[Plib-devel] Some "PW" notes

[Fay J. F C. AAC/W. <joh...@eg...>]

Gentlemen,

	I have started going over the new "PW" code.  Frankly, I am amazed
at the accomplishment; "freeglut" is almost 20,000 lines of code while PW is
under 2,500 lines.  (Of course, the joystick support is missing; there
aren't any fonts; backwards compatibility was not an issue; etc.)  As with
all new software, there are some rough edges that may need some smoothing.
In an effort to apply some polishing, I have a few questions and
suggestions.

(1) The X11 and MacOSX versions of "pwSwapBuffers" and "pwCleanup" check
whether PW has been initialized and prints an error message (and in the case
of "pwSwapBuffers" under X11 exits) if it has not.  The Windows version does
not.  Do we want it to?

Incidentally, the X11 version uses "fprintf" and "exit" while the MacOSX
version uses "ulSetError".  I presume the latter is preferable.

Also, do we want to exit if a PW application calls "pwSwapBuffers" without
initializing?

(2) Some error messages in the X11 version need carriage returns at the end
of the message.  They also use "fprintf" instead of "ulSetError".  The
messages that I noticed are on lines 219, 229, 314, and 315 of "pwX11.cxx".

(3) When starting up the Trireme simulation on Linux, I get the warning
messages that "This is an INDIRECT rendering context" and "That may be bad
for performance."  This may be more a question for the Triereis project, but
I will ask it here anyway.  How bad for performance is it?  I am getting
frame rates of less than one per second but it's a slow computer.  Also, how
do I create a direct rendering context?

John F. Fay
joh...@eg...