Hi and welcome to the new Pixelate monthly column on Allegro development. In this corner I’ll focus on latest issues, happenings and progressions of our gaming library; almost all of the news comes from the Allegro Developers mailing list (AD), so this is just a brief report extracted from the messages posted on it. Let’s start and have a look at what happened this month, July 2001.

First of all, I'm sure nobody missed the release of WIP 3.9.37, which silently came out on July, 9. This version contains many bug fixes and some new things; as always, we suggest you keep yourself up to date with library development and use this WIP in your programs.

An important note: the WIP has a big change in the Unix code which makes it use some drivers as modules, i.e. dynamically loading them at runtime only if they’re needed. Unfortunately, owing to a mistake, some drivers are now not properly detected, and you may end up not being able to use DGA2 or ALSA for example. This was quickly fixed and the WIP files replaced; anyway, if you own a bugged copy, please download it again or do a CVS checkout from the Allegro repository on Sourceforge. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Of course development has continued after the WIP release, and here’s a brief summary of the most important changes already applied. More and more gfx drivers are starting to implement the new fetch_mode_list() method, which enumerates the list of available video modes for a given driver; this feature was requested a long time ago, but only now has it been made operative. If you didn’t know about it, check it out in the docs! A new dat2c program, similar to Allegro dat2s but with C output, has been developed by Laurence Withers and there is the possibility such a utility will become part of the official library package. The advantage of dat2c over dat2s is that it’ll work on any platform supported by Allegro, even those not based on the i80386 architecture. The disadvantage is that your converted data will be bigger than that created by dat2s...

On to other news, the next WIP will feature an optimized sprite rotation routine, so your rotated sprites will be faster and look smoother. It also seems the new internal API easily allows the possible addition of anti-aliasing support in the future...

There have been some discussions on the old problem of threads and timers; I’ll not enter into details here, but this involves synchronization issues that must be solved soon on all platforms on which Allegro makes use of threads, i.e. all except DOS. Unfortunately a final decision has not been taken so far, but things are moving.

Ending words must be spoken on some more work being done on the Watcom port (you should all keep an eye on www.openwatcom.org as this may become a great alternative to DJGPP in the future), and some patches to make Allegro compatible with the MFC, a little nicety some of you will probably appreciate.

Many (all?) of you will be happy to know there’s a rumor about attempting to release Allegro 4.0 by the end of this year; someone even suggested releasing it on December 10, exactly four years after the birth of Allegro 3.0. Will this be the end of the Allegro WIP releases? Of course not, but probably version numbering will change and a Linux kernel style numbering will be adopted. Furthermore, a new home page for our beloved library, which will replace the existing one on www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro, is planned for the big event. More details on this will come at proper time! =P

Well, that’s all for now. Cya until the next time!

Angelo Mottola