From: Adrian Ratnapala <s369625@student.uq.edu.au>
  To  : GGI <ggi-develop@eskimo.com>
  Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1998 08:57:37 +0000

PenguinPlay IRC meeting. GGI developers wanted.

Good day All,

As some of you might know there is a project called PenguinPlay which
aims at creating a
free games (and incidentally multimedia) development library, similar in
scope to DirectX.
We are currently in the very early stages, we have a little bit of code
and lots of plans.  Below
is a little description of the project, its more reliable than the web
pages.

We are planning to hold two IRC meetings in order to map out our future
directions.
The first meeting will be with developers of important open source
projects, GGI included,
this is why I am writing to you now.  We also want people form Mesa  and
ALSA, as well as
other people we can think of.  (Suggestions about people to invite are
welcome).

The details of the second meeting will depend on the outcome of the
first, but it is intended
to be where we find out what comercial developers are looking for.  We
will contact these
developers directly, tell them what we are doing, and try to get them to
tell us what we are
doing wrong.  We also plan to make a general announcement of this
meeting, so random people
off the net can also tell us what we are doing wrong.

If any of you could turn up for the first meeting, it would be greatly
appreciated, our tentative time/location
is:
    21:00 GMT, Saturday 8 August, channel #pplay on Efnet.

This can be changed if it proves too inconvenient for too many people.

If you intend to come along, it would be nice if you emailed me some
time soon, so we
know what to expect, but don't feel you have to.


Thankyou.



---------------------------
A quick summary of PenguinPlay
---------------------------

The PenguinPlay SDK, formerly known as the (Linux) GSDK, is an effort to
provide a free toolkit
similar in scope to Microsoft's DirectX for game developmeent.  Once it
was foolishly linux oriented,
now portability is a key goal.  We plan to support all Unices we can,
Win32 and the PlayStation, at least.

PPlay will be a large and varied set of components.  While a "pure"
PPlay based system would provide
nice integration (and hence hopefully speed development of games), we
indend to make it possible to
use PPlay components independently of eachother.   (Some components in
PPlay are definately unnecassary
or unwanted for many cases, others may even be alternatives to
eachother).

Some components will be highish level C++ API's, while others will be in
C for providing core functionality.



The main components we plan to have are:
    * A sound API + some  kind of sound server to do mixing etc.
    * Graphics API's (medium to high level C++ ones, we  indend to use
libggi or something similar for for straight C).
    * A Network protocl and API for accessing it.  This will involve
"game servers" etc.  Similar to Kali, I guess.
    * A C++ Gui toolkit, a strange one, designed for the needs of games.

    * A low level event/thread handling mechanism.  To ease tasks like
background processing.  (Wraps pthreads,
        UNIX signals etc.)
    * A general file I/O system.  Provides functinality similar to the
GNU coustom streams or C++ stdstream, only
        portably and in C.  (Specifically we want this to allow loading
from "archive files").
    * An input mechanism.


How does this relate to GGI?

Well some of the components above are clearly similar to GGI
components.  Specifically,  Graphics, Sound and Input.
I have no direct experience with the Sound and Input side of things, but
I will comment on the graphics.

We are planning to provided medium to high level 2d and 3d graphics
APIs.  On unix platforms at least, these
will live on top of GGI and OpenGL.  The 2d API(pg2d) is similar maybe
to libggi2d, only its a bit more ambitious.
It would ease my job (as the maintainer of this pg2d) if we could use
GGI on all platforms. but if performance
issues crop up, or GGI is not available, then pg2d will go native.
 (well, thats my plan anyway).

For lower level needs, there are 3rd party API's which can be used, GGI
and OpenGL seem like excellent
options to me.  If there is a hole (ie something does not exist on some
important platform), then PPlay needs
to fill it.


Errm, thats all I can think of for now, so bye.