Playing with IDEs

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb at cesmail.net
Tue Dec 25 16:21:03 EST 2007


Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> Jeffrey Kesselman wrote:
> 
>> Think VERY carefully about his.  Your opening up a world of potential
>> hurt for 2D game developers and similar kinds of apps.
> 
> I designed a few 2D arcade games myself and I've found that it
> only takes a minimal amount of thought to make them properly
> scale within a reasonable range or resolutions.
> 
> PC games had the requirement of supporting multiple resolutions
> since the MS-DOS era.  Today Cairo makes it super easy.
> 
> And even if a very peculiar 2D bitmap game couldn't be made
> to scale easily, this is not a good excuse for all the rest
> of the activities to lazily hardcode screen coordinates and
> font sizes instead of computing them based on their window size.
> 

Well ... let me put on my marketing hat for a bit here:

The current XO is designed to have a life of five years. Now if it only
takes a bright child a year or two to outgrow the *hardware* of the XO,
that means that the current XO will probably get handed down to a
younger child and *someone, not necessarily OLPC*, will have an
opportunity to produce a more advanced hardware platform for "graduates"
of the XO.

So I'm with Bernardo on this one -- unless OLPC is willing to rule out
being the provider of the "XO Plus" for older children, activity
developers should do nothing that rules out portability, growth paths,
agility, or use cases only a little bit removed from the original use
cases around which the XO was designed.

What I do think is a good idea is to specify a *minimum* screen size
which activities must support. I'd guess 1024x768 is a fair choice at
this point in time -- I don't see any reason why activity developers
should be forced to run on 800x600.



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