From: teunis <teunis@computersupportcentre.com>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 18:53:50 -0700 (MST)

Re: LibGGI3D RFC

On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Rodolphe Ortalo wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, teunis wrote:
> > Does this message help any?  Are we communicating or arguing about
> > completely different topics thinking they're the same? :)
> 
> We are communicating, don't worry... ;-) In fact, your 3d_tridata
> example showed me how we could pass more things through a single
> function (hence clarifying the objective of using display targets...)
> 
> You know, even if I play the devil's advocate, I would really _like_
> to be able to use ggi3dDrawTriangle _only, and then have some
> setup function where I can (possibly dynamically) reconfigure the
> engine so that it uses gouraud, textured, etc.

Actually - that's why I said at the end of the message there was problems
with that approach....

Truely here OpenGL is a -good- model!  Rather than sending a triangle,
sending a small(!) list of instructions on what those triangles should be
(yes - handle lists of triangles).  So you could attach additional info to
a triangle such as texture data, multitexture info, ....

I'll take a look tonight at OpenGL api and try to find a sub-API that
would make sense.  (it'd help alot if I actually knew OpenGL but *giggle*
I don't even though I'm strongly in favour of it...  I've never used it)

G'day, eh? :)
	- Teunis

PS: All non-constructive responses to this will be ignored.  I'm not
expecting anyone to agree or back me on this.  I'll write up a spec and
-then- post it for discussion :)

PPS: incidentally, one of the problems I have with embedding data that way
was the overhead of pointer-lookups in rendering....  a cached system is
much faster!  I had a lot of these kinds of probs with the renderer I
coded....  (floats were too slow [486 then Cyrix-non-MMX], function calls
were -too- expensive, -fPIC slowed everything by 50%+, any memory access
at all was expensive, ....)