libtagaro: New in playground/games October 19, 2010

Project Tagaro aims to bring KDE games to mobile form factors and more. (crosspost from projects.kde.org)

libkdegames, the base library for virtually all games in the kdegames module, has aged considerably. Most of its components have been designed in Qt 2/3 times, and do not take advantage of Qt 4 goodness. Project Tagaro attempts to overcome the accumulated anachronisms and, among other things, make kdegames ready for mobile form factors.

Tagaro components are already getting used in kdegames starting from the 4.6 release: KGameRenderer, a first version of Tagaro’s theming framework, has already reduced code size and increased rendering speed in many KDE games. TagaroAudio, a simple Qt-style wrapper for OpenAL which brings low latency sound output to kdegames, will likely be used in Granatier soon.

As of today, libtagaro’s Git repository has moved to the new KDE Git server. Clone from git://git.kde.org/libtagaro.git.

And just a few words on how Tagaro relates to other projects in this area: Tagaro is completely separate from the Gluon project because I do not see Gluon getting a stable and nice API soon (see this review which I sent to the kde-games-devel mailinglist). I also am opposed to a library that renders only OpenGL; I want to keep that hard dependency out of kdegames as long as possible.

On the side of mobile form factors, there is Qt Quick which I cannot use at the moment because it does not have a widget set. I am looking forward to Qt Components and will try to use it for Tagaro when it reaches a certain stability, but that will not happen soon. Plasma has a stable set of components which can be used in mobile form factors, but Plasma developers indicate that they will be moving to Qt Components as soon as this is available, so I doubt I can safely rely on them, either. when this is stable, so the best long-term solution is probably to rely on Qt Components instead.