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

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Well, Gluon has some real code and examples, but I agree the
visibility is not good. DrIDK posted some blogs about it, and it
existed as far back as the 2008 Akademy, at least with some demos.

But, there is still a long way between this and what Leinir is
proposing. So, let me try to help :) Please correct me if I am wrong!

Gluon can be a solution for several issues we found while trying to
use just Qt as the basis of our games. Think of it as a way for us to
get a more game oriented scenegraph, audio and input handling compared
with what the combo QGV/Phonon gives us. It also exposes physics. Many
games will be happy with just the Qt-provided services. But for those
that are not for one reason or another, the goal of Gluon is to help
us here.

What Gluon lacks is some games that exercise its libraries. It is a
problem that imo could be easily corrected if it was developed inside
playground. Maybe the lack of git is what is preventing this from
happening?

In the case of our games (take KGoldRunner for example), we could use
Gluon to get arguably better audio support, accelerated 2D display and
joystick input. Notice that I am not advocating this Ian (hehe, not
another port!!!), just giving an example of what it is!

But, from this to a fully fledged game development application as
Leinir is proposing there is a wide gap, of course. And I know he is
fully aware of this. I look at this idea with a great interest: I have
used authoring systems geared towards non-programmers for a long time,
mainly Macromedia (now Adobe) Director, and Hypercard before it. This
is something sorely lacking in the open source arena: a tool for
designers with some simple (probably Lua or Python based) scripting
environment. The difficult part in designing this is finding the right
compromise between exposing functionality and making it dead simple
for beginners. Such an environment can be made on top of Gluon, but it
can also leverage what we have on our existing libkdegames API,
including GGZ, and also Qt.

As for the sprint, I think that if one of the goals could be to help
us put Gluon into KDE 4.4 with at least one game using it . It has
been in development for some time, and maybe entering into release
mode would help get more people contributing ideas to it. Of course I
am not the author and I am not aware of DrIDK's plans, but count this
message as a vote of encouragement to bring Gluon to the light, so
more people can contribute with it. Then people could have more
options and choose to use its technology if needed, for example for
better sound output.

Best regards,
Mauricio Piacentini