# date: 2001 - 12 - 01

Design Goal:
 - As simple API as can be (smaller than 4.0 ?) but still as powerful
 - Portability


Audio:
 - Switch to completely disable the Allegro mixer, and send audiobuffers to the sound card directly. (TRAC)
 - Methods to get and 'suggest' playback rates, sample depth, stereoness (TRAC)
 - Callback for audiobuffers, when they are done playing. (MrGrim)
 - MMX remixers (can't do it in DOS interrupt context)
 - Ability to switch remixers without resorting to the config-file hack
 - remove those unused sound functions (vibratto, etc)
 - Collapse load_* into one function load_sample(), smart enough to read the file
   header to determine the format.
 - Option to let the remixer divide by the number of voices currently playing instead
   of some preset amount.
 - play_midi and play_looped_midi combined
 - DMusic support


Graphics:
 - 8 bit palette components
 - Possible merge of AllegroGL (as an OpenGL driver only, to keep it light)
 - merge blit and sprite API
 - window resizing support
 - is_*_bitmap collapsed to a single function - get_bitmap_type()
 - fixing the (x1,y1)-(x2,y2) included or not included issue. (use width/height instead?)
 - What to do with floodfill (can't be accelerated via GL or D3D)
 - Dump draw_character
 - Unified rotate_flip_pivot_stretch routine
 - Dump compiled sprites
 - Hooks in the polygon routines to add our own span-based sorter.
   This means that ZBuffer, SBuffer, and P3D can spun out to other libs.
 - Make blenders work with spans (see FBlend)
 - hsv_to_rgb and rgb_to_hsv in a separate lib
 - Remove not-so-useful blenders (dissolve, dodge, hue, invert, luminance,
   multiply, saturation, screen)
 - Collapse load_* into one function load_bitmap(), smart enough to read the file
   header to determine the format.
 - GFX_SAFE sets a Windowed mode when possible
 - DDraw7 and DGraphics8 support
 - Fix this whole 32bpp == int, 16bpp == short thing. Use int16_t and int32_t instead?
 - true color fade in/out (Nathan)
 - DRAW_MODE_TRANS_PATTERN (Nathan)
 - Speed ups in the asm code - drop READ/WRITE_BANK calls for linear memory bitmaps.


Text Drawing:
 - load_font/save_font API
 - textout should not use -1 for colored fonts.


Input:
 - Message based (see SDL)
 - DInput 8


Muti-threading:
 - Mutexes, thread control, etc


Packfiles:
 - Remove compression/encryption. This can be spun off to a new lib.
   Basic endian-safe pack functions can still be present.
 - Allow registering of new compression and encryption libs.
 - save_datafile() and save_datafile_object() (Nathan Smith)


Network:
 - Can we get one? Please? :) 


Core:
 - Configuration via an OpenGL-like al_set(variable, value) system
 - prefixing of the API
 - Some of the little used variables converted to strings (os_type/version, cpu_family, etc)
 - Move as much as possible to VTables
 - Update to DirectX 9 (we have the time ;)
 - Drop DOS.
 - Dynamic module loading (we could have alleg-gfx.dll, alleg-sound.dll, etc)


Installation:
 - Have a Windows installer built from a script (PIMP?)


Documentation:
 - Generated from source via Doxygen or Javadoc (see AllegroGL for example)


Stuff to remove (can be placed in add-ons)
 Perhaps a script can be supplied to make these add-ons installation
 as simple as copying them to the allegro dir and running make/make install?

 - FLI playback code
 - Software 3D code
 - 3D Math
 - Fixed point math
 - Compiled sprites and RLE