usage of clutter for game development

Question

I'm a relatively new developer, and I'm looking to learn C++. I've had experience coding in java, javascript, actionscript, and python, but I want something fast enough to do some high performance 2D and 3D games.

When I eventually learn the basics (control structures, classes, etc) I'd like to develop a 2D game. I've explored various libraries for 2D graphics (cairo, sdl, openframeworks, clutter) but clutter seemed to be the most optimised for accelerated graphics and vector drawing.

Would clutter be a good fit for a 2D game? I realise that it maintains its own scenegraph unlike other libraries, but I've developed a flash game in the past, so I should be used to that.

Are there any performance issues I should be aware of? Has anyone else had experience doing heavy graphics with clutter?

Answer 1

I must admit I've never heard of Clutter before, probably because it's not a Windows library and the majority of games developers work on Windows platforms. Similarly, most game developers (even indie/hobbyist ones) are not considering Cairo, or Openframeworks either. More common by far would be the use of SDL, although that is not fully hardware accelerated and thus not a good choice for modern games. SFML is an alternative that is growing in popularity, but most game developers these days are probably rolling their own OpenGL rendering on top of something like SDL.

By the looks of it, Clutter might be a good choice, and it certainly seems fully-featured. But sometimes the problem with the larger frameworks is that they become a bit of a walled garden and it's hard to integrate extra bits that you might need - for example, I don't know how well the input might work.

The other problem with using a less well-known engine is that if you go to http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/ or http://www.gamedev.net and ask questions, the community won't be able to help as much since they are not familiar with the technology you're using. You have to balance the cost of that against the potential gains that come from using an unpopular but actually very competent library. (As well as the possibility that these other guys know something you don't...)

Answer 2

Clutter is relatively new and there are not many applications that use it right now. Especially games. So you will have a hard time finding somebody who has experience with it for gaming purposes.

That said, clutter indeed has some interesting features that make it look compelling for the purpose, and I would even claim that for many types of gameplay the internal scene graph can even be an advantage to the game developer.

I would like to propose you another interesting option for 2D game graphics: Qt from Nokia.

While it is primarily a general-purpose GUI toolkit, it has nice proportions not every game developer would be aware of in first place. In fact, it has a fully-fledged OpenGL drawing backend which can be used to draw any widget, and to use any of Qt's canvas drawing operations.

Things go crazy as soon as you start to explicitely using a QGLWidget, which not only enforces GL drawing mode (which is not the default), but also allows you to mix your own GL drawings with Qt's drawing operations in the same context. You gain the possibility to not only use simple-to-use, high level drawing operations paired with a powerful event queue and efficient input handling; furthermore you keep the freedom to build-in more advanced, low level graphics in the future.

See this example. Note that you can mix native GL drawing freely with Qt's Painter functionality (if you take care of the GL matrix stack).