Re: [Adonthell-general] Adonthell French Meetic Report - GUI, SDL, Clanlib

[Kai Sterker]

On Fri, 3 Jan 2003 23:52:48 +0100 Alexandre Courbot wrote:

Hey, really nice to see some traffic on those lists again! :)


> > About the GUI, I don't think that clanGUI could be of that much
> > help, its a nice piece of code, but after all its build for
> > mouse-interaction and I don't think that it is really useable with a
> > gamepad or keyboard. And as long as a GUI shouldn't use a zillion
> > different widges its not that difficult to develop and own, which
> > might serve the purpose better than a generic one.
> 
> Problem is, the GUI is also supposed to be used for map-making tools
> and others. So it has to provide a minimum of stuff.

Well, why don't you use something like picogui (or some other gui) for
the editors then. It needs not be fancy, it just needs to work. For the
game itself we don't need that many features as far as a gui is
concerned and could stick to our own.


> Actually, having a GUI that we could map on top of our current layer
> would be great. But unfortunately, it seems not to be an option. And
> hacking an already-existing GUI that is too much dependant of a
> library is not necessarily better than writing one from scratch, I
> fear.

Depends how well it is designed, I guess ;). And if it is a cool gui, it
might well be worth the effort. (*remembers porting dlgedit from MFC to
GTK+; now that was fun!*)
 

> The issue is, I think it'd be better to concentrate the efforts more
> on actual game development and less on the alternative aspects - for
> this we can use what already exist. Kinda utopic I know, but I'd like
> 0.4 to be released, say, before 2005! ;)

Hm. I never felt that the programming was the problem (unless we talk
items), but more the artwork and writing. At least for v0.3 the code was
ready long before the gfx and dialogues were. But of course, the faster
the code gets done, the sooner writers and artists have to start working
hard to catch up with the programmers :).


As far as the decision for one GUI or another is concerned: I installed
Clanlib 6.something a while ago, and it doesn't look bad to me. It's not
that much larger than SDL when stripped of debugging information. And as
far as I've seen, it supports other platforms than Linux and Windows
too, doesn't it.


Oh, and while we're talking about coding: I guess I could work with
David on the character/item/inventory complex. One doing the low-level
stuff, the other taking care of an editor. I wanted to finish dlgedit
first, but as it is in a usable state again, it can wait. Only problem
is, I won't have too much time this month, as I also have exams in a
couple of weeks.

Kai