Re: GNUstep for games

[Matt Rice]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 5:41 AM, Ivan Vučica <ivan@vucica.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Matt Rice <ratmice@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> FWIW, in the past i managed to get the OGRE engine running inside
>> NSOpenGLView in gnustep (although this required patching, initial
>> hacks should still be in the bug tracker)... it is possible that this
>> could be done with SDL as well, i'd be suprised if SDL didn't work
>> embedded into other toolkits anyways.  so not exactly an either or
>> situation.
>
>
> [I presume SDL 1.2. I'm unfamiliar with details of SDL 2.0.]
>
> SDL's primary use is precisely to get a window and read inputs. I'm not
> really sure I'd want to draw anything using SDL's drawing methods; the
> primary benefit of doing so is being able to things like
> SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=aalib, which is something I don't see as compelling enough.
>
> SDL is supposed to be the thing that provides you with an NSOpenGLView, not
> to draw into an NSOpenGLView. It's not an engine. OGRE is a full-fledged
> engine that happens to also be able to handle inputs and open windows.

ogre actually doesn't handle input without help,
in addition to gui widgets, the event handling for drag and drop
between gui and NSOpenGLView were the primary reasons for using
gnustep in this project...

> Its drawing methods are mostly a leftover from we-need-to-port-DOS-games era
> and not-everyone-has-a-3D-accelerator era.


Makes sense, i'm actually not familiar with SDL,

> And as far as I am familiar with SDL's architecture, hacking SDL to draw
> into surfaces not managed by SDL would be... nontrivial.

> Among other
> reasons, because of SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER, which lets you draw into an
> aalib-managed surface (and window) as easily as into a D3D-backed surface
> (and a win32 window).

this is much how OGRE works, with d3d, opengl, opengl es backends etc,
the usage of an externally created window must be done on a backend
specific basis, and it's opengl backend is capable of that,
 getting gnustep to hand over said window is another task entirely..