[crossfire] clients

Mark Wedel mwedel at sonic.net
Mon Apr 6 00:29:06 CDT 2009


  Just another notes on clients:

  For the gtk-v2 client, having 3 different draw modes (pixmap, opengl, sdl) 
seems like overkill and is extra maintenance work.

  pixmap is no frills, but is always sure to be there, so should be kept.

  I don't think we need both opengl and sdl support.  I'd suggest SDL support 
gets removed at some point, and for best graphic support, go with opengl.

  I mostly say that because opengl is a much more powerful library.  While we 
may never use most of the features it has, even if we use just a few, having 
them there would be quite nice (main one that comes to mind to me immediately 
might be lighting support, but also things like real time rescaling, etc are nice).

  SDL would be a better choice if all the media aspects (sound, mouse, threads, 
etc) were written to use it.  But the only part that does is graphics, so a lot 
of what SDL might give us isn't really there.

  From a performance standpoint, if you're video driver has a opengl interface, 
it blows the doors off of SDL.  If it doesn't (and thus work is being done in 
software), performance is probably about the same.

  But if there are lots of folks out there using SDL and can't use opengl, or 
there are other good uses to keep SDL around, would be interested in hearing 
about it.




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