Re: Newbie Q: What to use ...

[Jan-Marek Glogowski <glogow fbihome de>]

Hi

>From my first impression I think you can simply use a GtkDrawingArea and
GdkPixmap(s).

Look at GDK Docs -> Drawing Primitives, if you want to move from X to GDK.

> 1) Stick with Xlib primitives for displaying ants ? OK, but I can't see
> which kind of widget that will allow
>     me to use XLib drawing primitives on it, or how to somehow extract
> an XWindow from a widget

GDK Docs -> X Window System Interaction

GDK_DRAWABLE_XID( any GdkDrawable )

e.g. GTK_WIDGET( my_gtk_drawing_area )->window

I think this would be the fastest, if you want to stick with your current
X functions.

> 2) Use Gnome canvas ? Might be fine for the debugger, but isn't it much
> slower than XLib for the main
>     battlefield view ?

It should be fast enought, but I have no experience.

BTW: GnomeCanvas doesn't depend on Gnome - people tend to miss that.

As long as you don't have [moving] objects (like sprites), you want to
handle like GtkObjects (signals, ...), GnomeCanvas may be overkill.

> 3) Use GDK primitives ? But I need to be able to control the color of
> the ants directly. Can I somehow
>     set the drawing foreground color in RGB directly ? Seems to me that
> GDK was made for drawing
>     widgets, not much more.

Any drawing is done using GDK Graphics Contexts (GdkGC)

gdk_gc_set_foreground( GdkGC, GdkColor ), with

struct GdkColor {
  guint32 pixel;
  guint16 red;
  guint16 green;
  guint16 blue;
};

Simply create some GC with you required colors after widget realization,
if you just need some, and free them at unrealization.

> 4) Use GDKRGB ? I can see how to use that for displaying a static image
> :) But I also need to be able
>     to manipulate individual pixels, or rectangles in the image
> dynamically, and preferably fast :)

No - you have a dynamic picture (GDK docs): "GdkRGB is a low-level module
which renders RGB, grayscale, and indexed colormap images to a
GdkDrawable."

How do you want to handle window resize?

Do you want to support scrolling a larger image?

HTH

Jan-Marek