Re: XF86 and full-screen graphical console apps

[Magnus Norddahl <mbn@dark.x.dtu.dk>]

Quoting Johnny Taporg (taporg@yahoo.com):

> Oh, this reminds me.  Have you considered how GGI can
> be beneficial to ClanLib?  The two libraries are 
> hardly in competition... GGI is a unix-based graphics
> lib, while ClanLib is an object-oriented, 
> cross-platform game SDK.  Using GGI for the Linux side,
> the two libraries could complement each other very
> well.

At a time, I did plan GGI support, but when I finally took a look on it,
they where in the middle of a rewrite of their libggi2d + some problems with
the configure scripts. Because of that, I decided to wait until GGI gets
more mature.

> The multi-target ability of GGI would solve the ClanLib
> problem of manually having to select the display target
> at startup.  Plus, you'd get XSHM support for free.

I'm currently rewriting the X implementation to use PTC, which also gives me
XShm and DGA support.

About selecting display target:

ClanLib has been rewritten in a way, so it at run time can detect which
display implementations are available, and pick the best one. Or said with
other words: ClanLib should be able to compile without requiring that any of
its targets are available. This has two advantages:

  * libclanlib.so can be upgraded with new implementations without having to
    recompile all the games that uses it.

  * There's no need to download special libraries to run a ClanLib game or
    compile ClanLib.

Unfortantly, there is a fatal bug in glibc's dynamic linker: dlsym() simply
doesn't work with C++ libraries. :-(

Because of that, ClanLib's startup sequency is not like it is intented to
be...

--
Magnus Norddahl
ClanSoft