[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] to Nokia: simple method to gaina gamingaudienceon 770/800

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Kees Jongenburger wrote:
> On 1/25/07, Jakub.Pavelek at nokia.com <Jakub.Pavelek at nokia.com> wrote:
>>  * easy to make basic GUI for game setup (input methods do not work in
>> SDL)
> Hello
> 
> I guess anybody how is porting a SDL game will run into the keyboard
> issue problem.
> It would be nice if we can port existing SDL games but that really
> means that we need a cute keyboard input hack. I have been asking
> around but did not find a simple pluggable virtual keyboard for sdl.
> perhaps pointer to such resources would help. but otherwise I think
> some effort must be put into that.

I would start matchbox-keyboard when the game starts and set it to be:
- to be decoration(=border)-less dialog which doesn't take keyboard
   focus
- transient to the game window (so that it keeps above it)
Additionally I would also add button to the keyboard with which one can:
- drag the keyboard on the screen
- toggle it to the size of that button
I don't know how much changes this would need to the matchbox-keyboard
as I haven't checked its code.  As matchbox-keyboard uses just XTest
(which AFAIK doesn't deal with UTF-8 charaters, just keycodes), it
should work just fine without any changes needed for SDL programs
(except for giving the XID of their window to the keyboard so that
it knows to what window it needs to be transient for).

The normal device keyboard won't work with SDL programs because such
games very rarely react reasonably to being resized and the fullscreen
thumb keyboard (which could otherwise work quite OK), would hide the
whole game window.

Added bonus of the matchbox-keyboard would be that you can easily
configure what keys it contains (i.e. you could make it be very small)
with XML files, see:
	http://projects.o-hand.com/matchbox/?p=1


	- Eero