CompuServe Messages

PMJI, Chuck, but here's an idea for a driver which would help at least do Slave Renders under Windows (in a window, no less!) without needing all that notification stuff (I read that and it was very interesting), and I think y'all should add it to the next release of the Inline Drivers: Basically, a VGA 80×50 TEXT-mode driver! This should be feasible since 3DS uses only monospaced fonts for its UI (at last I've found an advantage to that!). The driver would translate calls for text, horizontal and vertical lines (using the various box and line-draw characters available in the PC's default Code Page), and color changes, but ignore requests to draw individual dots, diagonal lines, etc. Of course, one could not model with 3DS in this mode, but for slave and command-line renders it should be wonderful! Even the red Rendering progress bar could be simulated by using characters 219 (solid block, "_") and 221 (left-half block, "|")! All in all, you should be able to do a passable imitation of the general 3DS UI with such a driver. There is even a way to use on-the-fly character redefinition to allow a graphic-looking smooth-moving mouse pointer (see the most recent versions of CompuShow GIF [and other] Viewer, CSHOWA ver. 8 or later, for an example of this, as well as PC-Tools Shell 7 or later), though I would happily settle for a simple inverted-attribute block mouse cursor, and I doubt I'd be alone in this. This shouldn't be hard to write, and I for one would be very happy to help you beta-test it. 🙂