06.02
GSoC coding kicked off last week and I didn’t spent the week with my arm crossed. First off, I created a small wiki page including a TODO/Progress chart and how to get your hands on the code I’m writing. It’s a good place to see where I am at with my progress.
So where am I exactly after a week of coding? Okay, I’ll be honest and admit I’ve been coding for a little more than a week. As you can notice on the wiki page, I managed to re implement the canvas with Clutter where the game take place. This part was quite simple and straight forward. Next step was being able to load levels on the new board. I studied and tried multiple approach to implement and draw levels but I’ve stopped with something similar to what was previously in place but more modular and of course, making good use of clutter.
I also started my work on porting each worms to clutter. After giving it more thought I decided to differ a little from what was planed in my initial proposal. My initial proposal suggested implicitly to create new theme for each worm and process a lot of useless and greedy animation on each worms as they move. With my new approach casual Nibbles player won’t even notice that worm have changed. Using a custom ClutterTexture to fill each actor of the worm with a repeating texture. The result is promising as you can see on these early screenshots.
On the first screenshot you can see the current version of Nibbles, and on the second, the early Clutter version. (click to enlarge)
Nibbles - Current version
Nibbles - Clutter version
My goal for the first half of the summer is to literally clone the current version of Nibbles to Clutter. That’s in the second half of the summer that I’ll make things shine and add animations. As you can see on these previous screenshots I believe I’m off with a good start !
Obviously good work, but the theme is horrible
Snake II on my seven years old black/white Nokia phone looks better (Probably because it has blue backlighting)
The difference for the end user will be immense!
Just kidding. Great work!
Shiny things will come later
don’t worry, with what I have in mind, the experience for the end user will be on a whole other level 
As long as the need for a faster computer doesn’t go up I’m all for using clutter…
But it’s pretty horrible that to play snake (a fairly simple game) I need a Pentium computer for it to run smooth…
Have you noticed any slowdowns between the two versions? It would be interesting to see how many FPS each version achieves on your computer.
Right now the clutter version only load and display levels and worms, there’s no movement whatsoever so it’s hard to tell. But everything load really fast right now and of course speed and responsiveness are in my priorities for the rest of the development
Sob sob it brings back memory…I still remember my first game created on the old 386 using Pascal..classic… the game was horrible back then with just few ascii dot connect together. Good work good work on Clutter port, I’d love to see the final result when GSoC wrap up. Good work!