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[MANTA] Manta output


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Hansong Zhang <hansong@sgi.com>
  • To: "'manta@sci.utah.edu'" <manta@sci.utah.edu>
  • Subject: [MANTA] Manta output
  • Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:07:51 -0700
Hi Steve,

Abe has explained to a few of us that the ImageDisplay class is supposed be a one stop link to display hardware. This seems limiting to the many way different downsteam applications can connect to Manta to obtain, process, and distribute the result.

In the end, Manta has to have a output interface. The current interface is the ImageDisplay class. It may be more general to get the "display" concept out of there and make Manta export opaque buffers (including the image buffer). This is so that the downstream apps don't have to subclass Manta to make use of the output. This arrangement has to do with a ray tracing server based on Manta, but that's topic for another mail.

I believe that when other apps like Catia connects to Manta's output, it would want to do so at the buffers level (i.e. data protocols, not class inheritance).

On a related note, it seems to me that Manta shouldn't concern itself with (a)synchronous i/o at all. Manta may have a notion of double/triple/...-buffered output (with ready flags), and it would be up to whatever consumers that come later to decide what to do with the buffers.

Hansong



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