Re: [AD] thoughts on a release

[Thomas Fjellstrom <tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

> > Oh yes, and not to forget making sure the X11 fullscreen driver
> > actually works.
> 
> I just tried it on a dual monitor setup.  It sets a fullscreen mode, but
> it does it for both displays.  The Allegro window occupies the whole of
> the primary display, but the window shows up with decorations on the
> secondary display (4.4 does better here).  At exit, the original dual
> monitor setup is not restored, although it does restore the resolution
> (4.4 is the same here).
> 
> I don't remember any problems on single monitor configurations.

There are other problems, XF86VidMode is starting to break on newer drivers. 
So it will need to be replaced with XRandR+Xinerama eventually.

> Peter
> 
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-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx