Re: Call For Articles

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Bert Peers wrote:
> 
> Steve Baker wrote:
> 
> > Bert Peers wrote:
> > > I've been thinking about an article on how to write a simple GUI
> > > for a game.  Motif, Qt, GTK is probably out of the question for
> > > most games, breaking the look-and-feel, or maybe even simply
> > For OpenGL, you can use my PLIB library which has a fairly
> > complete GUI (written using OpenGL for the rendering) that
> > can be rendered on top of the game screen.
> 
> Hehe, this sounds like a strategy for world domination : whenever
> anybody ponders the idea of explaining how to write your own GUI,
> you quickly point those would-be authors to PLIB ?... :^)

:-)

Rats!  You figured it out!

Well, I wrote PUI precisely so that OpenGL games could be written
without having to start off by writing GUI, Joystick, Audio, etc.
My Tux_AQFH game has only about 7000 lines of code - the remaining
15,000 being inside PLIB.

Perhaps I need to write a "Writing 3D games with PUI" HOWTO.

> Ok, seriously, I'm just addicted to GUI systems and have been
> browsing GTK, Qt etc, written some of my own GUIs, scriptable
> and all, and thought it would be nice to explain some of this.

More documentation is always a good thing.  I certainly don't
want to discourage you from passing on your valuable knowledge.

> Yeah, I've been thinking about building a GUI that delegates all
> rendering work using a bridge or whatever, but I'm not sure
> about performance and resource management yet.

Dunno about performance.  PLIB assumes it has to redraw the entire
GUI each time anything happens.  With 3D hardware, this is not too
costly - and it's generally necessary since 3D hardware is
double-buffered
and generally clears the screen for each iteration of the game.

In a 2D "framebuffer" oriented game, this "redraw everything"
strategy might be pretty costly compared to a smarter algorithm
that only redrew whatever changed. In that case, using PLIB's GUI
would be A Bad Thing.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)