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

[Nils Fohrbeck]

Hi everybody!

I am back at home and have only read all the adonthell mails (and other mails 
as well). Happy New Year to everybody! And Welcome Lunar Blade! It is great 
to have a new artist in the team! Over the Holidays Ben and I got together for 
a few hours and we had some rather interestin thoughts on the roolz! I 
think Ben wants to write them up :) and then we 'll present them. Now fresh to 
work, let us make the New Years resolution that 0.4 gets on the way come 
true, it would just be too cool! I really liked all the stuff Alex wrote about 
Clan Lib. It seems that it might be a way to speed up the development of 
adonthell. But then, what do I know about libraries (we will have to rely on 
the experts advice).

good luck on your finals everybody as well, Nils!

Am 03.01.2003 22:32:32, schrieb Alexandre Courbot <address@hidden>:

>As you might have noticed, I'm going to post a bit more on the list from
>now! ;) Not that our finals are finished (haven't started even!), but I
>spend two days at Joël's for university work, and we of course ended
>talking about Adonthell and how suck it was that we have no time yet to
>code on it. It's going to change soon, however! And anyway, the come of
>new developers and the happypenguin awards were too much - we gotta get
>back to Adonthell! So here is the report of what we discussed about.
>
>First, 0.4 is going to be a lot of work for everyone. We thought that it
>was very important to scale down the implementation time as much as
>possible so we get the engine running quickly. This implies, using the
>right tools and stopping reinventing the wheel all the time. This is
>very true for the GUI - making a GUI is a titan work, with geometry
>shit that is a pain to code, and there are plenty of them available. So
>at first we looked at some GUIs we could rip from other projects. Since
>we are very demanding(we need a complete GUI, with theming capabilities
>an so on), we only found two that fits our requirements:
>-Paragui (http://www.paragui.org)
>-Picogui (http://www.picogui.org)
>
>Unfortunately, both have drawbacks: Paragui is highly dependant on SDL,
>and therefore is inapt regarding our politic of having our own wrapper
>interface (which would require the GUI to have a backend interface).
>Paragui handles backends, but seems to be unable to share the screen
>with something else. Moreover, it is driven by a server/client
>architecture, which is too much for us. So after looking at these two
>candidates, we came to the conclusion that none is realistically
>hackable to fit into Adonthell :(
>
>It also came back to our minds that Clanlib has a great GUI componant,
>but that would also mean dropping our wrapping policy to make our client
>program completely dependant of Clanlib and unportable outside of it.
>Which still means supporting main platforms but forcing users to use
>Clanlib instead of another library.
>
>So it look like there is a choice to be made here: we could save lot of
>time not having to re-implement a GUI, and probably other stuff, if we
>decide to stick to a specific library instead of keeping our "all
>portable" approach. I'd have some regrets doing so, but considering the
>amount of work that would be saved, I'd like to open the discussion
>about it.
>
>Which library we would choose, is another problem. I'm starting being
>upset about SDL. No major updates sinces ages - and still none planed.
>Nothing new on the mailing list, which has become a helping list instead
>of a development one. Low performances under X/Linux, very poor hardware
>acceleration capabilities. In front of that, stands Clanlib which I'm
>re-examinating right now: very clean design, seems to be very well
>documented, still under active development(seen a 0.7 around!), OpenGL
>backend for Linux, great GUI, wrappers to audio mixers, ogg vorbis,
>network, that is, everything we need! The only I'm afraid of being the
>size of the beast.:) But still, it's really cool. Maybe Kenneth and Ingo
>could relativize what I'm saying (is it *that* cool?), or give their
>opinion about that. I'm not advocating in favour of any solution yet -
>but I wanted to highligh the problem, and the short and long term
>consequences of both choices on the project. Of course, this would only
>influence the client side of the game - that is, not that much. And
>right now, despite of our claims for portability and
>library-independance, we only support SDL and are now having troubles
>because of that. So in practise it's just like we were using directly
>SDL without our abstraction layer.
>
>So... Opinions? Suggestions?
>
>Alex.
>-- 
>http://www.gnurou.org
>
>
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