Re: GnomeCanvasPixbuf -- Yay!

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"John R. Sheets" <dusk@ravendusk.org> writes:

> On Dec 01, 1999, Loban Amaan Rahman <loban@enigma.caltech.edu> wrote:
> > 
> > Well then, I did something I should have done a while ago - I installed
> > cvs. The first thing I did was checkout gdk-pixbuff, compile, and install
> > it. After changing all my GnomeCanvasImages to GnomeCanvasPixbufs, I am
> > happy to say EVERYTHING works perfectly now - even faster!
> > 
> > I hereby recommend anyone struggling with GnomeCanvasImage or just imlib
> > in general to convert to gdk-pixbuf and libart. It's not only faster and
> > more reliable, it's easier to implement too!
> 
> Yeah, I did that myself, last weekend, and was surprised at how easy it
> was.  
> 
> On a side note, one thing I did notice is that the aa Canvas is much
> *MUCH* faster over a networked X connection than the normal GDK Canvas.
> (on a 10 Mbps network, anyway).  I have a lot of little tiles on my
> Canvas (it's for a game), and the GDK Canvas rendered very slow and
> blocky (sometimes > 5 seconds for a 500x400 window), whereas the aa
> Canvas was consistently < 1 second.  Naturally on a local display, both
> are quite fast.

If you have a many copies of a small tile, then what you really need
is a GnomePixmapItem (would be specific to the non-aa) canvas,
that draws a server-side pixmap. That would be much faster over a network
link than even the aa canvas.

There is no such item now, but the need arises occasionally, so someone
should write one. (It should be pretty trivial.)

Regards,
                                        Owen