Teething Problems

Linux IDEs

It's always exciting to start work on a new project but the downside is that there are always problems at the beginning. Yesterday I made good progress with the Linux work by getting the virtual PC up and running so today I spent some time trying to get some sample code building under a Linux IDE.

The first one that I tried was KDevelop as everybody says that's the best. With Visual Studio, I can setup an empty project and manually add files to it which allows me to keep platform-specific build files away from source files. But I could find no way to do that using KDevelop. It came with a multitude of project templates but no empty project. The simplest project I could set up was a 'hello world' application but I was shocked to find that this created about 20 files! This would have been okay as long as I could add my own files to the project but alas I could only do that if I placed the files in a specific directory, which of course did not fit in with the directory structure I had created.

I googled around and it would seem that only an earlier version of KDevelop allows project creation to be truly configurable. Oh well, so much for progress. I'll try out Eclipse next time.

GUI Libraries

I didn't want to spend my entire day wresting with Linux IDE's so I turned my attention to coding issues. When developing Morde at Uni, I spent a long time trying to find a GUI library that would work with SDL. Most of the ones I investigated provided not just widgets, but a complete application framework. This did not suit me as I already had my framework in place (I didn't think about Gui work until quite late into development!) Eventually I found one called Guichan which seemed ideal as as it is designed specifically for SDL games and wasn't intrusive. Unfortunately it just wasn't up to scratch.

I will need a GUI library for Mod Wars too so the hunt is on again but this time I'll be thinking of it from the outset so this opens up my options. One library that I have my eye on is wxWidgets. This is a very mature, cross-platform library that has a lot of documentation available. But these things can have their downsides too; wxWidgets has been around for such a long time and there are so many tutorials etc that there is a huge overload of out of date information out there and I have not yet managed to build the standard Hello World sample yet :-(