Re: [Chicken-users] cross-platform gui toolkit

[Peter Keller]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 12:12:44PM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> For clarity: Thu, John, and myself are not working on the kind of GUI 
> toolkit you're talking about.  We're not doing widgets.  We're just 
> putting OpenGL windows up on a screen, so that game developers can get 
> started with something productive.  We're not going to try to make 
> events invisible to the programmer.  We will facilitate a developer who 
> wants his own control over event loops, callbacks, and other event 
> passing mechanisms.  Game developers usually hate it when the toolkit 
> gets in the way of how they want to do the event handling stuff.

So how is the SDL and OpenGL egg not sufficient for this? I've coded
plenty of graphics programs (in C) with those two alone. Most games have
some handwritten "windowing system" in them anyway--and wouldn't have
it any other way. SDL provides plenty of fine granularity for things
like keyboard/mouse events and the programmer has their own event loop.

Unless I'm mistaken in understanding what you're trying to do, I think
you're trying to solve a problem that isn't there.

The SDL APIs (graphics, mixer, tiff, etc) are plenty good for serious
games.  In looking through the eggs, I'd add SDL-mixer and libpng to
the pile, port the OpenGL egg to use OpenGL 1.5 at least, add an OpenGL
Shader egg, and then there'd be *plenty* of goodies to write good games
(and their level editors).

If you want more toolkit-like junk, then write a nice asset management
library since that is stuff a programmer usually just wants to have
and doesn't like having to write.

Later,
-pete