Aouch… 3 months since last post.
A lot of things happened. First of all i changed job (who said lame excuse?). Then GGI was selected for google summer of code. Guess who is the GGI admin on gsoc.. me :). 2 projects from the idea list were “slotted”. This means that google will fund them. The project i was about to mentor wasn’t selected. Anyway, i hope everything will be alright because some of the selected projects are part of the 3.0 roadmap.
Still about GGI, my current task is to implement Xdbe helper for X target. The task is not easy as it seems. My first try was kinda simplistic and … buggy. Instead of increasing X target speed, it slowed it down. And worst of all, i totally misunderstood the goal of Xdbe helper. It’s not just about swapping the window drawable. In fact, it’s the last and final part of the job. For the moment in X target, all the drawing operation are performed on the window drawable. Multiple buffering is performed by using window clipping. Let’s say we want a visual of 320×240 pixels and 3 frames (in order to do triple buffering, or whatever). We create a parent window with a size of 320 by 240. Then we create a child window of 320 x 240*3. We display a given frame by moving the child window so that the required area becomes visible.
For example, if we want to view the second frame, we move the child window by (0,240).
Back to Xdbe. We don’t need to use window auto-clipping anymore. We can use a single window with a backbuffer attach to it. If we want multiple frames, we can create a pixmap the same way we created the child window or create a pixmap per frame. All the drawing operations will be perfomed on the pixmap. Then on flush, we copy the pixmap data to the backbuffer and swap the window. It’s not as easy as it sounds because i’ll have to reorganize (or completly rewrite) the X target.
On the crbn/ray tracing front. There’s not much coding going on but i’m reading a lot… Ok. Let me rephrase it… I have a lot of papers and books to read 🙂
The pcengine tracker development was resumed this week. I hope to release a test rom for the instrument editor before the end of the month.
And now something different. Yesterday (and today) i rewrote the gallery with javascript and css. The old one was in perl/cgi and had a small oneliner. I still have the code lying around. I’d better burn it for the sake of mankind 🙂 However the only dynamic part in the new one is the image display in javascript, and as i now have this wonderfull blog, i threw the onliner away.
I put a link (“Doodles, drawings, sketch dump…”) to it in the section “My other stuffs”.