Hello Rob, Sunday, October 14, 2007, 6:26:34 AM, you wrote: RS> I got a weird email with no sender or subject, but it appeared to look RS> like a message that you were looking at a DirectFB and maybe a Xara RS> backend for Gnash ?
We discussed this a few days ago in IRC but no, I didn't send you a e-mail on this regard. Regarding Xara I had some mail exchange about a year ago with Charles Moir: > Our rendering engine is called CDraw (sometimes called XaraDraw) and, at > the moment, is the one component that we have not made GPL. It's not > unlike Cairo in many ways. However we do plan to GPL this within the > near future. Subscribe to our announce mail list I would suggest to hear > news about this. > > As to whether it's suitable for animation is another matter. I've always > assumed that Flash was optimized for animation from day one, and makes > quite some compromises on quality (such as flattening, anti-aliasing and > line stroking) in order to achieve the speed. We are not animation > orientated, and have made no such quality compromises or optimisations > for animation, so I can't say how we'll compare against Flash. My > expectation is that it should certainly be fast enough for most typical > Flash style animations. ... > OK. If you're a commercial company I should tell you we have a much > faster assembler optimised version of XaraDraw that's not being open > sourced. Although thinking about it you are probably not running x86 cpu > on embedded devices so this is probably of less interest. Reading some more recent posts in the XaraXtreme-dev mailing it seems that they themselves are looking for an alternative to CDraw (mainly considering Cairo and AGG) since CDraw apparently will remain closed source: http://www.xaraxtreme.org/maillists/archive/dev/dev_022007/msg00117.html So I don't think it makes sense to build a Xara backend. Probably it wouldn't be faster than AGG either. Xara (CDraw) most probably doesn't offer a Flash-style rasterizer so we need to use our triangulator, which will be the bottleneck. A Cairo backend makes more sense for it's hw acceleration possibilities. Dunno about (dis)advantages compared to OpenGL. DirectFB makes sense, but is a new GUI, not a new backend, and should be fairly easy to implement using AGG. I don't think we will find any faster software renderer than AGG. We still need a full featured hardware renderer. Probably there's not much missing in the OpenGL backend but AFAIK nobody is working on that. Also, the triangulator needs some rework (as others mentioned). Udo _______________________________________________ Gnash-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev
