> Are we going to wait for DirectX updates before announcing
> the release candidate? BTW, can anyone offer me some pointers
> to instructions on how I would go about building/testing
> cygwin and the DirectX target? I do have a Win98 box handy these days.
>
You need the Cygwin development environment (http://www.cygwin.com/) Install
all packages. This gives a nice Unix-like environment...
You also need the Direct-X SDK from Microsoft. They do not allow
redistribution of their headers so you must download it yourself. Cygwin
does have a version of the import libraries though. I've been using the
Direct-X 6.1 which is somewhat out of date, but Direct-X is backwards
compatible so it should works with DX 8 also. The headers may need to be
patched.
Also, the CVS version of the Direct-X target is wrong. Somehow, different
and incompatible code was committed in CVS. I'm in the process of fixing it
now. Hopefully I will be able to finish it this weekend.
> Also, it was mentioned that cygwin was needed because of
> ggiSelect -- 1) what are the pros/cons of cygwin being needed?
> and 2) Is it possible to build without cygwin and just omit
> the ggiSelect call from the API? It is documented that it may
> not be available on some systems.
>
1) A native windows version of the demos runs MUCH faster than a cygwin
version. There is no unix thunking layer. Thay said, programs written on a
Unix system have a much easier time compiling under cygwin than porting
directly to the Win32 API.
2) There is a pretty easy patch to libGII to fix the select problem for the
time being. The downside is that it puts all the input for GII
(keyblard/mouse) into polling mode which can eat up CPU cycles. I'll try to
put a patch together for discussion.
John
