[gnome-love] Games programming with GNOME and related technologies

[Matthew Walton <mxw00u cs nott ac uk>]

I've got various ideas floating around that might finally lead to me 
being able to do what I've been wanting to do and write an (albeit 
fairly basic) RPG in the style of Baldur's Gate or Secret of Mana. Now, 
I'd obviously like to do this on Linux and related OSes, and I would 
definitely like to be able to do it with GTK+ and probably GNOME as the 
base GUI provider for the options dialogs, windows and so forth - mostly 
because I already know a reasonable amount about how to use it. 
Everything I need to know, in fact, apart from some of the GNOME 
integration technologies I'll be needing, libxml (which I'd like to use 
for the datafiles) and most crucially some kind of suitable high-speed 
2D graphics engine to actually draw the game action. I know of a couple 
of things that provide 2D APIs suitable for gaming - SDL, ClanLib, 
Crystal Space to name but three - but can I realistically use any of 
these with GNOME?

Actually, what I'd really like to do is use Crystal Space's 3D engine, 
but I guess I'd have to go away from GNOME to do that properly. I'm not 
keen on writing the graphics engine from scratch using GtkGLArea!

So, can anyone point me at some suitable projects and/or resources for 
that kind of thing? I'm thinking 2D to start with at least, but that may 
change if I can stop my hardware-accelerated graphics from jerking 
(you'd think a Voodoo4 would be fine, but oh no...) and if I can gather 
up the enthusiasm.

Thanks in advance.

--
Matthew Walton
matthew alledora co uk

Miri it is whil Linux ilast