tHeBloG

As people have blogged (e.g. here & here ), maemo will get Clutter support! On related news, haven't had time to really hack clutteroad forward but last time I left it looking this:

So as expected, I gave Clutter 0.8 a little test drive. Literally... =) Going to add a bit more eye candy in there and push Clutter API further, we'll see what comes out. Currently the biggest problem is collision detection, tried to utilize: clutter_stage_get_actor_at_pos() - Separated road & background into own images/actors, but having a problem that clutter_stage_get_actor_at_pos() doesn't seem to ignore the transparent part of the image in picking. clutter_stage_read_pixels() - The RGBA color could be used to see if car is on grass (green) or on road (brown). But for some reason the outcome was not clear, even when making sure the pixel is taken next to car (not _from_ the car) and driving on top of a black&white chess board... Collisions to other cars etc. should not be a problem with clutter_stage_get_actor_at_pos() but what could be cleanest way to detect the track? Flash has hitTest for this.

The 0.8 version of Clutter is coming out soonish from the excellent ohand people, containing again massive improvements ! I started to love Clutter when 0.2 was released ~1.5 years ago, it was just so easy to create functional & eye candy applications with its refreshingly clean API. All started with the question "How can one make effect [XYZ] using GTK+?" and after some pondering my answer was "You can't"... Of course these requested things would have been possible with Cairo (too low-level, hard & slow) and/or "just" forking GTK+ and adding ugly magic which would make it API&ABI incompatible with 2.x (no-no-no). After some studying Clutter appeared to be the best candidate for the job, and I had a lot of fun with it during 0.2-0.4 versions. Sadly GTK+ hasn't progressed much since then when it comes to GUIs, layouts & theming are quite static, timeline is not in, no native canvas etc. Luckily offscreen rendering is progressing ...