Multiple screens ...

[James [Wez] Weatherall]

On 14 Aug 1998, Kevin Davidson wrote:

> ecloud> This idea does not mix well with VNC; you would bloat it with all this
> ecloud> high-level stuff.  The idea is to keep it simple.  But if you want
> ecloud> 3D remotely the choices are plain old X or VRML (or perhaps others
> ecloud> I don't know about).    
> 
>  I'm actually only half serious. It's certainly not a must-have, but
>  it would be pretty cool. (Not that VNC isn't cool already!)
> 
>  I don't know enough about the VNC protocol to say whether it would be
>  easy to shove some packets across labelled as `opengl', rather than
>  the normal rectangular updates. Is the protocol extensible in this
>  way ?

You could add a new 'OpenGLUpdate' message to the protocol if you wanted
to.  This would obviously clash with any new messages added to the base
VNC system, though, so in that sense, VNC isn't extensible in this way.
It might be useful to add a rfbNonStandard message or something along
those lines, to allow development along these lines, without conflicting
with potential future protocol updates.

>  OpenGL API in Win32 and stop using X then it will no longer be able
>  to display on a remote screen - unless VNC supports this.

If your application uses standard PAINT messages to re-render the OpenGL
section then VNC will happily remote the resulting on-screen data, I
think.  If you have the OpenGL screen-savers set up to run on NT then they
get remoted by WinVNC, so I see no reason why this shouldn't generally be
true for OpenGL apps.  I'm not sure what the performance hit would be -
I'm assuming you could put the 3D card in the Win32 server-side machine.

Cheers,

James "Wez" Weatherall
--
Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory, Cambridge, UK.
Tel : Work - 343000


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