[3ddesktop-dev] Re: Shortcuts and grey screens

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 13:38 -0400, Brad Wasson wrote:

> The scanning that enlightenment does only happens for the current desktop
> and happens at a pretty slow rate.  Inconsistencies that show up when
> you switch around a lot and move windows isn't noticable at the very 
> low resolution of these tiny windows.  It does show up at the superhigh
> res of the textures used by 3ddesktop.  Plus there is more cpu and memory
> bandwidth used because of the high resolution 3ddesktop is working with.
> 
Sorry, it looks like I was probably talking out'a my arse ;).. 

> I've played with using tiles to represent the faces of each desktop and
> then slurp in desktops piecemeal tile by tile and I have test code that 
> does it.  This would be one step closer to averaging out the load that 
> acquiring the desktop in the background takes.  I just don't know if its 
> worth the effort as inconsistencies would still show up (and be noticable).
> 
True, a tiled up top or tail would look pretty funny wouldn't it.

> One thing to do (and enlightenment might do this) would be to catch window
> events and specifically rescan effected portions of the screen but this is 
> beyond my abilities and time these days.
> 
It sounds like a larger pain than it's worth.

Really, the "right" way to do it is to have the 3d support built into
the window manager, and/or the X server. When an application writes
something to a desktop or a window, it should really be writing it to an
opengl surface. Then you can do all the tricky stuff and have it be
instant, and all these horrible exceptions and update problems go away.
I know there are a few projects working on this.. I'm sure most of you
have seen the demos as well. 

One of the projects uses vnc as a sort of X server loop back device to
get windows onto opengl surfaces, and has a small tweaked window manager
to handle the 3d stuff. It actually doesn't work too bad for a proof of
concept, but it's not something you can really use on a daily basis
right now. It is fun to run firefox upside down and backward, and
rotated 15 degrees.. It's a little harder to play video games that way
though.

The other two that I know of are Luminocity (a gnome project I think)
and Sun's Looking Glass stuff.

Someday one of these projects will be usable, and then maybe 3ddesktop
can be rewritten to strap on to one of those as a simple sorta desktop
switching plug-in or something. For now though, I'd like to thank Brad
for the last few years of my desktop looking cooler than everyone else's
at my work. You have no idea how many people have asked about switching
to Linux just because of the kick-ass eye candy you've been providing.
My work's policy is that only IT guys get to run Linux though, so I've
always just gotten to say "neener neener neener, too bad for you" to
them.

Links to 3d window manager sorts
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots
http://insitu.lri.fr/~chapuis/metisse/
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/Desktop/lookingglass/


> Yes I will add this patch to the next release!
> (I will also add the man page with Mathias's permission).
> 
Cool, thanks.

> Also I think I will make autoacquire default to *off* in the 
> next release.  Does anybody strongly object to this or have any
> feedback for me in this area?
> 
No objection here.

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