RE: [AD] Possible new features for Allegro?

["Vincent Penquerc'h" <Vincent.Penquerch@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [AD] Possible new features for Allegro?

> Maybe Allegro needs some high level features that are
> commonly used in games,
> such as scripting and physics engine, maybe not. Also I would
> like to see a
> music module/mp3 playing library integrated to Allegro.
> I know these are all available as separate libraries but it
> would be easier
> to use if Allegro provided them.

IMHO, a physics engine would not be easy to make general
enough to cover all possible cases. It is too specialized.
Or it would be horribly slow :)
Scripting could be made general enough, but there's no
point including it in Allegro, except maybe add routines
to load a script from a DATAFILE. Apart from that, these
are two wildly different things and so integrating on in
another one is irrelevant. And you would end up choosing
between different levels of scripting (I mean rather high
level or very high level), how the updates are made (with
real/simulated threads for each scripted object or with
event callbacks, etc), which syntax to use...
If I could plug, you might try Lua (www.lua.org). Nifty
scripting engine, which I use alongside Allegro.A module/MP3/whatever player would be good IMHO, for two
reasons: it's not trivial to do portably, and it could be
built on top of Allegro's sound layer.
But Shawn and others have stated their opinions on that,
with very valid points.
Another feature which I would have liked to see added to
Allegro is networking. This too is hard to do portably,
and could use Allegro's endianness independant stuff. I
would be delighted to see PACKFILE *open_socket(...) for
instance :) New drivers could easily be added using the
normal Allegro way of using vtables.
Well, that's my view of it. Feel free to comment :)
Cheers

--
Vincent Penquerc'h