From: "Chris Bilson" Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: The future of graphics programming Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 08:09:41 +0800 Organization: DCI HiNet Lines: 50 Message-ID: <6cvn02$6t5@netnews.hinet.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: h27.s11.ts30.hinet.net To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk If you are interested in developing graphics apps with allegro, or other libraries... Recently, my company was visited by some Intel people, and they talked with us about what kinds of apps they'd like to see us developing over the next few years. It seems that they are planning to have 450 Mhz P IIs as the base system for most people by sometime next year. Intel has some really nice tools to help in developing and optomizing graphics apps, but there is definately a heavy Windows 95/98 slant there. This is understandable considering the way most people set up there PCs. Another interesting thing that I saw mentioned was that they want people to start working on "software" rendering in 3D, not relying just on hardware acceleration. Judging from the unbelievable differences I've seen in different manufacturer's implementations of basic 3D graphics operations, I'm all for this. The problem is that they want us doing something like 20,000 ~ 30,000 polygon's per frame with Phong shading (eventually), procedural textures, video textures, etc., etc. This sounds like a very tall order indeed in software only. I guess what I'd really like to know is if anybody is using libraries like Allegro to develop apps like this. I like Allegro alot, much better than DirectX, or some of the other 3D APIs available. I find it easy to learn, straightfoward to program, and I'm fairly impressed with it's power. It's also increadibly easy to scale apps with an API like Allegro, as you pretty much have total control over everything the API does. The problem is that Allegro doesn't seem to be designed to do 20,000 ~ 30,000 polygons per scene, with or without hardware acceleration. I concede that of course with the right hardware(fast CPUs and mega memory)/algorithm(totally optomized code) it would definately be possible to do such things with Allegro, but I can't help but feel that Allegro was designed with much humbler goals in mind. Anyway, I guess I am just curious what others are thinking. I am still kind of in a state of shock about what's going to be happening over the next few years (and this isn't just vaporware - the guy brought demos!). If anybody has anything interesting to share, please post, or e-mail me, whatever! Long live DJGPP and Allegro! Chris Bilson chrisb AT NOSPAMms12 DOT hinet DOT net -- Chris Bilson chrisb AT NOSPAMms12 DOT hinet DOT net