[GEM-dev] single buffering

[ben at ekran.org]

Hello All,

After playing with my Gem GOPs today (released soon I hope! I wanted to
get a few more done though) I'm even more assured that single-buffering is
an important feature. Important enough for it to end up in all my patches
in some form or another. The reason why? single buffering makes very very
beutiful organic shapes possible with very little polys. They render
really fast, and are incredably smooth. Today I was playing with a static
object in single buffering playing a video on it. The effect was visually
very close to pix_biquad and pix_blur (smoother than pix_blur) without any
extra computation. The frames smoothly get blended together as if the
frames were actually being cross-fade. I was blown away, and realize I
really have to try it with live video!

single buffering is, for me, one of the most important features, because
it makes possible forms in time that would take a lot more processing
power to do without it.

Anyhow I am the only one to use single buffering??

Ben


> On Thursday, September 11, 2003, at 04:49  PM, cgc at humboldtblvd.com
> wrote:
>
>> Quoting ben at ekran.org:
>>
>>> heya all,
>>>
>>> I was just tinkering with an old patch and I can't get
>>> single-buffering
>>> to
>>> work. It worked before...
>>>
>>> I'm using Chris's bianry release for OSX from two weeks ago.
>>>
>>> The window does not complain, seems to enter single-buffering mode.
>>> but
>>> when I try and draw something (by banging on a gemhead) I get nothing
>>> but
>>> black. Changing the gemwin color does not render either, all black...
>>>
>>> Anyhow I hope it gets fixed as its something I often use.
>>>
>>
>> There is no single buffering of GL contexts in OSX.  Never has been
>> and never
>> will be.  There's nothing we can do about this - it was a very early
>> Apple
>> design decision.
>
> ...uh, strictly speaking you're right, but I do remember a 'single
> buffer' mode working in earlier versions of the GEM OSX port...I think
> it was one of ben's early example patches:  but as I recall, ya had to
> select single buffer before creating the window, which resulted in the
> buffer getting filled by all drawing events, which was cool as long as
> ya had a way to change your drawing colors/shapes/etc...I haven't tried
> this in awhile, so I'll look into it tonight...
>
> l8r,
> jamie