On Aug 15, 2007, at 06:12, Mark Carter wrote:
I think this is a good idea, and one that I intend to have a go on.
No promises, of course. After playing for a little while, I
realised that it was going to be trickier than I first thought.
Looking at flip - the simplest plugin - one sees that one has to
worry about threads, and whether one is using opengl. So instead of
saying "here's a bunch of old pixels, now give me a new bunch of
new pixels", a plugin writer seems to be burdened by all sorts of
stuff.
I'm wondering if the opengl idea was the worst idea ever. It just
adds a whole new layer of complexity.
I think the performance benefits of OpenGL are worth the complexity.
Furthermore, you can deal with the complexity by providing an
abstraction layer on top of OpenGL. That is, I believe, what Blender
and Mac OS X do for their respective GUIs.
