Re: New technologies (clutter, telepathy).

["Thomas H.P. Andersen" <phomes gmail com>]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 14:36, Robert Ancell <robert ancell gmail com> wrote:
> 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?

In the glines port I took the same approach. It is fairly easy to do
but of course it doubles the testing effort and adds more code.

- thomas