New technologies (clutter, telepathy).

[Robert Ancell <robert ancell gmail com>]

Hi all,

GNOME games and new technologies (clutter, telepathy).  OK, so they're
not new at all :)

One of the intentional side-effects of porting games to Vala is the
code follows more modern conventions and is simpler to change.  So I
hope we can finally start integrating networking (telepathy) and bling
(Clutter) more effectively.

Some thoughts about using Clutter; Since the ported games have Model -
View classes we have a nice migration strategy for bringing in
Clutter.  The games can have a ViewCairo class (i.e. the current
behaviour) and a ViewClutter class (see how Chess does ViewCairo and
ViewOpenGL).  What I like about this:
- We can keep the games running on systems that might not have
reliable / fast Clutter support
- We have a very well defined task to implement these - great for
summer of code style programs
- The Cairo/GTK interface can (potentially) be accessible, where this
is harder to do in Clutter
- The Clutter class can be of a lower quality than the Cairo class and
we can build it up over time (choosing the default based on what we
think is better)
- Eventually I expect we can just drop the Cairo support when the
Clutter version is better in every way.

Thoughts?