[XBoard-devel] Re: XBoard stuff

[Tim Mann]

That sounds like good progress.  Let's use the xboard-devel mailing list
for discussion -- assuming it works, that is.  Just to confirm that,
could each of you reply to me (not the list) if you get this message?

A few comments interspersed.

On Mon, 01 Dec 2003 10:48:51 -0600, "Dan Jenkins" <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi guys.
> 
> I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving weekend!
> 
> Just thought I'd  check up on how everyone was doing and toss around a few 
> ideas I had for how I'd like to try and start implementing an OpenGL front 
> end for XBoard.  I feel group communication on projects like this is 
> important to keep from stepping on each others toes too much. :)
> 
> First of all, I spent some time this weekend trying to get a better grasp of 
> the GNU autotools.  I'm still far from confident in my knowledge of them, 
> but I am reasonably sure I can add some stuff to conditionally link in the 
> GL libraries, and add the appropriate #defines to the config.h.  I found 
> some M4 macros to check for GL and GLU at the GNU Autoconf Macro archive.  
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/htmldoc/)  These seemed to work 
> pretty well on my Slackware system and are probably much more complete than 
> what I could write on my own.

Sounds good.

> Next, I thought about trying to move some of the Xaw code for drawing the 
> board into a separate file so that the xboard.c file is composed mainly of 
> stuff like Window creation and handling of window events, and so that it 
> might be easier to try and start defining a common GUI interface between 
> OpenGL and any other UIs.

That's good.  If you want, you could also pull out Unix-specific code
that isn't X related at all into a third file (assuming you find some
that can be pulled out fairly cleanly).  We'd been talking about that as
a step toward replacing Xaw with GTK+.

> Once I get to the stage of actually trying to plug my OpenGL code into 
> Xboard, I thought that initially, I could implement a command-line option to 
> enable GL mode.  I figured if I did that, it would be easier to keep from 
> messing up the original code too bad so that everyone else could still see 
> the board as it is now.

Doing it as a command-line option as the first step seems fine.

One thing to watch out for: the existing code has a weakness that some
things can be done only from the command line because they're tangled up
with program initialization -- in particular, resizing the window.  It
would be nice not to make initialization any harder to untangle, as
we'll want to make the window resizable at some point.

> If you have any thoughts/comments about any of the above, or if any of my 
> ideas will totally mess up stuff you are working on, let me know.  Also, if 
> you have any ideas of how we should design the front end code in a way that 
> we can support multiple UIs, I'd love to discuss them.

I think the interface between the chessboard proper (not including the
clocks, menu bar, text line, etc.) and the rest of the program is
already pretty narrow.  I think the idea you were talking about before,
of making that part into an object-like interface (struct containing
several function pointers) is a good direction to go.

> 
> _________________________________________________________________
> Groove on the latest from the hot new rock groups!  Get downloads, videos, 
> and more here.  http://special.msn.com/entertainment/wiredformusic.armx
> 


-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/