[libksd-devel] Looking to the future ...

[David S. <xe...@ne...>]

I just release LibKSD 0.0.4 today!  I very happy with it!  Here is the 
developer-style list of changes:

- Reworked surface architecture to accomadate OpenGL
- Replaced error with C++ style exceptions
- Fixed up TSharedLibrary
- Wrote some docuemtation
- General API clean up

The next release will be 0.1.0, the first developemental release!  What 
this means is that we will no longer be do huge re-writes each release 
and focus more on adding new features and doing bug testing.  After the 
next release we will be working up to 0.2.0, or the first stable release.

Here is a list of things I want to finish for the 0.1.0 release:

- Rewrite (hopeful the last goal that starts with that word) TWidget for 
  more extensibility.  Overall, I see TWidget as one big hack. 
Everytime I need a new feature I add some more widget flags to implement 
that feature.  While some of these flags are valid: double buffer, 
accept input, etc., most are used just once.  I need to make it possible 
to extend a widget generically and move all the valid widget flags down 
to TControl.  This way users can add their own features that I didn't 
think of without editing the code.
- I broke the drawing code a bit with the surface rewrite, mainly the 
clipping is incorrect.  Fixing this is a priority for the next release.
- Writting unit tests.  I want to be able to work on various parts of 
the library and have the code automatically verify that we haven't 
broken anything.  I want to institute a policy where if a bug is found, 
you must write a unit test to test for that bug.  This way making sure 
that something similar is found before the code is released.
- Audit the audio code.  I haven't spent very much time in the audio 
code although I know that its reference counting mechanism is broken.  I 
think we need to take a serious look at it.
- Fix TApplication::Exit().  I was actually planning on doing this for 
the 0.0.4 release but didn;t get arround to it.  But it must be finished 
in order to have a developemental release.  (If you are unfamilar with 
this problem, I have documented in the source.  See Application.{h,cpp}).

Long term goals:

- Make widget-set world class.  This includes adding XML definitions, 
more themes, and a visual GUI builder.
- Include a default OpenGL based 3D engine.
- Implement the image loading code without SDL_image to provide image 
saving.  We could problably copy all of SDL_image out for the image 
reading since we use the same license.
- Add more sophisticated drawing code, including rotating, anti-aliased 
  lines, brush images and patterns, etc.
- Finish that damned input filter system!!
- Add support for animations, including common anitmation formats: mpeg, 
mng, animated gif...

I don't know how much of the long term goals will be finished for the 
first stable release.  We'll just play that by ear. Hopefully, I can get 
this developemental release out in about two monthes (such is my goal! 
:-) so the real work can begin!

	-- David Snopek

/-- libksd --
| The C++ Cross-Platform Game Framework
| Only want to write it once??
| http://libksd.sourceforge.net
\------------