2002-04-23

  New Grabber (for lack of imagination) is the start a "grabber"
  utility, using GTK+ and Python.  One day it will be oh-so-sweet, but
  for the moment it can only load and view (possibly nested) datafiles.
  THERE ARE NO EDITING FACILITIES YET.  And saving does not work.


Why?

  A grabber that works properly in semi-modern, windowed enviroments
  would be pretty cool.  Imagine being able to drag and drop between
  two datafiles.  Or between a file manager and a datafile.  Or an
  image editor.  Or maybe embed an external editor into the grabber
  window (ambitious and not so useful ;-)

  Also, a grabber utility should be easy to modify (unlike grabber).
  It should be possible to quickly write plugins (_real_ plugins) that
  serve the purposes of individual games.  Then you could view
  game-specific content like maps, 3d models, collision masks,
  etc. inside the grabber.

  In some cases, the grabber could become the actual editing tool,
  making the small utilities that come with games-making redundant.
  For example, you could write a plugin to edit NPC attributes for an
  RPG.  No more boilerplate code, no mucking around writing yet
  another GUI system, no mucking around with the Allegro GUI... yes!

  In my opinion, datafiles are general and flexible enough for lots of
  uses in Allegro programs, if there were a better grabber.  Having
  said that, I still don't know if I can be bothered finishing it.


Some cool things

  Have a look around and how it's implemented.  IMHO, it's pretty
  slick, and definitely much easier to write plugins for than grabber.
  The .glade files describe the user interface, made by point and
  click in Glade, and are loaded at run-time.


Dependency hell

  Both Python and PyGTK come in nice installers on Windows, and are
  (semi-)standard fare on Linux, it's not much of a problem now.

  I did consider some other toolkits, but I didn't find anything so
  sweet as libglade.  I also considered other languages, but since
  Python is working well now, is easy to learn, and is well supported
  along with PyGTK, I probably won't switch from it either.  I already
  made one switch from Lua to Python, that's enough for me.