
> Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 5:42 AM
> To: Coordination of admins/developers of the game programming library
> Allegro
> Subject: Re: [AD] 4.3 display update methods
>=20
> On 7/24/06, Elias Pschernig <el...@us...> wrote:
> > And I'd rename them a bit, for example:
> >
> > AL_FLIP - al_flip_display will make changes visible. I guess this is
> > better than "retained", since we probably won't implement a real
> > retained mode (where only a list of primitives is stored, and then
> > executed for al_flip_display).
> >
> > AL_UPDATE - the non-retained mode. The user would respond to update
> > events with calls to al_update_rectangle, after redrawing only part
of
> > the window. This would have been most useful in the past for X11,
which
> > always was very slow (with XGL it probably won't matter anymore
though).
> >
> > Both of which could probably be combined with a "direct access"
mode,
> > where Allegro maintains an additional memory cache. So maybe an
> > AL_DIRECT which can be combined with both?
> Does everyone agree with the principle of Elias's suggestion? I'm not
> as happy with the actual names as they don't seem intuitive to me - I
> would prefer something like RETAINED/NON_RETAINED, but then I wasn't
> aware that "retained" refers specifically to storing a list of
> primitives.
>=20
> Pete
>=20
>
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