From:	"Andrei 'old boy' Ellman" <ellman AT xs4all DOT nl>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: AllegroPak
Date:	Mon, 27 Oct 1997 02:55:59 +0100
Organization:	Heslington Toast Parlour, Yorkshire
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References:	<01bce0ff$1809a9a0$fb7806d1 AT arexey DOT gis DOT net>
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To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Alexey Kouzmitch wrote:
> 
> Uh, this is a message to the author of AllegroPak!!!!

That's me.

> The only problem is that Allegro is slow as it is.... without z-buffer
> or anything else...
> it would've been better if u rewrote the thing in asssembler without
> adding anything...
>
> BTW... I might be doing that very soon!!!!

AllegroPak was born out of my first attempt to understand low-level 3D
graphics and implement Z-buffering in Allegro. To start off with, I
experimented with my own rendering functions (the sphere drawers) and tried
to come up with a good datastructure for a Z-buffer. When I worked out the
datastructure, I hacked Allegro's polygon renderers and added z-buffering to
them. I then thought about adding 3D sprites to the system as well and added
them. The rest of AllegroPak's functions were other useful functions I
programmed when working on my demos. I was also thinking of writing a
low-level raycaster, but I never found the time to do it.

I have been thinking of completely re-writing Allegro's polygon drawers in
100% ASM from scratch, as I know a LOT more about 80x86 ASM and low-level
polygon rendering than I did when I started AllegroPak (for example, use
triangle-drawers and convex-quad-drawers instead of polygon-drawers). I have
also thinking of adding support for hardware-acceleration. But a lot of
other people seem to be doing the same thing (for example, MGL which
includes a DOS port of OpenGL), and I would rather get on with turning my
brilliant idea that I have for a 2D game into reality, than writing a
really-good complete 3D engine with support for hardware-acceleration.

I was hoping that AllegroPak would become part of Allegro, but Shawn was
getting worried that Allegro was getting too big, and is not likely to
update Allegro's 3D engine. It would have also made it more difficult to
make hi-colour and true-colour versions of the 3D polygon functions.
I decided to release AllegroPak as it was because I did not want to waste
all that time I spent working on it. Even if it is a bit slow, a lot of
people will find Z-buffering useful, not to mention all the other functions
(frustum clipping, polar <-> cartesian co-ordinate conversion, RGB <-> HLS,
etc.).

AE.

-- 
Andrei Ellman - URL: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ellman/ae-a - ae1 AT york DOT ac DOT uk
"All I wanna do is have some fun     :-)     || ae-a AT minster DOT york DOT ac DOT uk
 I've got the feeling I'm not the only one"  || mailto:ellman AT xs4all DOT nl
     -- Sheryl Crow      :-)    ||       It's what you make of it.

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