Re: [AD] thoughts on a release

[Peter Wang <novalazy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2010-01-19, Thomas Fjellstrom <tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue January 19 2010, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
> > On Tue January 19 2010, Peter Wang wrote:
> > > On 2010-01-19, Thomas Fjellstrom <tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > > Another thing that's arguably as important as those, is a
> > > > > "capabilities" framework, so people can query what they can, and
> > > > > can't do on a given computer.
> > >
> > > Was there a proposal somewhere?  What kind of capabilities did you have
> > > in mind?
> > 
> > I think there might have been a proper proposal, but at any rate its been
> > mentioned on IRC and the list a few times in the past.
> > 
> > What I think (and others seem to agree, SiegeLord, Elias, etc) is that
> >  there should be a list of common capabilities exported via an allegro
> >  API. So you can detect if there really is FAST hw acceleration (just
> >  having GL work is no indication), things like NPOT textures, FBO's, and
> >  other useful (but not always available) features should be advertised in
> >  a cross platform manner (yes, I'm aware "FBO" is a GL term, but D3D
> >  should have a corresponding feature).
> > 
> > This way people can detect what features are available, and provide
> > different code paths, before objects are even created.

I would think that many of the graphical capabilities would not be known
until OpenGL is initialised, which means you'd want to query it on a
specific display.  Maybe like:

    enum { ALLEGRO_CAPABILITY_NPOT_TEXTURES = 1, ... };
    bool al_get_display_capability(ALLEGRO_DISPLAY *dpy, int cap);

Perhaps some capabilities are not boolean values, e.g. maximum texture
size, so maybe we need multiple functions with different return types.

> I'm not the one to work on the capabilities stuff, but I do have some 
> experience working with both Xinerama and XRandR, so I will volunteer to 
> work on that should no one else want to (as a last resort).

As usual I can't find any documentation for Xrandr.h.  Do you know where
it is, or of a good example?

Peter