A major redesign for Visual-4 Beta is underway. The central goal of the
new design is to create an architecture which is more robust, easier to
maintain and to extend, and easier to install and to use. The principal
architects are David Scherer and Bruce Sherwood. Steve Spicklemire and
Ruth Chabay have also been involved in discussions.
As a result, a number of changes to the current beta version are likely:
Support for textures will change. Rather than creating a texture bitmap,
a programmer will be able to specify a material (such as wood).
Transparency will be supported.
At this point it is unclear exactly what support there will be for
bitmapped images; they may be supported only as "decals" which can be
applied to flat surfaces.
Lighting options may change; it is likely that spotlights will not be
supported at first in this version.
You can look forward to higher-quality rendering of scenes on computers
with modern graphics cards.
A Macintosh version which does not require X11 or Fink will be created.
Both the Windows version and the Mac version will no longer depend on
the large GTK libraries, which will however still be the foundation for
Linux.
Bruce Sherwood
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