
These very impressive demos compiled for BeOS show different aspects and features of the Anti-Grain Geometry C++ rendering engine by Maxim Shemanarev. For much more information on AGG, please visit the website at

<http://antigrain.com>


Notes on this "port"

The AGG library itself is very portable and no changes were necessary in order to compile it (I just added Makefile.in.BeOS). It is ready to integrate into any BeOS project with no other dependencies (besides on freetype if you want to use the new font rendering features). I suggest linking statically, as long as the AGG API is not frozen. Building a shared library is no problem though, just change the linking flags in Makefile.in.BeOS (LIB = ...).

In order to port the examples to BeOS, I have had to implement a class called platform_support in terms of the BeOS API. Every demo is based on this class and further implements some hook functions to become interactive. As many examples don't use the native framebuffer format, additional colorspace conversions slow down the rendering speed. In your own applications, you can of course use any colorspace you want. If you care to look at my implemetation of platform_support, it wouldn't be unlikely that you find some way of improving it. Please don't hesitate to contact me about it (see below).

The demo svg_test needs to be started from Terminal with a path to an SVG file you want it to display. It needs libexpat.so in your lib folder. All other demos can now be launched via Tracker.


The code for the "examples" shows the usage of different aspects of the core library and is easy to follow. AGG makes heavy use of templates in order to construct so called rendering pipelines. These pipelines are usually made up of some type of vertex source, additional converters, transformations and finally rasterizers/renderers. AGG also features some advanced image filtering and transformations. Please refer to the tutorials and also the webside to get started. There is also a very nice mailing list on AGG, with many helpful people and very good signal/noise ratio.

With AGG, you hold in your hands a very powerful collection of nicely designed and fast code to write feature rich applications. The license is very free too. Have great fun!

-Stephan Aßmus, maintaining the BeOS port

P.S. If you have questions specifically about my port, I can be reached at
<superstippi@gmx.de>. If you have questions about AGG, I am only starting to get familiar with it myself, so I wouldn't be of much help. Please use the AGG website as a resource and the great mailing list (which you probably find a link to on said site).

P.P.S. The most current version of the code can be obtained using CVS on SourceForge <http://sourceforge.net/projects/vector-agg/>. The code in this archive is from May 11th 2005. All the BeOS specific stuff is in CVS too.


