Re: GTK+ Game Development

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com> writes:

> On Tue, 2004-11-16 at 20:23 -0500, Timothy Mann wrote:
>> Hey Everyone,
>>  I was wondering what features GTK+ offered for simple desktop game
>> developers to much larger projects? Is Glib a better alternative? I have
>> done most of my projects previously with SDL, are there any major
>> advantages to using GTK+? Thank you for your time.
>
> Stick with SDL.  GTK+ is not designed for making games.  Unless you are
> making a very simplistic "desktop" style game (like Solitaire), SDL,
> OpenAL, and OpenGL are definitely the tools you are best off with.

That's not completely true. Speaking as someone who has implemented
several games with the Gnome stack, there are some real benefits.
Gnome Canvas operates at a much higher level than most game libraries
seem to provide (I've done game programming with Allegro in the past),
managing screen updates and stacking automatically. Configuration
management is very easy with GConf. And you get that special desktop
look and integration for free.

But of course, you miss portability and there also some annoyances.

As I see it, the biggest benefit GTK+ can provide is the availability
of a super-powerful, modern GUI toolkit (surprise, surprise) which can
potentially be a big boon in a strategy game.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.aau.dk/~olau/