[xinf] exp samples

[daniel fischer]

Hi Claude,

welcome, and thanks for the praise ;)

claudedelannoy at free.fr (on Sat, 24 Mar 2007 02:24:23 +0100):

  > Since how long are you working on xinf ?

nearly a year now, although with varying degrees of intensity.

  > Did you start from scratch ?

yes. obviously i already had some experiences with gui toolkits, javascript, flash (although surprisingly little of flash) and the like, and the xinferno protocol is based on an old "research" project of mine ( http://iterative.org/strive/ ).

  > Have you been inspired from another app(s) ?

strive always seemed to me to be a mix of postscript, svg and the X Window System protocol (and probably others, too), but without all the fuzz :) You can probably also say i've been inspired by the "clean slate" approach of the BeOS APIs (i've been using BeOS from 96 or 97 until well after its premature death).

Surely i want to unite best of all worlds. Although with the experimental xinf.ul widgets i'm often going intuitive routes, the basic idea is to use "accepted approaches", so people feel at home quickly.

  > I have read especially the event and the graphics renderer sources, and it's
  > verry close from the flash action script design. In fact, I would like to know
  > how you "reversed" or found all these mecanism (for instance I have looked in
  > the tamarin project to know if they give the event system, but of course it's
  > not given with).

hm, i dont really understand what you are pointing at-- in principle, most existing object-oriented toolkits are rather similar. While not trying to mimick the flash API(s) too closely, of course the flash crowd is a primary target group for xinf, and i want to make it easy for them to switch :) There was no "hard" reverse-engineering of anything involved; in a way, i've been wanting to do something like this for "ever", so the whole process has been building up for about twenty years now ;)

  > I'm verry interrested to use xinf (for a 2d game), but actualy I discovered haxe
  > language a few days ago. I'm interrested to know if the the picking system is
  > already as precise as the flash picking system is, espacially for the shapes
  > (with bezier path
  > and stroke ) ? I ask the question because I saw the old xinferno sample, and we
  > can't click on the shapes or on the bezier curves.

No, it isnt- not in xinfinity at least, where it's (currently) only based on the bounding box of objects. In flash, it should be just the same as with normal flash content. Surely xinfinty will need more precise picking one day.. there should be existing algorithms around (finding if a point is enclosed within a potentially complex polygon) that we could integrate at the right point.. you're of course very welcome to work on this, and i'll gladly be of help integrating. It's not too much of a priority for me, currently.

BTW, there is an alternative (older) picking system in xinfinity that uses the GL "select buffer", that should be very precise. GL select buffers are not implemented for the linux opensource driver of my ati card, and that was the main reason for introducing the "GLObject layer" in inity. Also, it seems to be usually not hardware-accellerated even if it works, and most GL gurus seem to recommend against using it for varying reasons..

  > I was writting the event system for my game engine when I discovered
  > xinf/haxe/neko,
  > so at first I tried to translate your event system in C++, but it's a little bit
  > difficult because of the templates and functions management. So may be I will
  > integrate nekovm and xinf/haxe in my game engine if it's too long to be
  > translated in C++.

interesting, good luck! when designing the event system, i was hoping that it could be easily bound to C/C++ with kinda dynamic objects, because the actual event type is just a string... i haven't tried this yet though...

  > Have you an irc channel ?

kinda. i hang around #xinf on freenode from time to time. probably more if actually people (other than mark13 and tomb) turn up there. Currently, i have no permanent internet connection, so my irc usage will neccessarily be sparse. #osflash, also on freenode, might be of interest too.

  > Thanks, and great job !

thanks again.. i hope that now that we're *really* getting to some 0.1 (i'm about to have a debug session for zjnues gl problem :), more people will start attempts at actually using the baby..

  > ps: sorry for my "all you base are belong to us" english , I'm french ;)

dont worry about it! all our english are belong to the people! (i guess the native speakers will have to live with us spoiling their beautiful language for the benefit of not having to learn anything new :)

-dan

-- 
http://0xDF.com/
http://iterative.org/