[Gnash-dev] Fast, high-quality, platform independent software renderer for Gnash

[Udo Giacomozzi]

Hi,

just to let you know:

We switched from DirectFB to AGG (www.antigrain.com). It's an advanced
graphics engine that is entirely written in pure C++ and works on any
platform.

It provides anti-aliasing with sub-pixel accuracy (256 sub-pixels per
pixel) and is known for it's very fast and accurate anti-aliasing
algorithms. Besides of that it's extremely flexible. I'm sure it
provides everything required to render Flash scenes (the author wrote
even a little Flash rendering demo).

Also, it's completely hardware-independent because it simply renders
into a chunk of memory. That can be the framebuffer itself, DirectFB
or any in-memory buffer (double buffering) and of course can be
blitted to a GTK/GDI/whatever window. With other words, it could be
the universal software rendering backend for any situation.

The licence seems to allow direct integration into Gnash and the
library does not have any dependencies except for FreeType since we
need to render text.

That's why we think AGG is the ideal backend solution for Gnash.

The downside is that it is rather difficult to learn and use at first.
It took me a whole day just to figure out how to draw a simple
brezenham line.

So far we can render SWFs with lines, splines and such and it looks
very well. I think shapes will follow very soon.

It would probably be best if Flash splines would be passed as such to
the backend since AGG can render them already (and better). I guess
we'll have to wait for the new backend structure.

Hope you like this,
Udo