Re: [Chicken-users] cross-platform gui toolkit

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> On 2/8/07, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
> > There are at least 3 camps:
> >
> > - put OpenGL windows on screen, no widgets.  For game developers who
> > don't want a bunch of extraneous stuff in their way.  Not much to
> > discuss about requirements here.  We've got 3 people working on it, and
> > we all know what we're doing well enough.  We welcome anyone who
> > actually wants to cut code.
>
> Good.  I plan to use it then.  But is there a feature list, stuff that
> you need to add?

I'm not big on frontloaded discussions.  I am big on looking at what 
work people have already done, and I haven't finished that exercise yet.

>   It still seems to me that the current opengl egg +
> glut egg does quite a bit already, but maybe not enough for text
> rendering (which I have not investigated yet).  

Glut is an ancient, decrepit, not open source, not modifiable toolkit 
that must die.  There is of course FreeGlut that attempts to remedy that 
problem, but its development didn't look very active.  I don't think we 
should chase it.  I think we should mostly write our own Scheme code.  
We'll get more people willing to expand various capabilities if we're 
actually using the language the Scheme developers want to be using.

> And you don't want to
> change the existing opengl egg's API, right?  (So that code I write
> now will still run on future ones?)

No promises.  I'm not into gratuitous change for its own sake, but I 
haven't looked at that egg's design yet, and I know it doesn't support 
OpenGL 2.0 or the various OpenGL ESes.

> Now that Vista has arrived (and people have had Mac OS X
> envy for years already), the existing ubiquitous grey widgets are
> going to be perceived the same way TK is now, in a year or so.  I'm
> not going to start out with slick appearance being the #1 goal, the
> way a game developer would; but if we make sure it's possible, then 

Crazy Eddie's GUI System 
http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page is worth looking at in 
this regard.  It is a C++ toolkit, skinnable, MIT licensed, and has 
survived as the preferred GUI of the Ogre3D engine.  Ogre3D ain't small 
potatoes.  This means CEGUI has community resources that most open 
source projects lack.  When I say "look at it," I mean for design 
inspiration, since it's a successful system.  I think C++ wrapping 
projects are currently hard in Chicken, so I've been leery of chasing 
anyone's C++ development.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every