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. | Main News Download Documentation Developers Licensing Contact Mirrors Links as you can see... this website is under construction! | . |  | Well its been almost three years now since i started working on PTC, and i'm proud to announce that the final standard is ready for public release: OpenPTC 1.0. I see this release of the OpenPTC standard as the culmination of all of my work on PTC over the past three years, for now i believe i have achieved my goal: to create a fast, simple, and easy to use graphics system that is portable to virtually any platform. PTC has changed a lot over the years, back in the days up to PTC 0.72 (early 1998) you had a pretty useful system, but it was excessively complex: it just tried to do way much more than it really needed to. For this reason, i stopped development on this source tree, and started entirely from scratch. The new design was briefly called PTC 1.0 during draft implementations in early 1998, then came to be known as PTC 2.0 as development continued for the rest of the year. PTC 2.0 was developed as open source software from the very beginning, and i owe a lot of its success to those that helped with development, especially Christian Nentwich and Jonathan Matthew who worked on the UNIX and DOS implementations respectively. I am truly amazed at the amount of work that Christian has put in to the PTC project: working on the X11 implementation, and at the same time creating an off-shoot library built out of the old PTC 0.72 conversion routines called HERMES. OpenPTC depends on this library for all its low level functionality (pixel format conversion and clearing) and by doing so has been able to reach a much higher level of portability than ever before. My respect to you Christian :) And of course, many others helped along the way, contributing code, providing valuable feedback, feature requests and bug reports. I thank you all. You truly helped shape what PTC is today. Anyway, as 1998 came to a close the feature set of PTC 2.0 started to solidify, and i started to standardize the system. Over a period of about 3 months i set about refining the standard before freezing it on March 1st 1999. I decided to rename it to OpenPTC to reflect the open source nature of the whole project and to distinguish it from previous versions. There will be no more changes now. thats it. done. eof. So now the implementation phase has begun, we currently have distributions for Win32 and Java ready for download, and distributions for DOS and UNIX due to be released shortly (April 1st). We are looking for people to help us to support other platforms: MacOS, BeOS, Amiga and hey, just about any other platform that you can think of... If you are an experienced graphics programmer on the missing platforms, consider donating your time to this project, your work will help provide a valuable tool to graphics programmers all around the world! Thats about it now, and remember to check back at this site frequently as we will be expanding and adding a lot more information over the next few weeks, including documentation for OpenPTC, a summary of new features and differences in OpenPTC 1.0 from previous versions, example programs and tutorials, and even some nice little treats using Java PTC on this web page to show you exactly what it is capable of :) So sit back and relax as we scurry around working frantically implementing OpenPTC on all the platforms that you need (heheh :), or alternatively you could join in and assist us with development to help speed things up. Either way, the best way to keep in touch with the OpenPTC project is the discussion groups on news.scene.org. Join in the discussion today! coders.ptc for general discussion about PTC coders.ptc.announce for PTC related announcements coders.ptc.bugs to submit bug reports for PTC implementations coders.ptc.development for PTC development discussion Thanks to the kind folks at scene.org for providing us with this valuable resource! |  | .
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