So, it's been a while since the last update on Gluon. Quite a bit has been happening actually, of which more in this blog post. :)

Gluon Renaming

First off, we had a little IRC meeting in December in which we discussed some things related to the graphics library and other issues. One of the things we discussed was that considering the core Gluon libs will only depend on Qt, it does not make a whole lot of sense to name them "KSomething". Instead, it was decided that we will rename the libraries. KAL will become Gluon Audio, KCL will become Gluon Input and KGL will become Gluon Graphics. The current "GluonCommon" that exists mostly as a CMake file and one header will be renamed to Gluon Core and several things like the GDL handling and others will be moved to this. All the Gluon libraries will depend on Gluon Core, which will mostly provide convenience classes for all sorts of things. The previously unnamed src/ directory and contents will become Gluon Engine, which will be where stuff like the game object hierarchy, scene management and components will live.

Now, for those that now think "OMG! They're not KDE anymore!", rest assured as we are still members of the larger KDE community and we're not going to leave that. In fact, Gluon Creator depends on KDELibs and we are not planning to change that. The desktop-player will most likely also depend on KDELibs, while we will also make a very simple version that does not depend on KDE. Only the libraries will not depend on KDE, as this will make it easier to port as well as make it easier for third party devs to use these libraries.

Refactoring of Gluon Graphics (KGL)

Another point of the meeting (actually the primary reason for the meeting) is that we need to do some refactoring of KGL/Gluon Graphics. There were some not all too nice parts about KGL and we wanted some more separation. We already discussed at the Gluon Sprint in October that we wanted to move the physics outside of KGL. There is also a working game loop in Gluon Engine, which means the loop in KGL is obsolete as well (and it really does not belong in a graphics library). There are also some internal things that needed changing as well as some new features supported by Qt 4.6 that we can use.

Gluon Alpha

Now, something that is probably much more interesting to people is that we have decided that we want to release an alpha around the end of this month. It's a bit ambitious and I am personally not entirely sure we will make it, but the "deadline" is there and we will try as hard as possible to make it. The alpha stage will also mark a new stage of development, as we will then focus on keeping our API's as stable as possible, which should ease development for third party developers.

We discussed the open issues for alpha last wednesday and while there are several big open issues there were also quite a few items that could be marked as "Done for Alpha". Gluon Audio has been stable for a while as well as Gluon Input. Gluon Engine is nearly done for alpha, there is only hierarchical transforms left as big issue. There are still several components to create as well as scripting support, which is one of the "big issues" left.

Creator Progress

Another item which still needs quite a bit of work is Gluon Creator. While I have been working on it on and off after the sprint and there is quite a lot of progress, there is still a lot to be done. What we have implemented since the last post is a plugin structure, saving/loading of projects and related files, start/stop of the game loop and several other things. The main docks are now all implemented as plugins, making the code a lot cleaner and the actual application a lot more flexible. The plugin structure will also be used for the "Tools", which are things like a code editor and others.

Below is a screenshot of the latest Creator:

(Click here for full version)