Anonymous comments disabled. CLS-compliant OpenAL API. Help wanted.

Posted Tuesday, 12 February, 2008 - 12:12 by the Fiddler

Spam bots have started becoming bolder lately, bypassing captcha checks and posting about those "medicine" links we all love so much. I'm looking for alternatives, but for now I've been forced to disable anonymous comments. Annoying as that may be, please consider registering a handle (a mere two clicks away, and thankfully without a round trip through your emails).

We have been silent the past few days, but we are slowly ramping up for the 0.9.1 release. Inertia is currently working on CLS-compliant overloads to OpenAL, while I am trying to improve OpenTK on Linux (having completely moved my main system over) - we have encountered some problems with OpenAL/Linux and are currently implementing workarounds.

All in all we feel 0.9.1 will be a strong release, with many new features. 0.9.2 will be mainly focused on bugfixes and documentation, while the main missing features (joysticks and native Mac OS X drivers) are scheduled for 0.9.3 and later releases.

If you have some spare time and would like to lend us a hand, here are some things OpenTK could use:

  1. A .wav loader (here's a more complete reference)
  2. An .ogg loader built on cs vorbis. The loading part itself is fully implemented in csvorbis, we just need to get a working "frontend" over it.
  3. Support for more font layout options in OpenTK.TextPrinter. Basic left-to-right layout is implemented, but we are currently missing word-wrapping and, justified and right-to-left options.

We are planning to work on these features for OpenTK 1.0, but we won't do so until the core API is complete; consider helping out if you wish to see them earlier!

Stay tuned for updates.


Comments

Feb 12
 14:54:29
Re: Anonymous comments disabled. CLS-compliant OpenAL API. Help
posted by Stevo14

I wrote a wave saver some time back (really not all that long ago, I just can't remember how long.) in vb. I would be more than happy to "translate" the code into a wave loader (in c#) and submit it.

Feb 12
 15:16:10
Re: This would be very helpful indeed!
posted by the Fiddler

This would be very helpful indeed!

We currently depend on the native alut.dll for wave loading which seems to be missing on many systems, causing problems.

Feb 12
 15:50:55
Re: Anonymous comments disabled. CLS-compliant OpenAL API. Help
posted by Stevo14

What do you think the API should look like? Maybe something simple like "WaveSound _Sound = new WaveSound("test.wav");" ?

Feb 12
 16:07:20
Re: Looks fine
posted by the Fiddler

Yeah, looks fine.

The final API is still to be decided (what we want to do in the end is load the data into an OpenAL buffer), but this will work fine until then. ;)

Feb 12
 18:00:45
Re: Anonymous comments disabled. CLS-compliant OpenAL API. Help
posted by Inertia

At least a hint what the final API will be like:

void BufferData( uint bid, Enums.ALFormat format, IntPtr data, int size, int freq );

This is the function which the loaded data should be fed into. The format subchunk gives all these parameters, you'd only have to chose the value of the enum according to the read NumChannels and BitsPerSample variables (there are not many options).

We should probably add an overload to BufferData which could look like this:

void BufferData( uint bid, WaveSound wav );

Feb 13
 07:59:44
Re: Anonymous comments disabled. CLS-compliant OpenAL API. Help
posted by nythrix

Is anonymous posting really needed? People interested in this project register anyway.

Feb 13
 12:05:52
Re: Anonymous comments disabled. CLS-compliant OpenAL API. Help
posted by the Fiddler

Yeah, I think that's reasonable.

I would still keep anonymous posting enabled though, if it didn't cause problems - no need to force someone to register just to ask a quick question!

Feb 13
 13:26:07
Re: Anonymous comments disabled. CLS-compliant OpenAL API. Help
posted by Inertia

Anonymous posts also had the advantage that people could post from "unsafe" locations (e.g. public access points like webcafes) without worrying about security, but the recent amount of spam simply left no choice. Either way, registration is quite painless here, and it's much nicer for the other users to see who is actually posting there.