Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ucsd!ucbvax!decwrl!shelby!neon!neon!ramani From: ramani@modesty.Stanford.EDU (Ramani Pichumani) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: what's most important to you for R5? Message-ID: Date: 4 Jul 90 03:01:23 GMT Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System) Organization: Stanford University Department of Computer Science Lines: 49 A very useful addition to Xlib would be the ability to draw a Gouraud shaded polygon. My guess is that this would not be difficult to do at the Xlib level. The simple addition of a Gouraud shaded polygon would open the door to a large class of 3D solid and surface rendering capabilities without having to incur the expense of running the PEX extensions or relying on expensive 3D graphics hardware. Also, if color dithering was employed in the polygon function, users with 8-bit color frame buffers could benefit greatly also. They would have the ability to view vivid 3D color graphics without expensive 24-bit color graphics support. With the use of a color intensity table, dithered polygons would enable monochrome users to also view 3D color objects in digital halftones. This would also provide a more general solution than using stipples to perform shading on monochrome displays. For people who need to do high-performance 3D color graphics generation, there is no substitute for 3D graphics hardware. However, the addition of this one function would enable users who are more interested in *viewing* 3D graphics (e.g. from a color X terminal) a much more economical solution. The XDraw* functions are fairly complete for drawing a large class of 2D and 3D graphical objects. The ability to draw a rotated ellipse is one of the few additional changes I would like to see in this area. Why a rotated ellipse and not rotated lines, polylines, etc? Because rotated polylines can still be achieved by passing transformed data to their respective drawing functions whereas there is no way to pass transformed data to the XDrawArc function to draw a rotated ellipse. This would be fairly easy to do at the Xlib level and would eliminate having to decompose a rotated ellipse into polylines just because the angle of rotation is non-zero. Ramani ------ Ramani Pichumani Tel: (415) 723-2902 or 723-2437 Department of Computer Science Fax: (415) 725-7411 Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 308 email: ramani@patience.stanford.edu Stanford, CA 94305 USA uunet!patience.stanford.edu!ramani -- Ramani Pichumani Tel: (415) 723-2902 or 723-2437 Department of Computer Science Fax: (415) 725-7411 Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 308 email: ramani@patience.stanford.edu Stanford, CA 94305 USA uunet!patience.stanford.edu!ramani