Hi,
I am working on restructuring an application, it's called "the Warring Ants".
If you don't know it, it's a programming game: Different people implement a standard behaviour of individual ants in an ant tribe, and several different tribes then compete for survival.
The game is visualized in a pixel map; each ant is just a colored 1x1 pixel dot. While the game runs, all ants (there might be 1000s of them) take turns in making a move - a move is one pixel up/down/left/right. A game might involve up to a few dozen ant tribes.
Currently, the ants and everything are drawn right into an X window using XLib primitives. Performs great. The backing buffer is a home made design.
There is no GUI per se, only graphical output. All game parameters and results are I/Oed in the console.
Now I wan to add some nice menus etc, preferrably using GTK, and also a debugger utility that will visualize many more details about some selected ants.
This means that I will have ant imaging and GUI widgets exist in the same windows.
I have very little experience in programming GTK, but, hey, after this project I will have some.
My problem here is that I am not sure whether I should, or even need to reimplement the ant visualization in something else than raw XLib.
In one view, I want to have something like this:
--------------------------------------------------------------
| MyDebuggerWindow |
--------------------------------------------------------------
| Enlarged | GTK widgets |
| image | displaying debugging |
| of part | info on seleced ant(s) |
| of ant | |
| battlefield | |
| w/ selection | |
| cursor | |
| | |
--------------------------------------------------------------
(yes, I know ... debugging ants !?!? )
Question: How should I put this together ?
1) Stick with Xlib primitives for displaying ants ? OK, but I can't see which kind of widget that will allow
me to use XLib drawing primitives on it, or how to somehow extract an XWindow from a widget
2) Use Gnome canvas ? Might be fine for the debugger, but isn't it much slower than XLib for the main
battlefield view ?
3) Use GDK primitives ? But I need to be able to control the color of the ants directly. Can I somehow
set the drawing foreground color in RGB directly ? Seems to me that GDK was made for drawing
widgets, not much more.
4) Use GDKRGB ? I can see how to use that for displaying a static image :) But I also need to be able
to manipulate individual pixels, or rectangles in the image dynamically, and preferably fast :)
I hope someone can help me out. Basically, the question is, what should I use for maintaining a dynamically updated image in a GTK or Gnome application ?
Thanx
Soren
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