Irrlicht Engine

What I meant by abstract is that ITexture implementations keep an IImage private member which contains a copy of all the texture data.

Ah OK, that's optional by now in trunk (and that one is related to some of the troubles, thought we got most sorted out by now and it works in 90% of the cases, we keep old solution for the 10% cases where old behavior is still needed).

And never mind the fact that ITexture::lock() is a dumb interface as texture transfers should be done in and out of GPU-side buffers (pixel pack and unpack), where one has control over GPU-CPU stalls.

Thats the way GPUs work since D3D10, you have a buffer which is a chunk of memory in VRAM/DMA/RAM, and you can simply bind it to (cast it into) any object such as vertex buffers, index buffer, pixel unpack, pixel pack, texture buffer object, transform feedback capture, uniform/constant buffer, atomic buffer, shader storage, indirect draw parameters, etc.

The only object which remains opaque in terms of backing memory is a Texture.

This reduces the need of Irrlicht API Abstraction Acrobatics which cause peformance hits everywhere unless you actually use one driver, reinterpret_cast<> everything into the related driver implementation type and play around with D3D or OpenGL object handles directly and implement everything by yourself anyway.

It's dumb to have an interface for the API which we use and we should have one for the API which we do currently not support? This thread is somehow drifting off.

The point I try to make with that list is - it won't help to switch to git now. As I don't expect it will suddenly cause people to work on the no-fun stuff.

From my point of view, what we don't have is a good communication, people don't really know what Irrlicht needs until you say it: more maintainers.

Git or not git, like I said, is not a must-have point, the problem is we should move forward in some way. You can't slow things down just because of some problems with coding.

And since you seems to be overwhelmed with some parts of the development, we should have ideas for other areas and that is what this topic is about.
I suggest we stop talking about coding stuffs since CuteAlien made it pretty clear in some previous posts. So if someone could help him, it would be great.

I keep insisting my point on better forum software.

@CuteAlien: you can consider using an external SMTP service and configure phpbb to use it.
Mailgun and many providers offer plenty of free emails, for example 10k each month: https://www.mailgun.com/pricing

@mant: I'm not a sysop. Current very simple setup is enough work over the year, I'm not having that many weekends...

Servers are the same as programming - you can set up new stuff rather fast, the real cost is maintaining stuff for several years - and SF despite all it's troubles worked for us for 15 years already. Not many free provider offering that kind of track-record (yeah, we are older than google...).

5 mins for registering mailgun and verify domain using DNS records
3 mins to configure SMTP in phpb3
Howcome that cost is too much for having mail notifications?
I think there are many people want to help but they won't waste time browsing every forums a day just to see new posts
(plus you need to remember a lot to know whether the post is a new one).

@mant: I got to admit I never had the idea that we can maybe configure phpbb3 to use a mailserver on another server to get sending mails working again in the forum (sorry, I really don't know much server-side stuff... I usually avoid it as long as nothing is broken too badly). I'll ask Yoran who helps me out with administration what he thinks about it (thought I'm also certain it will take me more than 8 minutes - like figuring out what/who a mailgun is and if that will open any new security troubles for us and what happens when the guy registering leaves the team and if it's possible for spammers to cause us costs by sending a million mails and similar stuff).

The forum keeps track of new posts for you. The icons are different color, and when you click the right part, it scrolls straight to new posts.

Yeah, there is also the "View unread posts" button, thought I'm not sure if it shows up in all board styles (it's there in IrrSubSilver style and the one I use every time). But being able to send mails again would certainly be a win.

OK, Yoran's feedback was that it sounds like a good idea, but not sure if it works. As SF tends to block _every_ outgoing port, so likely we can't access the external mail server. Will have to try.

It will work, because the mail is not coming from SF server, it sends a HTTP request to mailgun for mailing.

hendu wrote:The forum keeps track of new posts for you. The icons are different color, and when you click the right part, it scrolls straight to new posts.

Yeah it's hard to notice at first. Anyways browsing forums everyday seems tired. I'd love to have some mails in my inbox to have a glance at new posts.

Quick note...

There's also an RSS feed to the forum, in case you wish to receive notifications of new content.

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/forum/feed.php