Re: [AD] 5.1?

[Pavel Sountsov <slabode@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:40 AM, Pavel Sountsov <slabode@xxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> > > > Secondly, there's the point that A5 is a 2D library by
> > > > default, and thus many bits of it (specifically the memory drawers 
both
> > > > in the core and the primitives addon) just don't support it at this
> > > > time. Primitives addon can be extended to handle them relatively 
easily,
> > > > but the PARALLELOGRAM_MAP probably will need to be rewritten.
> > >
> > > What are the drawbacks of removing parallelogram_map completely?
> >
> > Effort will need to be expended to write a replacement. Or, effort 
will
> > need to be expended to put the primitives addon into the allegro core.
>
>
> Yes, that's what I was hoping to get some insight on. Isn't the 
primitives API completely capable of doing the same thing already?

Yes, it is. For hardware accelerated mode, there probably won't be any 
price to pay for this. For software drawing the tradeoff (right now) 
would be higher rendering quality (PARALLELOGRAM_MAP does not produce 
the best looking output) at the expense of slower speed. I am not 100% 
of the slower speed point, but I'm reasonably sure that the memblit.c 
scaling functions are faster than the triangle rasterizers; 
PARALLELOGRAM_MAP might be slower than them, though, perhaps. Also, 
there are some heavily optimized pathways that the primitives addon 
just ignores, things like screen->bitmap and screen->screen when there 
is no current transformation. Those will suffer without similar 
optimizations in the primitives addon.

> And there's no need to move anything into the core... just move image 
drawing into the primitives addon which is more where it belongs. No 
reason to have al_draw_image() "in the core" when not even 
al_draw_line() is. I put it in quotation since I think there isn't much 
of a problem if those two aren't cleanly separated where it would make 
things harder to implement.

I'm not sure what you mean here. What is cleanly separated? In terms of 
sticking the bitmap drawing into the primitives addon... well, it's 
possibly in principle, subject to the performance penalties above. Also 
there's the issue (not sure how important it is) that you wouldn't be 
able to do "anything" with Allegro core without at least one addon, a 
concern for some people.

Just thinking *really* outside the box here... it might be neat to have 
a pluginable graphics system too... just like we have for bitmap 
loading. This might be way out there though :P

-SiegeLord