From: Marcus Sundberg <mackan@stacken.kth.se>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 23:46:08 +0000

Re: Opening graphics files....

Tristan Wibberley wrote:
> 
> Alex Roberts wrote:
> >
> > Reply-To:
> > Hi!
> >
> > I'm writing a tile based game, and want to load the tiles from a graphic file
> > on the drive (probably a BMP, the dos port loads from those)...
> >
> > how would i go about loading a BMP file with GGI?
> > i looked through the GGV source for help, but coudln't get anywhere with it,
> > too confusing (sorry ;)...
> 
> Use a pre-written library that will load the data into memory, then you
> write that data into a visual, and voila! It's loaded in ready for
> manipulation. LibGGI doesn't parse binary format images, that's your
> job. I don't know whether there are any BMP libraries for Linux but you
> could save on the size of the game by converting your images to PNG.

Hmmm, we really need a library to load images and put them onto
a visual. Hmm, some ideas just popped up in my head. ;)
* It should have dynamically loaded "loaders", just like libggi
  have it's targets. This will keep the core library small and
  still provide support for every possible imageformat. It'll
  also let us use existing libraries like libgif/libjpeg/libgbm
  without needing every library to be installed for it to run.
* You should be able to associate an image with a visual, which would
  convert the image to the apropriate format and do dithering as
  needed. Dithering modules would also be dynamicly loaded.
* And of course there should be a function to blit the image to
  a visual.
* How about naming it libgil for General Image Loader :)

Does this sound like something useful?

//Marcus
-- 
-------------------------------+------------------------------------
        Marcus Sundberg        | http://www.stacken.kth.se/~mackan/
 Royal Institute of Technology |       Phone: +46 707 295404
       Stockholm, Sweden       |   E-Mail: mackan@stacken.kth.se