Ideas on the future of Quesa.

[Peter M. <Pet...@mi...>]

Dear all on the Quesa list,

I thought I would open a discussion on the future of Quesa. This was 
brought about by the fact that we have finished our current projects 
and we ( thats Roger Holmes and I ) are looking to the future.

I have started work on an implementation of QuickDraw3D ViewHints in 
Quesa, which would hopefully mean that I could understand the 
read/write structure in Quesa.  Then take this understanding on to work 
on the 3DS support currently present in Quesa but does not currently 
work for us.

Now, I have run into a little trouble in that I find it hard to debug 
with the current way in which the data is displayed in instanced data 
and the way in which objects methods are stored.

This maybe to do with the fact that all our programs are currently in 
C++, or that I am a little slow, but I would like to change Quesa's 
design to be more efficient and
simpler.

Firstly we would want to do this in an open source friendly way and 
give back to Quesa as much as possible. Currently the list has been 
kinda quiet, so now might be a good time to move to version 1.20, 
leaving 1.19 as stable and available version on Sourceforge. Then we 
can check-in changes as we make them as we go and not in one big go at 
the end. The time scale for this changes would end around March 2005.

So, what are these changes?

After some discussion we believe there are two options that we think 
are desirable. The first option is fairly standard optimizations and 
has been discussed on and off the Quesa list with Dair Grant, who was 
interest in the changes but due to work commitments can not make them 
himself. The second option is a little more radical but highly 
desirable in changing E3 routines to C++ format.

Either way, we have the development time at our disposal to do one of 
these changes. These changes will help with the speed of Quesa most 
notably in drawing large files with lots of different groups. Plus we 
want to give these speed ups back to the Quesa group.

So the question, are you happy for us to start discussing these changes 
on the Quesa list?
If so I will give a detailed plan of both options next week.

Cheers,
Peter Michelsen.