INT: Project Alive!

[Matthew Gruenke]

>	Are games such as doom, that are essentially their own OS, have a 
>place in Tunes?  Certainly some games would help out the system's 
>popularity.  But is consuming the whole machine encouraged?  Should we 
>provide some sort of fast, semi-portable gaming primitives?  Should these 
>have nothing in common with the graphics primitives that a simple 
>picture-drawing module might use?
>
>	Answers, comments and more questions are welcome....

   I like games.  I'll port all of my games (numbering 0, right now) to this
OS, if I possibly can!!  It is my belief that what would be most optimal would
be something similar to what Windows 3.x does with WinG.  WinG, if you don't
happen to know, allows for direct bit-plane access (as a 2D array in memory).
A simple call can be used to x-fer this bit-plane to the gfx hardware for
displaying.  Graphics should be able to be directed straight to the screen, or
to such a frame-buffer in main-mem.  The graphics-drawing functions (i.e.
DrawLine, DrawPoly, etc. should be able to function in EITHER case, and should
be fast enough for some reasonable 3D gaming!!   As a matter of fact, I think
it would be nice to include a 3D gfx lib  (which could either utilize the 2D
functions, to a degree, or if they're not high-performance enough, could cut
them outta the chain)!)  I think it's important to allow for at least this 
amount of flexibility, if not more, in order to make the platform graphics-
friendly!  I also think it's important to allow parts of the GUI to be easily
re-written or replaced (possible to allow for some expirementation with 3D 
GUI's, or atleast a good deal of customization).  Normal applications should
NOT ever be able to take complete control of the system.  The OS MUST remain
capable
of doing comm-access, ftp x-fers, etc. in the background w/o causing errors, due
to some poorly written (but possibly fun) game!!  EVERYTHING should be able to
multi-task!!

>-Chris
>


                                                :Matthew Gruenke
                                                 (mgruenke@sound.net)