[Kde-games-devel] The Future of Game Development in KDE

[Ian Wadham]

On Wed, 9 Sep 2009 6:31:34 am Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen wrote:
> Right. It's that time where i tell you all what i've been pondering on for
> a while now, so here goes:
>
> http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1098-The-Future-of-Game-Development-in-
>KDE.html
>
> The writeup really says it all, so, go go go! :)
>
Sorry, but that link does not tell me very much at all about Gluon ... :-(

Also, I would challenge some of your basic assumptions.

Firstly, there *is* stuff around in Linux.  Pyglet www.pyglet.org is a
Python-based, cross-platform game-development system.  At a talk
given by its authors, I saw them develop a Space-Invaders-like game with
music, sounds and animation during the hour they were speaking.

Pyglet kills two birds with one stone by linking direct to binary libraries
that are commonly used for sound, graphics, etc. on whatever platform it
is on.  Thus it becomes cross-platform without having to take along a
whole slew of libraries and it cuts out a lot of interpretive overhead.

Then there is a 3D game-engine/composer in Blender that seems
quite sophisticated and has had a lot of recent work done on it.  I am just
now reading a book (with examples) about it.

Secondly, as the maintainer of three KDE Games, I don't find the
integration of sound and graphics into a game to be much of a
problem, compared to writing the game engine, for example.

With graphics KDE Games has a good scheme for themeing in
SVG worked out and libkdegames support for it.  Recently, two of 
the artists re-themed many of our games with Egyptian themes,
for the KDE 4.3 release.  AFAIK there were not too many code
changes required.

I recently did have to re-integrate the sounds in one of my games ---
not because the sounds had changed, but because I had re-written
the game-engine.  It only took about half a day to plug them in.

The hard part, in some games, is finding underlying KDE/Qt
graphics and sound libraries that can perform well enough to keep
up with the action.  For example, QGraphicsView has not been
fast enough in some situations and I spent much *more* than half
a day experimenting with Phonon to get it to play my sounds well.

Which brings me to my third point ...  Having survived at the bleeding
edge of our industry for many years, I have a well-developed sense
of hype and your blog at amarok.kde.org set all my antennae jangling.

No surprise then when I linked to http://gluon.tuxfamily.org/
and found very little.  Clicking on the Documents tab, I found just
good old "Lorem ipsum dolor" boilerplate.  Does Gluon have any
substance?  What does it actually do?  Why should I believe it is
"The Future of Game Development in KDE"?

The logos are nice and the oblique references to quarks and color
charge are fun, but not all that glitters is gold.

Cheers, Ian W.