Here is a roundup of the changes to the guts of Factor's UI over time:
- When I started working on the C library interface, the SDL library was the first library I wrote bindings for. I developed a few demos which rendered geometric shapes directly to the frame buffer.
- The first implementation of the graphical listener used the SDL_gfx library to render text. Later on I developed a complete SDL_gfx binding and with it developed a number of small graphics demos.
- I started work on the code which would become the UI, and implemented an SDL_ttf binding since I wanted decent-looking text rendering -- SDL_gfx only offered a single built-in 8x8 font.
- The SDL/SDL_gfx/SDL_ttf combo served as the backend for the UI for a long time.
- OpenGL bindings were contributed. Fed up with the low performance and limited features of SDL_gfx, I switched over to OpenGL rendering in Factor 0.79. I also rewrote the code calling SDL_ttf to use FreeType instead. SDL_ttf is a wrapper around FreeType.
- Now in Factor 0.81, I'm replacing SDL with Cocoa, X11 and Windows backends.
No comments:
Post a Comment