[xinf] Future direction of Xinfinity

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> * I am put off by AGG because I suspect that its focus on quality is a
> bit excessive for my/our needs and therefore it perhaps isn't as fast
> as it could be. But, this is conjecture because I haven't looked very
> closely at AGG at all.

I'm personaly a big fan of the AGG Lite library.
That's 2 files (total 70KB) with a clean and extensible design, and
pretty well optimized (in particular the AntiAliasing).

But there's actually two ways of doing vector rendering :

a) the classic way (Flash,AGG) draw everything in memory using expensive
CPU routines.

b) the HW way (commercial libraries only ?) are tesselating vector
shapes into triangles that are sent to the GPU (using OpenGL API for
example). This take a lot less CPU time but require proper HW support
(less usable for embedded devices).

I think that the future of vector rendering on PC is (b).

> One question I forgot to ask in my sleepy delirium last night: What
> are your plans for packaging Xinfinity applications? I assume you plan
> to have some kind of SWF-like format for packaging vectors, bitmaps,
> code etc. together? It would be really cool if swfmill could be
> extended to output Xinfinity packages (XNF?) as well as SWF. I might
> be interested in working on that side of things as well, although I
> haven't looked at the swfmill source yet.
> 
> Other than that, if you'd be interested to talk architecture sometime
> over the next few weeks, that would be very welcome. I'll be coding
> this thing probably from Friday onwards, all going well, and I'm one
> of those people who works best when accompanied by lots of discussion.
> If that's not your style, I can always bounce ideas off Zjnue in the
> mean time, and come back and see what you think in a few weeks when
> hopefully some kind of skeleton implementation will be in place.

Looking forward to see what the Xinf team will come up with !

Nicolas