Re: [Plib-devel] PLIB 'Neat stuff' library

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

"Vallevand, Mark K" wrote:
> 
> Steve, are you planning on collecting some neat stuff into PLIB?  An
> auxiliary library of stuff.  I have a few small, useful classes that
> someone else might find handy.

Yes.  I certainly plan to do that...and quite soon too.

Curt's 'instant sky model' code is an excellent example (with a couple
of function calls, you get a properly updating sky with clouds, stars,
sun, moon, planets, etc - with a little more effort, you get correct
time-of-day rendering - and it even reproduces eclipses and such
automatically).

I haven't quite decided on the directory layout yet.  Should there
be an 'aux' library for each PLIB component (Like 'libGLU': SSGU, PUIU,
SLU, etc) or one gigantic utility library (PLIBU)?  Should each little
suite of stuff be in a separate lib (SSG_sky, SSG_fractals, etc) ?
Should there be one directory for all utilities or a separate directory
under each of the existing library levels?  Do we want to distribute
all that stuff along with PLIB or as a separate download?

>  The auxiliary library would be a good
> places to put collections of textures, wav files, mod files and models.

Hmmm - I think that 'Artwork' belongs somewhere else.  I'm greatly
enthusiastic about such collections since good freeware artwork is hard
to find - but I just don't think it belongs with PLIB since other packages
like CrystalSpace can also make use of it.

Software that creates textures, etc would be appropriate though - if
you wrote (say) an ssgTexture derived class that made fractal textures
or Perlin noise or something - then that would be a useful thing to add.

There are lots of existing repositories of free and semi-free art out
there.  Check out (for example) 3DCafe.  Perhaps contributing this stuff
there makes more sense.

It's awfully tempting to make "yet another texture repository" though.
If you want to do this, getting another sourceforge account to dump it
all into would be very easy...and I'd certainly want to link to it from
the PLIB site.

Too many of the existing repositories have no information about the
license under which these objects are distributed.  We need a place
where it's clearly stated that ALL content is under (say) the Xfree
license or something.

-- 
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