Wish List for Next Release

Windows

• Review why in VS2012 there is always a step (note) about needing to build Cing when running a sample (even if it is already built)
• Static linking for dependencies.
• VS property sheets should be split in 2 to allow different relative paths for user projects and cing examples (due to the CING_HOME user macro)

Mac

Platform Independent

• Log improvements: categories to filter output, console like output, Success/Error logs to simplify viewing them. HTML log?
• Review and potentially integrate XML class improvements from Alc
• Integrate https://code.google.com/p/googletest/ for unit testing
• Improve Documentation: use processing system? use http://sphinx-doc.org/? doxygen? other?
• Possibility to enable/disable ImageResource class (to have pre-created images to make runtime faster).
• Re-factor drawing API: even the current opencv based methods in the Image class have many lines of code that could be shared/refactored across all drawing methods. This is also pending on the decision of which 2D Render engine use in the future: Skia, Cairo, QT, other? ** Reference: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=70171
• Deep header file clean up to support advanced users who just want to include what they use (as opposed to just Cing.h) and speed up build process
• setActiveSceneManager: processing style to set the active scene manager so that for example resources created are created under this scene manager, etc. Instead of passing it as a parameter.
• Image buffer container as shared pointer: this has pros and cons, but it's mostly useful and safer. Fix Image::clone accordingly when done.
• Review usage of Ogre::Image inside of Cing::Image. Looks like we might remove it and just use it to load image from file. The use our internal image buffer (shared pointer) with the Ogre::PixelUtil to do all operations we need.
• Image format conversion helpers. Now the operator = does a weak copy so no conversion is done. Creaty fast ways to for example if you have a gray image and a color image and you assign one to the other, the pixel format is converted in the process, so it is faster than calling Image::toGray or Image::toColor that creates new memory to do the conversion in the same Image object.