Re: Gnome Games will make 3D mandatory for 2.28

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Olav Vitters <olav bkor dhs org> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 06:21:48PM -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
>> This is not a proposal or RFC. This is what is happening; I am merely
>> make it abundantly clear well in advance of it being released to the
>> general public.
>>
>> Games which will require 3D for 2.28:
>>  * Gnometris
>>  * Lights Off (pending approval of Seed/GJS dependency during proposal period)
>>  * Same Gnome (pending approval of Seed/GJS dependency during proposal period)
>
> So I assume release team should announce some dependencies earlier if it
> appears to be a no brainer?

Well, Clutter 1.0 is already in so we're good there.

Regarding the JavaScript games, it seems that everyone agrees that
JavaScript is going in to Gnome 2.28. GJS seems to have the leg-up as
the Gnome-Shell preferred engine. As for which one, Robert Carr has
plans to make Seed and GJS run-time compatible (to the extent that the
underlying engines have implemented the ECMA specs and same features)
by the time the module proposal period opens. I was planning on
leaving the proposal up to him due to the requirement that the
proposal must be made by the module maintainer. Currently, ScriptCore
(as seen in gtkwebkit 1.1, Safari 4 beta, Chrome 2 beta) is about 2x
faster than Tracemonkey (as seen in Firefox 3.1 beta) on the Sunspider
benchmarks. It seems like allowing both as dependencies is the only
way to go forward and since they should be (mostly) run-time
compatible, it shouldn't matter, really.

The only thing that worries me is Seed/GJS's both depend on the
stability of GIR/GOI. But since Owen knows more about the status of
that than I do and seems comfortable with the timeline, I do not
foresee this really being an issue.


>> Whatever your opinion, remember: these are just games. Don't take this
>> announcement too seriously.
>
> I saw you commenting (blog IIRC) about this, this is existing code right
> that is now used as the only method (scrapping of 2D)? Or totally new
> code? Assume new for Lights Off and Same Gnome. Anyway, looking forward
> to the change.

Aisleriot is the only game that we are committing to maintaining the
old 2D engine on, for now. We're strapped for resources and the
thought of doubling our maintenance burden for every game that gets an
upgraded engine is not appealing.