Angelscript and libRocket evaluation.

[Jukka Jylänki]

As the last feat before Christmas, we are throwing in a few research tasks
to try to resolve the biggest issues on the bug tracker.

The first one is the persisting problems with the QtScript script engine.
See

https://github.com/realXtend/naali/issues/313
https://github.com/realXtend/naali/issues/542
https://github.com/realXtend/naali/issues/452
https://github.com/realXtend/naali/issues/484
https://github.com/realXtend/naali/issues/250
https://github.com/realXtend/naali/issues/341

The research is to investigate if it is feasible to migrate to another
script engine. The goal is not to implement a production-ready codebase
for shipping.

The second task relates to performance issues, especially for mobile
devices in mind. The Qt CPU-based UI rendering is a killer, and their
GPU-based path is not really much better either. This was profile last
year about same time (
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/40949268/AnimatedUI_Anim3_OpenGL.png ), and there
is the AnimatedUI sample as the result to test for yourself. The goal of
this task is to research integrating libRocket to Tundra, to see what it
offers as a replacement UI solution.

Both tasks are part of the realXtend core development project, with the
aim to leading to a more informed roadmap for the next year. Neither
QtScript or Qt as UI solution is planned to be deprecated or anything
similar. Both research work are available at

https://github.com/LudoCraft/Tundra/tree/angelscript and
https://github.com/LudoCraft/Tundra/tree/librocket

if you are interested in following it. Patches are also welcome.

Jukka

[Toni Alatalo]

On Fri, 2012-12-14 at 17:08 +0200, Jukka Jylänki wrote:

Thanks for the heads up! A little note about libRocket & browser
clients:

> is the AnimatedUI sample as the result to test for yourself. The goal of
> this task is to research integrating libRocket to Tundra, to see what it
> offers as a replacement UI solution.

with libRocket HTML+CSS is used for the UI elements, which should be the
perfect with for browser based clients too.

there's been good progress in the browser+js based websocket+webgl land
within realXtend now too and it should continue in the coming months,
this tweet from Admino guys has a screenshot:
https://twitter.com/meshmoon1/status/279182879316123648

connects to tundra with websockets and does the scene entity sync,
similar to the old webnaali 0.1, but now instead of json with efficient
knet binary messages, and notably that new implementation reads geometry
from ogre mesh xml files so no separate exports from modeling apps to
other formats are required when using that together with Ogre-Tundra.

so with libRocket in Tundra, UI widgets being html+css, the same UIs
should be possible to make to work in browser based clients
straightforwardly too. we've always had this option with qt's webviews
too, but great if get it efficiently with the hw accelerated drawing in
libRocket.

this is the strategy Sirikata took to begin with, using gecko with Ogre
and then browsers, but I'm not sure how much they've done it in
practice.

> Jukka

cheers,
~Toni