[fluxus] whats going on with fluxus

[Dave Griffiths]

Hi all,

I thought I should post an update of whats happening with the plt branch
of fluxus - firstly I should say that none of this has been committed yet,
as I still need to decide where everything is going to live as the
structure has changed quite a bit. If you are not interested in the
specifics of whats going on, all I can say is that nothing outwardly is
going to change in the short term, all commands will stay the same (so
scripts will be compatible), and the graphics rendering is unchanged - you
might see the framerates improve for complex scripts though.

The main change is that there is a clean seperation between the
application - the gl window and text editor, and the render engine - the
backend that sets out the primitives and textures etc etc and gives them
to OpenGL.

There are going to be a set of plt modules which can be loaded into the
fluxus application (or any plt interpreter) called things like:

fluxus-engine : all the main graphics commands
fluxus-audio : the fft stuff + jack client
fluxus-osc : osc client and server
fluxus-video-texture : as and when :)

As the main app now has no conception of a renderer or anything other than
a scheme interpreter, we have to move all the code which binds them
together into scheme - but this gives us a lot more flexibility.

So I'm quite excited, because this way of working makes a lot of things
possible I'd been wondering about, like multiple scenegraphs, multipass
rendering and extending fluxus with code distributed seperately to the
main app.

Also, and perhaps this is the main point - being able to write and debug
fluxus scripts in drscheme is going to make fluxus much easier to use and
learn.

cheers,

dave