Re: [TuxKart-devel] Some notes

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

Ricardo Cruz <ri...@ae...> writes:

> Em Segunda, 2 de Agosto de 2004 03:00, o James Gregory escreveu:
>> As for the issues with not using SDL:
>>
>> 1. No fullscreen mode
>  --fullscreen is working fine here. Does it have problems in some systems?
>
>  About the no possibility of using a size different than screen size, Steve 
> said there shouldn't be any performance decrease. And I haven't noticed any 
> either.

The latest CVS already uses SDL, so fullscreen is working fine there.
Without use of SDL all plib-pw could do was open a borderless window
at the size of your desktop, which naturally would result in a
resolution a lot larger then needed, not something you want for lower
end hardware.

>> 2. GUI-wise being limited to using what plib provides
>  I believe it is as rich as ClanLib GUI module and other GUI libraries.

ClanLibs GUI is much like plibs GUI something that I would call a
'business-gui', ie. provides all the widgets that you get from a
normal gui toolkit, but little to no stuff that you would need for
games (animated jumping letters, joystick controll, etc.). Its ok if
you do a Transport Tycoon/SimCity type of game and just need a bit
theming, but do any good for arcade games.

>  But even if we decide to do a custom GUI code, can't we use its
> image and text capabilities?

Neverball-GUI already provides all we need and doesn't depend on
anything but SDL_image and SDL_ttf, which should be pretty much
widespread since a whole lot of games use them.

>  About physfs, isn't that a physics library? If yes, wasn't it
> decided that it would be better to make a home made physics.

ODE was the physic library, physfs is a file loading library that does
things like transparently 'mounting' zip files as directories and
such.

>  Well, those people already knew TuxKart used Plib and there was no
> opposition regarding that. Besides, Plib is pretty small and I guess
> they already had time to learn, at least, the basics.

This whole thing isn't about plib vs. SDL, we for sure will still use
plib for all the scene-graph stuff and model loading stuff, its just
that having support for TTF loading, pngs, jpegs and a real fullscreen
mode would be extremly helpfull.

>> 5. Everyone who ever compiles games already has SDL, SDL_image etc in
>> any case
>>
>  Why not linking to Allegro, ClanLib - you name it - as well.
>  "Everyone who ever compiles games already" have those. ;D

Compared to SDL, Allegro and ClanLib are far less widespread and at
least ClanLib also has the tendency to break the API every once in a
while, so you not only have to have it installed, but also the right
version. Beside that SDL_* does things we need, ClanLib and Allegro
don't.

Last not least I don't consider dependencies a bad thing, if some
library does what you need, then use it. The solution to the
dependency problem are binaries (static or with .so's included), no
recoding the wheel over and over again just to keep the dependencies
low.

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