Re: [Gnu3dkit-dev] Documentation Project

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Friday, October 11, 2002, at 06:08  Uhr, Brent Gulanowski wrote:
> On Friday, October 11, 2002, at 01:38  AM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > this is maybe a very good idea. To finally make some progress again, 
> > I planned to upload all header files to the CVS (including empty 
> > implementations maybe) so that you see my ideas. I would then fill in 
> > the code which would come from 0.3 ASAP. But unfortunately there are 
> > still some issues with the design which are not yet finalised, ie the 
> > new camera design to name one.
> >
> > I hesitate taking the old 0.3.x tree, adding the new files as is to 
> > let everyone working on it, because I think this would turn out to be 
> > a little messy - I'd rather have a simple version to start with (that 
> > is no graph optimisation, GL optimisations etc.), so that the design 
> > is understandable by anyone and that design flaws are detected early!
> >
> > What do you think?
> If the design is significantly different, then this makes perfect 
> sense to me. It doesn't mean that you're throwing out existing work, 
> but that old code will have to be inspected carefully as it is deemed 
> appropriate and added in. I believe it is ideal to start with the 
> external headers for any project, whether you are a top-down 
> design-first person (like me) or an XP person. I may change my tune 
> after a few years, but it seems to me that for a library, you usually 
> have some idea how it is going to be used first, so creating the API 
> that is exposed first will get you thinking in terms of the services 
> being offered and how best to represent them, instead of worrying 
> about how they are implemented.

It is not significantly different per se, but some (central) parts are, 
so I guess I will do so...

> BTW, did any of my speculations of the graph organization have an 
> applicable value?

I am not sure if I understood it completely... I agree that we should 
try to keep the design/class hierarchy simple (make it even simpler as 
it is now) and use the features of ObjC whenever possible. But on the 
other side, rendering performance must never be neglected! So what I 
did is I redesigned the graph traversal code to be more flexible and 
extensible w/o affecting the final performance. Please review this part 
of the new design as soon as I have uploaded the stuff and let me know 
what you think!

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip