Re: Lights I/O

[Stefan H. <st...@to...>]

I've found several aspects to improve viewhints i/o in Quesa.

>Going through the different parts in turn:
>
>The renderer is missing because whoever wrote the interactive
>renderer forgot to write the code which writes it out, however,
>this does not seem to be much of a problem, as any other
>QD3D renderer does have this code. For instance
>if the Microspot renderer was selected at save time, the
>renderer does get written. If there is no renderer we default
>to the interactive renderer and all is well. I guess this might
>be a problem for you but I doubt it.

In Quesa it's not really a problem for me, but it might be a problem 
with backward compability (see below). But IR_TextureFilterMode would 
be quite useful (in QD3D writing texture filter mode seems not to 
work).

>I am surprised about the container around the individual lights,
>the documentation for the 3D Meta File format shows them as
>loose items.

The documentation is not perfect; some information is not compatible 
with 3DMF version 1.5/1.6. I think we should use the v1.6 output as a 
reference.

>The code for writing out the attribute set, the clear colour and the
>image dimensions is there, though it does not get called unless
>you add these items to the view hints object. Maybe I am missing
>something here.

QD3D always writes the whole ViewHints data. In
   e3viewhints_new (file E3IOData.c)
this behaviour is partly implemented (if paramData...): Camera and 
lights are ok, renderer is basically ok (as you mentioned above: 
depends on the renderer type), default attributes should use 
Q3View_GetDefaultAttributeSet (not Q3View_GetAttributeSetState, I 
suppose), and clear color/dimension should be initialized from the 
draw context data.

>I do not need backward compatibility but I would like to sort this out
>for you if you do need it. Any chance of patching the file to find
>out which particular aspect is tripping up QD3D?

Currently I have not found a particular aspect; ignoring the 
viewhints as well as reading the complete viewhints seems to work. 
Certainly, I'm missing something, but what?

My suggestions are:
- upload the "kQ3LightData as 'lhgt'" hack
- change e3viewhints_new (the "if paramData" section)
- Quesa renderers: write the renderer settings out

After changing these issues, the Quesa viewhints output should be 
absolutely the same as the QD3D output.

Thanks a lot and best regards,

Stefan