Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc

An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)

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for more to the date info

[ezekiel683]

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9791

has alot of responces from raster on this subject so its worth a read and there also seems to be some progress on the whole debate

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[augustz]

Tuesday, 22 February 2005
Enlightenment the experimental toolkit

Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.

What I'll go into is some of the things Seth and Havoc talk about that we have already done and are well under way or very mature. Things we have advocated for years and have already solved - quite optimally. Our designs are forward-looking and just WAITING for drivers to catch up and stop "sucking". I could write essays about the many ways to address this issue alone (XRender), but I won't go there this time. I've been there before.

First let me talk about Seth's blog. He discusses "Next-Generation Rendering For the Free Desktop". This is great. this is just what we need... oh wait. it's just what we've been DOING for years! :) He mentions "A sophisticated drawing layer" (read his blog for the full text). We have that - Evas. it can accelerate via OpenGL, it's got a FAST software renderer. It can render to the Linux Framebuffer. It can render to memory. It can render using DirectFB. It can render using *GASP* ... Cairo! It can display in Qtopia. We can add new engines for new targets with little effort. Evas scales down to rendering at usable speeds on embedded devices (100-600Mhz ARM CPU's, limited RAM etc.). He discusses a toolkit that aggressively takes advantage of this - we have been working on EWL and Edje. Edje is a lower layer theme/layout system, with EWL being a full widget set on top of this, giving you whiz-bang themes with widget layout built on top of an Evas canvas with everything punting down to the rendering layer at the bottom there. We are doing our own Window Manager - and the day Xrender stops sucking, we will add compositing to it too - re-using all the layers we already have to do this. We have a low level acceleration mechanism (OpenGL) but its too unstable for use IMHO. This is a problem that needs fixing and is something that needs to be addressed.

Now he goes on to say what this will enable: "Toolkit themes that draw with layer blending effects" - Done. EWL, Evas, Edje. "Indiana Jones buttons that puff out smoothly and animated clouds of smoke when you click on them". OK - we don't have the smoke - but we have all the animation, glinting in the light, fading, glowing, sliding, etc. etc. etc. We have an entire engine devoted to just this (Edje), a theme description language, compiler, scripting engine, compressed theme format usable "live" without installation etc. He goes on to talk of "Alpha transparency whenever you want" - Done. Evas. Live window thumbnails - XRender has to improve something WICKED for this to be sane. :) Hundreds of snowflakes driving down the screen... E17 has a toy module for just this... and flames to burn them up as they hit the bottom of the screen. All with glorious alpha blending. He speaks of animated background desktops with things like grass blowing in the breeze - We do that already in E17. The desktop BG is an Edje file - and thus is capable of all the animation and effects Edje and Evas offer. In fact take a look at the following 2 video files (they are jerky because xvidcap is jerky and thats just how it is - in real life they are smooth as a babies bottom - you just have to see these things "live" to believe it. Also note - this has NO hardware acceleration. I am hoping one day to have acceleration available that is good enough for production use).

files/e17_movie-02.avi
files/e17_mov

Re:No Funding

[xoboots]

You, sir, are a magnificent bastard and a glorious ass.

It only sounds resentful if you are looking for resentment. It is a simple matter of fact -- he could not afford it as he and his project are not funded.

Another fact: his lack of funding is contrasted by the fact that others, who are only now investingating issues he has already implemented are well funded.

It is what it is -- factual. So keep your "you got what you asked for" attitude to yourself, thank-you very much.

Re:Okay..

[xcomputer_man]

You sir, are full of crap.

Let's see here...

The effects usually look professional, but they run slow and inefficiently

Evas is up to 150 times faster than XRender in plain software mode (with no hardware acceleration) at rendering images. In fact, we often prefer running in software mode than in GL mode because it's more stable and often works better. This is the wrongest statement I've ever heard in my life. Have you ever seen Engage? It does the OSX docker effect absolutely smoothly even on a relatively slow CPU and the crappiest of video cards. That complex, multi-layered animated background you see in the video runs on my system smoothly while taking less than 40% CPU ... and that's an EET that was designed to push the limits of what Evas/Edje can do. With GL acceleration that falls to 10-15%.

However, enlightenment is way too layered and has a million different little components... I just personally think it could all be implemented better.

So you think it would be better if we had one big monolithic, inflexible library that was full of bugs? Or you're one of those people who think that somehow the EFL is slower because it's componentized -- even though it beats the crap out of anything comparable that exists performance-wise? How does "consolidated" translate into "scalable", anyway, Mr. professor of software engineering?

This technology is there, it has been carefully thought out, solidly and cleanly implemented. Go take a look at the code/API yourself before you begin to comment. It is usable NOW, and you don't need to wait until E17 is released before you can use it. None of those things you see in the videos are simulated, that is presently working software available to anyone who wants to install it.