[GEM-dev] musings on multiple_window

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

james tittle wrote:
> heya,
> 
> 
> ...so, cgc and I chatted last nite, and I'm wondering if it's plausible 

men, where do you do it ?

> to add another symbol to gemhead for gemman to manage...the priority 
> system would still be used for rendering order, but the new symbol would 
> be used to determine which output/glcontext the render would go to 
> (kinda like pd's send/receive objects):  by default (ie. no extra 
> symbol), output would go to the "main" gemwindow...if there is a symbol, 
> then the output would go to the associated display output:  so we'd need 
> to add a symbol to each gemoutput:
> 
> [gembuffer offscreen1]:  this would be for pBuffer
> [gemwindow onscreen1]:  this would be for primary display
> [gemdv onscreen2]:  this would be a dv stream of the onscreen2 render
> [gemwindow onscreen2]:  this would be for 2nd monitor display

i would rather associate the "context" with the [gemcontrol] object.

> 
> ...then the gemheads would be something like the following:
> 
> [gemhead 43 offscreen1]:  this then renders to a pBuffer
> [gemhead -1 onscreen1]:  this renders to the primary display
> [gemhead -2 onscreen2]:  this renders to the 2nd monitor
> 
> ...we'd then need the output [gembuffer offscreen1] to allow binding to 
> texture for texturing on objects, which could then perhaps be rendered 
> into another buffer, textured, then rendered into a scene for screen 
> display...

that is exactly how i imagined it !

just one remark: the ordering of the context-name and the priority 
should be arbitrary:
eg: [gemhead 10 offscreen]
[gemhead blur] (==[gemhead 50 blur])
[gemhead bibs 32]
...


and probably "main" (or rather "") is attached to all contexts, like

[gemcontrol] context ""
[gemcontrol offscreen] context "offscreen"
[gemcontrol ot] context "ot"


[gemhead] renders to "", "offscreen", "ot"
[gemhead ot] renders to "", "ot"

and do we want to be able to connect one [gemhead] to multiple explicit 
contexts ?

like [gemhead here there everywhere] ?


> 
> ...any obvious problems?

yes, timing.
i guess it would/could/should be possible to somehow handle 
[gemcontrol]s at different rates, e.g. only render once a second into a 
pbuffer (or even better: on demand!)

how do we handle this efficiently ? (esp. with respect to "time-based" 
objects, like [pix_movie] in auto-mode or particle-systems)



mfg.as.dr
IOhannes