Unix/Win GUI re-evaluation

[Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>]

Hi all, I've been rethinking the choice of tcl/tk for the GUI for the
Unix/X11 and Windows versions of Xconq.

At this point the tcl/tk interface hasn't entirely lived up to its
original promise.  Although it proved easy to get an interface going,
it's been harder to make it fully functional - every new bit of
interface requires a set of new C-coded tcl commands to get the data
from the kernel into tcl-land, and vice versa.  So the tcl interface
has become just as large and complicated as the other interfaces.

Another selling point of the tcl interface is that it works on
Windows.  Indeed it does work - however the low-level Windows code in
tk is missing some graphics functionality that is crucial to Xconq,
which means tk internals hacking, since nobody in the tcl/tk community
seems to be spending time on improving its graphics support.

Also, I have been unable to get the tcl/tk interface to run anywhere
near as fast as the old Xaw version, despite doing a bunch of
profiling and tuning.  Responsiveness is key to a good game, even for
non-real-time games like Xconq.

Finally, setting up the installation is very complicated, what with
libraries of tcl code and env vars to deal with.  Worse, there don't
seem to be many other examples to follow - the best seems to be Cygnus'
own use of tcl/tk in their GDB GUI, and that one is known to need
front-line support people to deal with all the things that go wrong,
even with prebuilt binary packages!

On the other hand, tcl/tk *is* a big improvement over Xaw.  I've been
able to spend time on doing interface improvements (such as the
terrain transitions and linear terrain images) instead of fighting
with lame widgets.

So the question of the moment: is tcl/tk really the most fruitful
direction to go?

If not, I see a couple of options: a) go back to the Xaw interface and
work on it again, or b) pick a different toolkit and start over.  From
what I can tell, gtk seems like the only really plausible choice,
unless the Xconq interface were to become a full-screen design that
could use something like SDL or GGI.

So what do people think?  What (open source) GUI package would give
the best interface for Unix Xconq?

								Stan