website/archived/taofutureplans.md

---
title: "Tao:FuturePlans"
lastmodified: '2005-05-20'
redirect_from:
  - /Tao%3AFuturePlans/
---

Tao:FuturePlans
===============

Set of things I'd like to do in the (very) near future:

<table>
<col width="100%" />
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td align="left"><h2>Table of contents</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="#simplify-build-system">1 Simplify build system</a></li>
<li><a href="#single-taoopengl-dll-on-all-platforms">2 Single Tao.OpenGl DLL on all platforms</a></li>
<li><a href="#single-taosdl-dll-on-all-platforms">3 Single Tao.Sdl DLL on all platforms</a></li>
<li><a href="#macos-x-support">4 MacOS X support</a></li>
<li><a href="#opengl-documentation">5 OpenGL documentation</a></li>
<li><a href="#extension-support-in-openal">6 Extension support in OpenAL</a></li>
</ul></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

#### Simplify build system

Right now Tao has a number of build systems, including a NAnt-based one, a set of Visual Studio projects, and DNPB (dot net prebuild) files. NAnt is pretty painful on mono, especially on a development install, as it's large and has many dependencies. I'd like to move to only two maintained build methods going forward:

1. Simple cross-platform Makefile system

    This should support all the configurations that the current NAnt-system supports, but be easier to maintain. Support for mono on OS X should also be added to Tao. This will most likely depend on GNU make, though it may be possible to make the same files work with NMAKE.

2. VS.NET Solution/Projects

#### Single Tao.OpenGl DLL on all platforms

Building Tao.OpenGl fully right now depends on the ILMerge tool, which is a Windows-only binary tool. We should be able to replace both the stub generator and ILMerge with <http://www.plas.fit.qut.edu.au/perwapi/Default.aspx>. There are still some calling convention issues in some of the bindings that will make it difficult to ship a single binary for all platforms, but we should be able to identify these and provide a set of reccomended libraries to use that don't have any calling convention issues, making it possible to ship a single app that uses Tao that would run on all platforms.

#### Single Tao.Sdl DLL on all platforms

Building Tao.Sdl relies on ILDasm and ILAsm tolls which are Windows-only tools. These tools are used to correct some calling convention issues.

#### MacOS X support

Make sure that the MacOS X support is correct, and that the assembly .config files reference the correct .dylib bits on OSX.

#### OpenGL documentation

Need to get inline documentation for OpenGL functions in, based on the OpenGL man pages.

#### Extension support in OpenAL

OpenAL uses an extension mechanism similar to OpenGL's (alGetProcAddress)... we need to add support for some of the more common extensions (EAX) in the same way that we handle OpenGL extensions.