[Weekly report] Week 1: Nibbles port to Clutter

[Guillaume Beland <guillaume beland gmail com>]

GSoC coding kicked off last week and I didn’t spent the week with my
arm crossed. First off, I created a small wiki page[1] including a
TODO/Progress chart and how to get your hands on the code I’m writing.
It’s a good place to see where I am at with my progress.

So where am I exactly after a week of coding? Okay, I’ll be honest and
admit I’ve been coding for a little more than a week. As you can
notice on the wiki page, I managed to re implement the canvas with
Clutter where the game take place. This part was quite simple and
straight forward. Next step was being able to load levels on the new
board. I studied and tried  multiple approach to implement and draw
levels but I’ve stopped with something similar to what was previously
in place but more modular and of course, making good use of clutter.

I also started my work on porting each worms to clutter. After giving
it more thought I decided to differ a little from what was planed in
my initial proposal. My initial proposal suggested implicitly to
create new theme for each worm and process a lot of useless and greedy
animation on each worms as they move. With my new approach casual
Nibbles player won’t even notice that worm have changed. Using a
custom ClutterTexture to fill each actor of the worm with a repeating
texture. The result is promising as you can see on these early
screenshots.

On the first screenshot[2] you can see the current version of Nibbles,
and on the second[3], the early Clutter version.

My goal for the first half of the summer is to literally clone the
current version of Nibbles to Clutter. That’s in the second half of
the summer that I’ll make things shine and add animations. As you can
see on these previous screenshots I believe I’m off with a good start
!


Here's my git-shortlog: (full log available here[4])

Guillaume Beland (10):
      Initial commit including the work I did over the past 2 weeks
      Added new files to the build and updated main.c
      Forgot about that makefile, added the new svg
      Loading pixmaps in main.c
      First tentative to implement worm with clutter
      Using g_object_set_property instead of ClutterScript to set special actor
      Removed unused code for loading pixmaps in board.c
      Various work on worm-clutter.c
      Some minor work on worm-clutter
      Some work on resizing worm & creating/displaying them properly


[1]http://live.gnome.org/GuillaumeBeland/NibblesClutter
[2]http://damino.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/gnibbles.png
[3]http://damino.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/gnibbles-clutter.png
[4]http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-games/log/?h=gnibbles-clutter

Guillaume Béland