2016/10/10

08:43

One thing to consider is, how are the OpenGL ES APIs actually even used? Basically there are no displayable to use with the LCD UI, but there are contexts and displays. EGLDisplay and such are not Displayables.

08:52

Well for M3G you perform a bindTarget on Graphics provided by the Canvas or CustomItem. So this is rather simple. So the next thing is how to do this for OpenGL ES.

08:57

So I suppose then this is done with EGLDisplay eglGetDisplay(Object __a) since that is the only thing that makes sense. This means that I will need some kind of special binding system in the LCDUI code to handle cases where special cases are bound to. So somehow I will need to make publically available interfaces.

08:59

And the example uses:

Display display = Display.getDisplay(thisMIDlet);
display.setCurrent(this);

Then there is a call to eglCreateWindowSurface which uses a Graphics object. So that is basically all there is, so I can really now start implementing OpenGL ES and potentially M3G. I just need to think of a good way to have the special handling of display things. The only thing that I will need is some way to get the display instance that is currently being used and perform magical binding to it. And since the M3G code I plan to have it use OpenGL ES, I only have to implement base 3D rendering code once.

12:18

So the EGL classes, apart from the interfaces, have package private constructors. This could complicate things if I want to have software rasterizer in another project/package. However, hopefully noone will mind if I make the constructors protected.

12:20

Although, I can always keep it internal. I can have the base classes handle stuff such as LCDUI and then have software rasterizers and others implement the actual GL interfaces. I can make it where EGL uses whatever it wants and where the rasterizers are agnostic to it. The EGL interfaces can be thought up of system specific interfaces though. So this way the package will manage the rasterizers. Then the rasterizers will just expose themselves over the service mechanism. I just will need priorities so that way if a software rasterizer exists and a hardware one also exists, that the hardware one is selected first. As long as the hardware rasterizers support rendering to an off screen buffer, they should not have any issues at all when they are implemented.

12:32

Actually, GUI can lose Game. This way I can just have a basic drawGame for the most part. Otherwise I will have to setup new UIs whenever a new game is created, which would be very complex.

13:45

Since the size of a canvas may change when it comes to graphic operations, I would suppose that GameCanvas and Canvas getGraphics will return a forwarding Graphics instance so that the backing image that has the contents of the canvas can change, since images cannot be resized.

13:50

Then for the renderer that the game uses, I will need to specify the width and the height of the game view because it could change and may not be known when a draw request is made.

15:37

The problem with that though, is that Graphics is private and/or package private. So really there is no way to really initialize such a thing, except from the base class using some kind of hidden API.

15:59

So lets see, how do I handle GameCanvas getGraphics? Looking at some of these classes, it makes it seem as if they never heard of interfaces. But I suppose J2ME was made at a time where interfaces were frowned upon and you really wanted abstract classes.

16:02

Well, I suppose Graphics can just implement the bulk of drawing operations and then just draw them somewhere. I could cheat though and have another class.

16:05

Actually I know a way I can cheat, I can have Displayable extend a class of mine that is public. Then instead, I can have an accessor that can access all the hidden stuff via a static. So this new base for displayable would allow me to hack it up and allow for what I want.

16:15

Well, I could in theory just break compability in some subtle ways. Well really, Canvas is double buffered for the most part, which essentially means that there is a backing image somewhere.

16:26

Well, MicroEmulator makes it public and everything in it just throws an exception. Personally, I am thinking of breaking compatibility for sanity purposes.

16:31

Yes, definitely for sanity I will break compatibility. J2ME is a dead platform and Java ME is not really going anywhere at all. I suppose 99.9% compatibility will be good enough for the most part. As long as existing code can still run.

17:59

So, you cannot invokevirtual an interface. So I can just take the next alternative, and make all methods in the class abstract instead and make it public.

18:58

It is unspecified whether EGLContext.getEGL() returns the same instance or a new instance every time.

18:59

However, eglGetDisplay works on actual displays. However that can return the same instance every time essentially. However perhaps that should actually be unique. A configuration is chosen and a context is created. A surface is then created from the context. So yeah, the display can return the same one, but contexts are always different. Basically I can wrap anything that is done on displays. Well, actually not because displays can have their own pixel buffers and textures associated with them.

19:04

So EGL is shared, but displays and everything else are unique. Because if you wanted to get the pre-existing display you can get the current display, context, and surface.

22:09

I had an idea, I can have annotations and annotate compatbility breakages. This way it is documented in the source code and I can also potentially extract that information and automatically use it rather than keeping a single document.

22:39

Thinking that I may need a simplification of the BasicUI along with the LUI and LCDUI Display classes, providers, and instances.

22:45

Yes, I can essentially just remove the service lookup and just have basically a default service if a system property is not specified with a given class value. I also may need to infact fold the image reading code into the LCDUI image code, perhaps.

22:49

However, optional projects may be included and others may be missing. So a default specified handler for when nothing is around might not even work. I suppose then it can use ServiceLoader to make sure it exists. Then I can also simplify the display system too. Right now I can have displays across multiple drivers so to speak. Although this can work, it will complicate things a bit for the most part. But I will need drivers for the following:

I see the only implementation of LUI using just the terminal code since the latter would be much easier to work with anyway. The LCDUI code would get a bit complicated since it may actually be able to use native widgets and such.