From: Karl von Laudermann <doodpants@...>
Date: 2007-06-14T06:00:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Text/GFX rendering. Which lib ?

On Jun 13, 4:40 pm, "Mathieu Chappuis"
<mathieu.chappuis.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've tried ruby-opengl, rubygame, rubysdl, rudl. Theses libs are
> working great here (Debian Etch) but a good font rendering seem to be
> hard (I fail to have a working ftgl install). And some dependencies
> like boost.org are enormous, far in size and features  of my needs.
>

> Small specs :
>
> - Display Texts and basic gfx on a full screen window (X11 or Win32)
> on 640x400 or a bit more.
> - 256 colors is far enough
> - Display text using ttf or else fonts with few size variations
> - Bitmap display (backgrounds, icons, ..)
> - Basic line and polygons drawing
> - Basic move of screen portions.
> - No sound, no joystick, no sprite collisions and so on..

Sounds like you should probably try a full GUI library (fxruby,
wxruby, qtruby, ruby/gtk, Swing via JRuby, etc.). Create a window, put
a big ol' rich text control of some sort in the center, and populate
it as you wish. Or use multiple text label controls and graphic
canvases layed out as desired. I get the impression that the types of
libraries you've looked at so far are much lower level and are suited
for game developers who care about performance and efficiency, and
thus make you do more of the work that a good GUI library will do for
you, or hand off to the OS if it uses native controls.