Re: [AD] Possible new features for Allegro?

[Tero Laitinen <tero.laitinen@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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


Yeah... you have a point there. Other things that popped into my mind are 
- to add opengl support(merge AllegroGL?) because software 3d rasterizers are 
not candy for eyes
- to re-write the GUI code. Black&White widgets don't look so good and I 
would like movable/rezizeable windows. 
- to add more 3d engine functionality: bsp trees, models, textures, etc.
- to add run-time datafile writing functions (or a filesystem simulator 
inside one file)
- and that networking support you already mentioned. Is it really so hard to 
portably(excluding dos support... no point in there)?

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