Re: [AD] Miscelaneous issues

[Elias Pschernig <elias@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 00:28 +0200, Evert Glebbeek wrote:
> Some things that have bugged me for a while but that I didn't get round to 
> look into yet:
> 
>  - True colour fonts. The bitmap font loader looks as if it is supposed to 
> be able to load these, and being able to draw them is only a one or two 
> line addition to the colour font renderer, if that. Does anyone know why 
> they are not supported? Otherwise I'll see about fixing that.

Well, with the old code, it made not much sense. Fonts were read from
the datafile as 256 color paletted image, and there was no other way to
read in a font - so fonts always stayed paletted, even when Allegro
later got the ability to handle truecolor modes.

>  - Application icon problems in Linux. Ultio (on Allegro.cc) reported 
> problems with the window icon in Linux/X11. The best I was able to come up 
> with is that constructor functions don't work on his system. Originally, 
> the X11 icon used a weak symbol definition that could be overwritten from 
> user code. I'm considering adding this back in in case constructors are 
> not available. Does anyone see a problem with this?

(Sorry, no idea about that)

> Otherwise, the todo list still contains:
> 
> - Investigate video bitmap problems reported in 
> http://www.allegro.cc/forums/view_thread.php?_id=453220

This is hard to fix for 4.2.0. As far as I see, DirectX doesn't always
like to blit video pages inside a flipping chain. Which makes sense
somehow. For 4.3.x, we should specify the flipping method already with
create_display or whatever, and then only create a DirectX flipping
chain if it is needed (i.e. PAGE_FLIPPING or TRIPLE_BUFERING is
selected).

> - Investigate mouse problem reported in 
> http://www.allegro.cc/forums/view_thread.php?_id=459972

Not sure. But generally, show_mouse() should only be used with a direct
update method, never with double buffering (as in the above case), or a
flipping chain.

Just look what he is doing:

show_mouse(canvas);
blit(canvas, screen, 0, 0, 0, 0, canvas->w, canvas->h);

So, while the timer draws into canvas, canvas is blit to the screen. But
there's no synchronization whatsoever for this under windows. The
proposed fix probably just makes some race condition less likely to
occur (didn't really investigate it though..).

> I think (hope) that these may somehow be solved, but I don't know...
> 
> - Make the grabber (try to) use system cursors
> 
> Maybe this should be moved to the wishlist. The changes needed are fairly 
> trivial though.

Yes, can do it after the beta if trivially enough. I may have a look at
it in any case..

> - Purge main docs of DOSisms if that hasn't been done already
> 
> I think this has been mostly done. Maybe a few more, but we can take care 
> of doc polishing between 4.2 beta and 4.2 release (candidate)

Yep.

> - Documentation for Peter's packfile patch
> 
> Volunteers?

Waiting first for Peter..

> - Check if the examples correctly demonstrate new features since 4.0, eg
>    - mouse cursors
>    - custom packfiles
>    - custom font loading
> 
> The first of these is mostly done. I'm not sure if the second is really 
> that useful to put in an example, as it would be somewhat specialized.

The memory packfile example that came with Peter's original patch should
go in, I think. Whoever does the documentation can do that as well..

> Tobi's zip loader that was posted on Allegro.cc might be a better 
> reference. For the last one I have an ugly hack lying around that mostly 
> works... but is ugly. :)
> 

Well, an exfont certainly wouldn't hurt.

-- 
Elias Pschernig