On Tuesday, 14 January 2014 at 02:32:01 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 15:46:42 -0800, Matt Taylor
<taylor...@gmail.com> wrote:
2. 2D/3D Graphics interface to underlying hardware. This can
be useful - though it's not clear to me that the 2D part would
be terribly useful on its own, without 3D OpenGL support, or
possibly acting as primitives for a GUI library. I suppose 2D
games could use it.
This is what Aurora is intended to be. The 2D part could be
used as the building blocks for a GUI or games or whatever else
you can come up with. Aurora is intended to be a
general-purpose graphics library for D. It should be usable on
any device/platform that D supports or will support.
Is Aurora exclusively 2D? Or will 3D get a look in?
If it were up to me (I know, it isn't) - I would create a
graphics system for D based on a modern web-browser's
Javascript DOM. I daresay not everything would map well to D,
but I would start with that, and adapt it where necessary. I
would include WebGL 2.0 support, mouse handling callbacks etc.
Do you mean HTML DOM? This would be similar to XAML and both
are UX languages which are unrelated to the purpose and goal of
Aurora. And don't think this would translate to well into D
code. One of the goals is to use idiomatic D as much as
possible.
Definitely not. The web browser's DOM is a completely separate
entity to HTML (even though HTML is commonly used to populate it
on a webpage). A webpage can be constructed entirely
programatically in javascript. Personally I wouldn't allow
HTML,XAML or any other ML within a mile of my code. :-) No, I'm
definitely talking about pure D. What we take from the DOM is
it's structure and capabilities (i.e the Javascript DOM API), and
then reinterpret that API into idiomatic D.
The thing with a 2D graphics API, is deciding what level you want
it to work at. For example SDL is a 2D graphics API of sorts - it
gives you a pixel array, and you can set each pixel to whatever
colour you like.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, you have a system with
the capabilities of the Javascript DOM (see above), or the Flash
player. This system can composite multiple 2D layers, and keep
track of the contents of those layers.
Having said all that, I've a feeling that my thoughts are heading
in a different direction to what you had planned :-) so forgive
me if I'm merely distracting you from the task at hand.
Cheers
Matt
