Re: Missing parts of desktop

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:

>  > I think somebody (somewhere, sometimes) should sit down and write down
>  > outlines of bigger GNOME desktop that the one we currently have.
>  > 
>  > What bothers me, is lack of some essential libraries:
>  > - audio, especially MIDI & similar
>  > - gaming graphics (3D and 2D animation etc.)
>  > 
>  > There are certainly other missing pieces I am overlooking.
> 
> We need multimedia player able to export content through bonobo. 

Possibly. But it can take years to develop. And although we have something
to output sampled sounds, the situation with MIDI (or whatever other music
format) is much worse.

>  > I am not talking about big games - these implement ad hoc set of
>  > multiplatform libraries themselves to reach maximum possible audience. I
>  > mean little multimedia programs, such as children learning tools, that
>  > could be otherwise written easily for gnome - but lack of standard
>  > libraries make that mostly useless.
>  
> What kind of stuff do you thinks about. I found the canvas very
> helpfull in this goal.

Canvas can serve as foundation for simple 2D display - but there are
things like animation, sound synchronisation etc. that we could collect
into libraries, instead of reimplementing. 3D is currently entirely out of
scope from Gnome, as even gtkglarea is not shipped as standard part.

>  > What is needed, is political consensus: we name such and such
>  > libraries/projects as official part of GNOME desktop.
>  
> Any propostion?

I know little about audio things. People use libmikmod and are happy. We
can even write wrapper/frontend library, if people can write good API, but
I personally think we should start simply with shipping existing one with
gnome.
Certainly we have to include OpenAL to gnome base libraries.
For 3D there are many good libs floating around, but most of them are C++
- for that reason I started once project named floyd, to build Gtk+ OpenGL
scene graph library.
OpenGL WILL soon be standard in Gnome (being standard in XFree).

Regards,
Lauris