Re: [AD] Proposed changes for Allegro 5 (6?)

[Javier González <xaviergonz@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> There's a Font add-on? Well, regarding Shawn's post, it should perhaps be
> documented more clearly how to save or load fonts.

<plugin>
At least I made one, AllegroFont =)
http://sunsite.dk/allegro/files/alfont.zip
</plugin>

> Yes I know lots of people will disagree with me, but the fact is, if DOS
> isn't dead now, it will be by the time Allegro 5/6/7 comes out, when
Windows
> YQ comes out.
> If we drop DOS, we suddenly can have access to all these nice features
like
> multi-threading, networking, dynamic module loading, and probably a lot
more
> things that I can't think of right now.
> Seriously though, who still uses a pure DOS system today? If you use
> Windows, why not use Mingw and make Windows programs? (then port them to
> Linux ;)

I must agree with this... either if we want or not DOS will be totally dead
in say from 6 months to 1 year max

BTW, why dont we change our mode of work with files?
Right now, load_bitmap, load_sample etc etc *only* work with files and data
files, wich is a shame, because if we could load them from memory (say
somebody
makes his own datafile propietary format (not everybody likes to use allegro
datafiles =) but wants to be able to load them from its own datafiles (from
memory)
we could make somthing like making packfiles able to read from a memory
buffer (a la c++ stringstream)
Btw, about the name, packfiles... could we name it something like
AllegroFiles
or AllegroBuffers?...

Well, there is my proposal

Also I see event based system a lot better than callbacks system, because
say you change from the main menu to the game itself
you would have to uncallback everything from the menu part and callback the
game part... which is just easier to change to another event processing
function

My 2 cents, if you like them feel able to add them to the list (and hope
somebody adds all those ideas before they get lost) =)

It would be wonderful to make Allegro 5.0 the API we all would like without
caring about old compatibility, wouldnt it? =)

Oh yes, in Allegro 5.0 we *need* 3D
3D is *now*, so we need to support OpenGL at least (or at least behave
nicely, which if we use an event based system i bet would be a lot easier
todo)

Also, IMHO, we should forget DirectX3... it has been a while... ;)