[OLPC-Games] [Fwd: Re: Howto connect GTK mouse events to pygame events]

[stas zytkiewicz]

On 5/29/07, Noah Kantrowitz <kantrn at rpi.edu> wrote:
> Jim Gettys wrote:
> > Please try this on for size.
> >
> > http://webcvs.cairographics.org/cairo-demo/svgspacewar/
> >
> >
> That doesn't actually seem to use any animations. All the movement is
> done with procedural generation. While this is nice, it is unrealistic
> to expect all games to be reducible to this kind of procedural drawing.
> The animation I would think stas is talking about is the filmstrip
> style. While I can certainly see an implementation of this in Cairo
> (pretty easy for that matter), I can't speak to speed comparisons.

While it's always interesting, especially amongst hackers, to try to
get something
to work because we can it's not always the best approach.
I just look for the best tool available on the XO to build edu-games
and that's SDL.
Cairo is great for static stuff and fancy scaling but any activity,
like schoolsplay,
that does animations while playing sound or music and also wants to
collect data about the users activity and send it to a SQL dbase will
grind to a halt.
At best it will constant run at 100% CPU. SDL is just better suited
for this kind of things.
I suggest to get SDL/pygame to play nice with Sugar and start porting
all the wonderful pygame stuff to the XO :-)

IMO there's always the GNU/Hurd pitfall.

> --Noah
> >
> > On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 12:18 -0400, Noah Kantrowitz wrote:
> >
> >> Thought perhaps you can answer this better than I.
> >>
> >> --Noah
> >> email message attachment (Re: [OLPC-Games] Howto connect GTK mouse
> >> events to pygame events)
> >>
> >>> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> >>> From: stas zytkiewicz <stas.zytkiewicz at gmail.com>
> >>> Reply-To: stas.zytkiewicz at gmail.com
> >>> To: Noah Kantrowitz <kantrn at rpi.edu>
> >>> Cc: Games for the OLPC <games at laptop.org>
> >>> Subject: Re: [OLPC-Games] Howto connect GTK mouse events to pygame
> >>> events
> >>> Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 11:01:42 +0200
> >>>
> >>> plain text document attachment (Re: [OLPC-Games] Howto connect GTK
> >>> mouse events to pygame events)
> >>> On 5/29/07, Noah Kantrowitz <kantrn at rpi.edu> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> The API is PyGame, not SDL. The proposed alternative is to re-implement
> >>>> the PyGame API using Cairo. This would take care of integrating things
> >>>> like Pango and SVG rendering, which SDL lacks natively (and so does
> >>>> PyGame). The other reason this might be a better option is that OLPC is
> >>>> already committing to making Cairo run as as fast/effectively as it can
> >>>> on the XO hardware. Is it really wise to divide our efforts?
> >>>>
> >>> They are two different beasts, Cairo is great for SVG but horrible for anything
> >>> animated. SDL is great for animations but lacks scaling.
> >>> IMHO scaling and animation, especially on slower hardware, doesn't get along.
> >>> I have 5 years of online discussion with Bruno, author of Gcompris, about
> >>> the pro and cons of SDL (childsplay/schoolsplay) and Cairo (Gcompris).
> >>> The conclusion was that they both have advantages and disadvantages but
> >>> that combining the two don't result in a better end result.
> >>> Cairo is suitable for static activities while SDL, with it's low overhead,
> >>> is good for dynamic stuff.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> I'm not
> >>>> saying this is obviously the way to go, but it should really be answered
> >>>> at some point soon.
> >>>>
> >>> We can wait forever for an agreement that perhaps is never reached, but in the
> >>> meantime the XO ships with SDL/pygame which takes not much space so I
> >>> don't see why we shouldn't use it.
> >>>
> >>> Stas
> >>>
> >>>
>
>
>
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>
>


-- 
A collection of educational activities for schools
http://www.schoolsplay.org