Hi Jeff,

> Jeff Pierce wrote:
> > Meanwhile, I haven't had any bug reports or
requests from the
Squeak
> > community at all. Surely there's functionality
y'all would 
> like to see.
> > What do you wish Squeak Alice could do?  What bugs
have you 
> run into?

[ -- ALICE BIT -- ]
A while ago, i came across a 3D engine which Dave
Collins had written for Director. It was a little
slow, and could only handle 4 point polygonal faces,
(but these were the problems of Director, not the
author!) Anyway, here are the key points of that
implementation which i think would serve Squeak Alice
well:

* There was a special type of 3D object called a Point
Model. Instead of defining points and faces, the model
used single points to represent it's form. For each
point, an image was used. When this type of model
rendered, each image would render front on, and only
it's scale would be relative to it's distance from the
camera. This meant that you could define a spiral of
images, or a circular menu which would rotate images
round to face the user (as in many Playstation games).
Another usage could be for a grenade explosion in a
game. Rather than using a small mesh for each peice of
shrapnel, you'd define a point model, and have a few
varying explosive images, then displace the points
away from a center to acheive the explosion. This
means that no matter where the camera is, the images
of the point model will always render front on, with
only the scale changing their dimensions. I wander if
this form of 3D model could exist within the Alice
structure? Models would still have a bounding box, but
the points would not connect mesh, but exist in free
form to represent the position of a Form to render to.

* Director can use a 32-bit (millions+alpha) PICT file
to render a sprite with. This meant that although the
3D models could only define 4 points per polygon, one
could still acheive complex surfaces using the blend
of the alpha channel of the image to render surfaces.
One example would be to use a weave or cloth texture
to render the surfaces of a basket. Or using a leafy
texture to render a simple spheric mesh of a tree top.
I guess that this would only need Alice textures to
support transparent Forms (or is this already the
case?).

* That's about all i can think of (at this point on
Monday morning...)

[ -- TRANSPARENCY BIT -- ]
Andreas Raab mentioned in a reply that the
transparency paint mode of BitBlt is buggy and wasn't
working like it should. Will this be fixed for 2.7? I
know there are bigger fish, but it would be great have
that working...:]

Many Cheers,
Ali.
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