The SDL interface

[Mathias Broxvall <matbr at ida dot liu dot se>]

Hi, I have been looking a little at how to do things for the SDL
interface. As I see it we need a quite generall framework for the handling
of buttons/panels/screens/dialogs etc. This needs to be well done
especially if we want the client to be as general as discussed before.
We cannot simply make a hardcoded eventloop:

loop {
  handle events
  draw map
  draw units
  draw buttons
}

Therefore I suggest that we look at some of the extra SDL libraries for
game GUI's. IMHO it is especially important that it is a *Game* user
interface. That is, we don't want standard qt/gtk/motif/athena/... widgets
but rather want to specify the images for our buttons etc. ourselfs (from
the gamemodules!) and have non standard widgets and gadgets 
giving the game the same flavour and polish as "real" games.

One suggestion for a gui interface would be the library SDL_gui which seem
to be quite standard among SDL installations. (It's not an official SDL
library I think... correct?). The only disadvantage with this as I see it
would be that we have to do parts of the SDL interface in C++ and rely on
yet another library... but thats not to serious? (I dislike writing parts
of the SDL interface in C++ for the obvious reason - everything else is
pure C).

What do you think? Is this a reasonable approach for the SDL client?
Would this fit into your other design thoughts Stan?

Mathias Broxvall
matbr@ida.liu.se