[ggo-discussion] Re: gGo next generation ?

At 12:31 14.08.2003 -0400, you wrote:
>I am seeing a graphics problem with gIGo on my computer (WinXP Pro; 1.4GHz
>Athlon; 512MB DDR; Abit KG7-RAID; Geforce3 w/ latest nVidia driver, OpenGL
>at default settings).  The stones' transparent polygon mesh is not
>overdrawn by the skin so the stones look kind of ghostly.  You can view two
>screen captures of the problem
>here:  http://mysite.verizon.net/mdrohn/images/gIGo/goban.JPG and
>http://mysite.verizon.net/mdrohn/images/gIGo/gostone.JPG.  I tried all the
>tweaks I could think of to my video card settings and nothing helped the
>problem.  FWIW this problem does not occur on the various other 3D apps and
>games I run on my computer.

Thanks a bunch. I have no idea right now....
The first (goban.jpg) image looks like if you had software-only rendering, 
at least I get exactly this when I force software rendering by dropping the 
Microsoft Opengl32.dll and glu32.dll into the glGo install folder. But your 
gostone.jpg image definately looks like a hardware rendered image, you got 
superb antialiasing, this would not happen with software rendering.
I need to dig through my OpenGL book for that. Cant comment right now 
anything reasonable on it. And I think I should buy myself a Geforce3, with 
my ancient TNT 1 I only get a subset of OpenGL features, so difficult for 
development. I guess I missed some OpenGL setting, and it didnt produce 
that effect on my box, so I didnt notice. Maybe a chance is to get rid of 
this effect in software mode with the SGI implementation, which is quite 
slow but serves well as a standard OpenGL implementation for testing.

So far it seems, glGo runs on NVidia cards (with or without artifacts, but 
it runs). ATI seems to have problems, about Matrox I got no feedback so 
far. I guess its no problem to get myself a recent card, but its impossible 
I get all of the cards myself to test compatibility! I slowly start to have 
respect for those companies who make sure software works on all possible 
hardware variations. That's one of the areas where Java is really strong, 
you dont need to worry about such stuff. And the Java 2D display (just 
compare the gGo/Java with the glGo simple 2D display - see startmenu entry, 
it has an extra launcher) is actually pretty good. I suppose I wont get a 
2D display done without OpenGL or similar libraries just using the standard 
Win32 paint device stuff, which cannot even resize an image without blocky 
borders. Just try the non-OpenGL 2D simple glGo version and you see what I 
mean...
Well, just some random chatter... but I think OpenGL is a good choice. 
DirectX is bad, as I dont want a Windows-only program. SDL might be an 
idea, as it wraps DirectX on Windows, but SDL is rather for fullscreen 
applications, and not for embedding into a GUI window.

I am an OpenGL newbie programmer. Actually thats why this project was 
started, I had to do some 3D programming for university with VRML, 
considered VRML boring and thought about trying something in OpenGL.

By the way, really cool screenshots of a Chess program using exactly the 
same technology as glGo (wxWindows for the GUI and OpenGL for the display) 
are here: http://www.chesscommander.com
Unfortunately I didnt get the trial download running, refused to start. 
Maybe my TNT1 is too poor, no idea. But the screenshots on the webpage look 
quite cool.


>And by the way Peter the screen captures on the gIGo page are huge (500K+)
>and thus bandwidth-heavy; would you consider replacing them with more
>highly compressed images?

Ok, good point. I didnt pay attention, praises to highspeed internet 
connections...


>I love the look of this new interface and I hope you can get where you want
>it to be without having to spend too much time on it ;)

Let's see. Currently trying to get GNU Go working, that would be a good 
start to get some of the "how to manage a game" code basics done. Certainly 
GNU Go isnt overly interesting, but its much easier to do than IGS, so I 
guess a good start. Also I now have the chance to avoid lots of design 
mistakes I did in gGo. :*)

Thanks for the feedback so far, very welcome. I will need more to make sure 
it runs on all those graphiccards out there.
I guess I drop an update on the webpage when GNU Go is basically working 
next weekend.

  Peter

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