[Plib-devel] Work outstanding.

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

OK - so we have LOTS of enthusiastic new developers signed up to
lighten my load.

I just trawled back through the list of 'pending' things in my mail
queue.  If you have a yen to pick up one or more of these, please
mention it by email so we don't get duplicated work.


  * Dave said that he thinks the bug in _ssgShareState seems to
    have 'gone away' - and found that he could put it back into the
    code without breaking TuxAQFH.

    It needs to be tested - and someone needs to look through the
    email archives to find out why it was originally commented out.

  * Curt Olson has a nifty 'sky' model class in 'SimGear' that is really
    just *begging* to go into an SSG Utilities library in a form that
    frees it of it's remaining FlightGear heritage.  Just about every
    program I write at home would benefit from that.

       http://www.simgear.org/Docs/SGSky/

    Check out the email thread 'SGSky class'

  * FlightGear discovered that if you set *insane* values for
    pitch (207.44) and volume (30.1289) on their engine sound,
    SL would *crash*.  Obviously those are silly values - but
    SL shouldn't crash because of it.  That also came from Curt.

  * John Fay <fa...@tc...> contributed some
    patches to PUI to make it work better with multiple
    windows.  Sorry John - I didn't get time to try them.
    Check the archives for the message entitled:

       [Plib-devel] PUI 1.3.0 in Multiple Windows
       Mon, 17 Jul 2000 15:31:41 -0500

  * Dave Lawrence posted a 'frame rate limiter' routine
    that may be usefully added as a feature to ulClock. His
    original code isn't much use - but take the idea of noting the
    time at some point - then a bit later saying - sleep/spin
    until at least some number of milliseconds has elapsed.

  * Darrell Walisser contributed a number of MacOS patches.
    Sorry Darrell - I didn't have time to commit these. Look for the email thread:

        [Plib-devel] Mac Updates/Patches (Tux too!)
        Thu, 03 Aug 2000 16:20:49 EST

  * Dave has been worrying about ssgSelector nodes with more than 32 children,
    and how to time ssgTimedSelector in *realtime* instead of frame-time.
    I maintain that you need both options - either as a flag inside ssgTimedSelector
    or as a derived class that does realtime timing.
    This really does need to be done soon because it's holding up some of the
    loader work.  What's tricky (with the >32 kids problem) is keeping it
    backwards compatible.  Notice especially the need to have MULTIPLE children
    selectable at one - which is needed for some derived classes.

  * There have been some comments about the need to delete PUI nodes during
    their own callback functions.  This turns out to be incredibly useful - but
    it's not legal C++ to delete a class object whilst inside a member function
    that belongs to that same object.  There is an idea for a fix for this but
    it's very tricky.  Read the thread:

      [Plib-devel] listbox and filepicker
      Fri, 4 Aug 2000 10:51:38 -0700

  * Dave has shelved his Blender-VRML loader for a while and asks for help with
    continued development.  If this 'Blender-VRML' subset is the best interchange
    format between Blender and PLIB then we'd better write an exporter too so that
    Blender and PrettyPoly can exchange files too.

  * Leath Muller sent me 'lwload.cxx' and 'lwload.h' files which he says would make
    a good starting point for a 'LightWave' loader.  It would be nice to investigate
    that.  (If you want to attack this, let me know and I'll email you the files).

  * The new ssgVtxArray class could be made more efficient (especially for GeForce
    cards) if we added the option to pass Normal arrays as 'short' or 'byte' and
    Colour arrays as 'byte'.  At present, we have both of those as 'float' - so
    to send a vertex to T&L hardware like GeForce or Radion is taking ~48 bytes.
    If we could cut the precision, we'd only send ~27 bytes.  Since data transfer
    to the card is very often the limiting factor with hardware T&L, we could perhaps
    double performance on those cards without harming non-T&L cards.  The loss in
    precision doesn't matter because normals are pretty much only used for lighting -
    which in the end produces an 8 bit result - and colours are hardly every more
    than 8 bits - even with 32 bits per pixel frame buffer depth.

    (Notice that for *environment mapping* you may need more precise normals).

  * Multiple textures per polygon.

  * Enhance ssgState to allow for some of the more common/useful extensions
    to OpenGL.

  * Sam Stickland posted a patch to allow PUI menu's to be resized.  I havn't
    had time to deal with that (sorry Sam)...but since he now has CVS access, I
    guess he can do it himself now.

  * Documentation - this is especially problematic for SSG which has undergone
    a TON of changes since 1.0.5-ish (which is the last time I did a serious
    sync-up between the code and the manual).  The other libraries aren't
    too far out of date - but they could probably be read against the header
    files to be sure that every public function is explained for every class.
    (as a minimum).

Well, welcome to my hell!

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>
              WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net