Cross Platform GUI Toolkits

[Tabor Kelly]

Hello,

My apologies if this is a silly question. I have never written a game
before and I have never used a GUI toolkit before. I am an accomplished
programmer (at things like HTTP proxy servers), and a senior in a
Computer Science program.

I want to write a simple asteroids style game that will run on both my
FreeBSD box, and my brother's Windows box. I want to use Ruby because I
really want to learn Ruby, partially so I can try out RAILS. I want to
write a clone of an old DOS game I can remember playing, but I can't
remember the name of it.

Anyway, I will need simple 2D animation. So, what will work for this? I
heat GTK+ is nice to code for with Ruby, but it looks like the Win32
port for GTK+ is kind of unstable (please correct me if I am wrong). I
have heard that TK is a little painful to program with, but is _very_
cross platform (again, correct me if I am wrong). How about FOX? Will
these GUI toolkits even work, or should I be looking at SDL?

Thank You in advance.

 

[Alexander Kellett]

Anyway, I will need simple 2D animation. So, what will work for this?
I heat GTK+ is nice to code for with Ruby, but it looks like the Win32
port for GTK+ is kind of unstable (please correct me if I am wrong). I
have heard that TK is a little painful to program with, but is _very_
cross platform (again, correct me if I am wrong). How about FOX? Will
these GUI toolkits even work, or should I be looking at SDL?

gtk's canvas is not only slow but also supposedly quite
unstable on win32. so yeah. i think ur right

i'm qtruby co-devel so i should really be saying things
like: qt! cus qt4 will have gpl'ed windows support!!!
and its wonderful! yay! and whoop!

but erm. sdl is a better choice. so i won't

Alex

 

[R. Mark Volkmann]

gtk's canvas is not only slow but also supposedly quite
unstable on win32. so yeah. i think ur right

I believe Tk's canvas is both fast and stable. I've had good success with it.

 

[Tim Sutherland]

Anyway, I will need simple 2D animation. So, what will work for this? I
heat GTK+ is nice to code for with Ruby, but it looks like the Win32
port for GTK+ is kind of unstable (please correct me if I am wrong). I
have heard that TK is a little painful to program with, but is _very_
cross platform (again, correct me if I am wrong). How about FOX? Will
these GUI toolkits even work, or should I be looking at SDL?

I haven't used it, but RUDL (http://rudl.sf.net/) sits on top of SDL and
provides a higher level interface. (Based on the PyGame Python library.)