[Gambas-devel] bitBlt'ing and fast animation

[Rob]

On Monday 20 December 2004 17:13, machoamerica wrote:
> now i've got a friend with a ~9 year old son who i'd like to
> teach game programming to using free software.  gambas looks
> great, but i'm noticing there seems to be a lack of a canvas
> part that can be bitBlt'ed to, like in VB.  is this the case,
> or am i missing something?

Well, you can Draw.Picture onto a DrawingArea and some of us have 
done some passable games that way, but for faster animation you 
should probably look into the SDL graphics component Laurent has 
been working on lately.  It won't be in 1.0 officially but I'm 
sure it should show up in the 1.1 series for inclusion in 1.2.

As for adding support for QCanvas, I would imagine you could 
implement it as sort of a clone of DrawingArea, but subclassing 
QCanvas instead of QWidget.  However, QCanvas looks like it'd be 
rather higher level than you would want, since it has all kinds 
of helper classes like QCanvasView (needed for the actual 
onscreen representation), QCanvasSprite and QCanvasText etc. all 
of which you would need to wrap separately, and all these would 
have to go into gb.qt.ext since I'm sure there's no direct Gtk 
equivalent.

Nonetheless, it should probably happen sooner or later.  QCanvas 
is ridiculously powerful and could be amazing for beginning game 
programmers if properly wrapped (what with its sprites, 
collision detection and even automatic animation of child 
objects.)

Rob