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

[Alexandre Courbot]

> 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.

Right - see my other mail.

> 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 :).

That's a bit the chicken and egg problem. Having code that runs
motivates the artists, since they can enjoy they work in the game.
Getting artistic material motivates the coders, as they are curious to
see how cool their engine will look with such beautiful art. The problem
is, none did the first blow until then! ;)

> 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.

Right. My enthousiasm is tempered by other's reaction - as Ingo said,
it's much better design to keep your own framework. The GUI is the most
pressing problem to me. If we can just keep and improve the old one, and
if we can use, say, GTK for all our tools (embedding an Adonthell view
or maybe even writing a GTK backend to do rendering in a GTK window),
that'd be ok I think.

> 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.

Would be a good idea - moreover, having  a guide when they enter the
mess of Adonthell's code will certainly prevent newcomers to get
scared! ;) And the two of you won't be too much to get that huge task
done.

Alex.
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