Posted by Kevin Matthews on December 15, 2000 at 14:06:01:In Reply to: Quesa and DW posted by GaryV on December 15, 2000 at 00:09:31:
I assume Quesa will be incorporated into DW at some point. It seems as tho it is pretty far along and "almost there"(?).
I was just wondering if there will be any differences / improvements that will be noticeable to the DW user or whether it will be transparent (so to speak). I was just curious.
The general answer is "yes".
The initial goal of Quesa is to exactly match the functionality of QuickDraw 3D. More specifically, in the first phase of DesignWorkshop using Quesa, there may be little visible to DesignWorkshop users, although many Windows users should see a jump in rendering speed. In this sense, the upgrade to Quesa will be transparent.
Since Quesa is built to be native three ways, for Windows, Power Macintosh, and Unix right from the beginning, it gives us insulation against the OS wars, which in turn gives you much the same protection. Quesa is also independent from the specific 3D hardware acceleration system, so right now it uses Open GL, but when something better comes along next year, Quesa will mesh with it, so the core of DesignWorkshop won't have to.
Of course building Quesa is a big project in itself, which Artifice is contributing to significantly, along with many other developers around the world. But once Apple decided to stop forward support for QD3D, we were facing a big conversion project anyway. By focusing our conversion project into Quesa, we share benefits with all the other contributors, and because it is a talented and well-balanced group, we'll still get just the technology we're dreaming of!
Following on that first step up to basic Quesa, there are significant internal improvements in Quesa over QD3D which will make further growth more efficient. For example, the file input/output functions are nicely modularized, so adding translation modules, like .3DS input, for instance, is much easier than before.
The Quesa dimension is something I'm planning to discuss in a bit more detail - as much as folks want - at the January 9th get together in San Francisco.
Cheers,
K