Sunday, June 04, 2006

Lots of going on ..

Well,

A lot of things are happening on the mesa front.

Fisrtly, Ive been beavering away on a GLUT for AROSMesa.
Its starting to take shape now and every new build seems a bit more responsive and feature complete.

The only main lacking features of GLUT at the moment are using the AROS timer device to signal when a timed event is to happen saving us iterating loops every run, and using the AROS systems fonts instead of hardcoded ones.

Ive successfully compiled a number of test apps, including nearly everything in the mesa 6.5 demos archive - and only a very small number dont work.

Ive also started porting a first test game- FrontierGL at oliviers request, however its requiring me to use the full SDL (1.2.10 atm) from its main branch - and so far im not having much joy getting it to correctly link.

It does compile however - as does FrontierGL (and loads!) - so hopefully sometime soon i can get it all running.

One thing im pleased with is the change to use a global message port in the glut alphas. Instead of letting the app run in a continuous loop we wait after every "run" - and send a message to ourself if we need to run again.
This lets the system have its turn every time we finish doing something, so it should make the apps a bit more system friendly. Test runs so far actualy indicate it makes GLUT apps run faster (upto 3x!) since they are processing less pointless stuff.

It also seems to have had a knock on effect on some benchmarking demos (gltesperf and trispd for instance) in that they now actually work - and very well too afaict!

Ive fixed up the alpha channel code in AROSMesa/mesagl.hidd so the demos needing it now work properly - and look v nice =)