Re: [AD] Renamed API second draft

[Bob <ohannessian@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Bukin wrote:

[snip]
> IMHO, it would be better to make 'foreign' bitmap type (and call it
> AL_SPRITE, for example), because sprites and bitmaps are very
> different things.


The idea was to allow the user to quickly switch in between regular bitmaps, 
rle bitmaps and compiled bitmaps to see which one would be better for his 
needs. Right now, a user would need to almost rewrite the entire rendering 
code to accomodate the switch of type. This way too much, when a simple 
al_convert_to_rle(foo) would do just as well. Since vtables are used anyway, 
there will be no performance loss by merging the bitmap types. This also has 
the advantage of making the API more consistent (everything is a BITMAP), 
and reducing the number of functions in Allegro.

Finally, when converting the current Allegro code base to Allegro 5, we 
would only support blit() with no clipping as the only operation that can be 
performed, and probably disable writting to the bitmap too - until someone 
wants to code the routines to do that :)



--
- Robert J Ohannessian
"Microsoft code is probably O(n^20)" (my CS prof)
http://pages.infinit.net/voidstar/