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

[Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen]

On Wednesday 09 September 2009 16:38:33 Mauricio Piacentini wrote:
> 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?

  Gluon's development happens on Gitorious (http://gitorious.net/gluon/) and 
there's one game on there which is being developed, but a refactoring of 
certain main parts of Gluon is currently under way (as a direct result of 
developing this game) and as such it currently doesn't work. But, yeah, that's 
definitely helped push Gluon along, it was kind of hard when it was just DrIDK 
poking around himself :)

> 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!

  Absolutely - Gluon isn't aiming at replacing and fixing what obviously 
already works :) It's trying to provide what's missing for now :)

> 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.

  That's exactly the sort of thinking we need, there - make use of as much 
existing technology as possible to achieve the arguably very lofty goal set 
out in that blog post :) As for the compromise between ease of entry and 
power, that is really why i've been posting links for everybody who aren't 
already familiar with Unity3D to go and have a look at just what that tool can 
do.

> 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.

  DrIDK's plan is to have the libraries frozen and ready for use before the 
sprint, and to have codename Block (the game mentioned above) at least so 
ready that you can play it - not to have it completed, but to at least have 
the first level playable, and winnable/loseable :) And, from what i've seen of 
activity lately, it seems entirely doable :)

-- 
..Dan // Leinir..
http://leinir.dk/

                          Co-
                            existence
                          or no
                            existence

                          - Piet Hein