Subject: Introducing Gossamer...

From: Jon Blossom <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 May 93 17:56:18 PDT

I'm happy to announce the imminent release of Gossamer 1.0, a public domain
polygon-based 3D rendering engine for Macintosh. If you're interested, please
read on! You can send questions, comments, etc. to me: [email-masked].

Gossamer 1.0 is a general-purpose package for managing, manipulating, and
rendering three-dimensional scenes on the Macintosh. It has been designed and
with the intention to release it to the public domain to encourage the 
production
of homebrew VR systems, animation systems, and simple related applications.

Before I go into details, let me just say that Gossamer will not be 
available for
a few more weeks - I'm predicting some time in early June since I still have
some cleaning up to do.

Gossamer 1.0 will be provided as a library in Symantec THINK C 5.0 format with
header files, fairly extensive documentation, and a demonstration program
with source code that displays some of Gossamer's capabilities.

The package itself is a first-generation version that includes many but 
not all of
the features that I have planned. I will be extending the feature set 
as soon as
possible and releasing version 2.0, but I wanted to get *something* out to
interested parties so that the state of homebrew Mac VR work would not remain
as stagnant as it is now. Please forgive me the shortcomings and consider
this a step towards a more complete implementation. My soapbox: "It'll
only get faster and more robust."

The first generation of this library has been compiled for 68020 machines
with 68881 coprocessors. Apologies to those excluded by these restrictions--
I'll be switching to integer-based fixed-point math in the next 
version, but the
'020 restriction will remain. These are the only hardware requirements:
Gossamer is designed to be independent of monitor size or pixel depth and
requires only a CGrafPort to make it go. The included demonstration will
handle shading and pseudo-transparency on monitors from 1 to 8-bits per
pixel.

Although Gossamer is NOT a strict port of Rend386, the nature of the
project and the example of Rend386 make for many similarities between
the two systems and should enable porting Rend386 programs. The demo
files will contain procedures for reading Rend386 PLG files and, possibly,
FIG and WLD files as well.

Support for the PowerGlove and Sega glasses will have to come in future
revisions or from the application author. I haven't connected a pair of glasses
(and doubt that Gossamer could handle stereo rendering just now), and my
"ancient" 68HC11 EVBU pseudo-Menelli board is far from a standard in
Power Glove connectivity.

Also, a standard disclaimer: I have written Gossamer to work on my
personal development machine, a Mac IIci with a standard 13" Apple
monitor. I can not guarantee that the code will work without hitches on any
other machines. Actually, that's part of my reasoning for releasing this
library in its current state: I can't test this thing all by myself. I NEED BUG
REPORTS!

Gossamer is copyright (c) 1993 by Jon Blossom. This software may be used to
write applications for release into the public domain, but permission 
to use this
software for commercial ventures, including shareware, must be licensed from
the author.

If you have any questions, problems, ideas, or code relating to 
Gossamer, please
contact me at [email-masked]. Gossamer is NOT a Microsoft product, nor is
it even remotely endorsed by my  employers. It is strictly a labor of 
love and the
exclusive property and responsibility of the author. Sorry, I had to 
throw that in
just in case.