"Most Wanted" list

[Joseph J. S. <jo...@st...>]

[Resent to the proper list after Lars pointed out that I needed to 
update my address book...]

I've been talking with one of my most expert users about his 
most-wanted Quesa bug fixes and feature requests.  We may even get 
him to chip in a bit (he's an OpenGL whiz as well).  But it got me 
thinking that it might be valuable to kick around our favorite issues 
here a bit, and see whether anyone has any thoughts on them.

1. Proper mipmap filtering 
<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=905678&group_id=45158&atid=442052>. 
There are several ideas in this request, but the most important one 
is to automatically generate mipmaps from a Pixmap texture, just as 
QD3D 1.6 does.  (And then of course if you don't want mipmaps 
generated for you, you can use a MipMap texture instead.)

2. Color/alpha modulation on textured geometry. Even just matching 
QD3D's functionality would be welcome: 
<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=895106&group_id=45158&atid=442052> 
QD3D does this when using the null shader; we should probably do the 
same (and perhaps consider an object property later that extends this 
behavior to phong/lambert-shaded objects).

An example of when this is useful: you could use vertex colors to do 
your own lighting, which can be much faster than using OpenGL lights 
for some kinds of scenes.  Another example: by changing the diffuse 
alpha attribute on a textured model, you could make the object fade 
in or out.

3. The fog/specular blending bugs: 
<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=922742&group_id=45158&atid=442052> 
This is a pretty big one for me; the "Renegades" FPS game that Jeff 
Quan and I are working on (http://www.codenautics.com/renegades) 
suffers from it.  I don't find that specular highlights are very 
often a problem, but fog certainly is.

4. Improved speed -- though this has improved recently, we still find 
that object performance degrades pretty quickly for scenes with lots 
of objects.  (Some of this may actually be in the REALbasic layer on 
top of Quesa, but we'd like to at least look into where the current 
bottlenecks are and see what can be done about them.)

5. Support for writing text 3DMFs.  I looked at the code a little bit 
today, and it doesn't look very conducive to adding text support -- 
about half the code in E3FFW_3DMFBin_Writer.c should actually be 
shared between the bin and text writers.  But it could be 
refactored...

There's also a bug in 1.6d18 that causes psychadelic colors in some 
apps (such as Armageddon -- <http://www.codenautics.com/armageddon/>) 
which work fine with 1.6d17.  But I just tried to reproduce this with 
my current build from CVS, and couldn't do so, so maybe this is 
already fixed.

Anyway, that's our top-five list.  Any thoughts on any of these?

Thanks,
- Joe


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|    Joseph J. Strout         Check out the Mac Web Directory:     |
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