As an alternative to the glSwapBuffers() command it is desirable to maintain a frame buffer for an active window. This could avoid complete rerendering on simple frame redrawing. The Blit function has to be wrapped to display off-screen renderings. This will also be useful to maintaind a second frame buffer for fast screen refresh.
add capabilities for the user to place a frame to a different time
add the capabilities to display icons in place of the animation
thread the process to make it run more smoothly (ie, thead the plays so that the screen and controls are occasionally updated everything is set up correctly to do so through vuThread. currently, the limiting factor is that you will get asynchronous XLib errors if you try to do this. There needs to be some sort of locking (which wxwindows has to use) before this will work properely. This will have to use XInitThreads () and XLockDisplay, etc... It works without this, but it'd work better with it.
add better file type to read from for animation (like avi's or mpegs... ppm is just too large for big animations and too slow for high frame rates.). 300 by 500 is about the largest we can reasonably get on a fast machine with the PPM method... The I/O is just too slow for much larger sets.
change the method of instanstiation to something that is consistent with the lighter.
Find some way to add the ios::nocreate flag or some equivalent to this code so that we have similar behaviour in IRIX as we do Linux or Windows.
add more suitable movie type files.
add the ability to interpret from preloaded memory buffers (so async file reads can occur and other stuff can happen before then without multiple threads).