[Scummvm-devel] Virtual keyboard work: Request for ideas.

John Willis John.Willis at Distant-earth.com
Mon Jun 8 13:07:03 CEST 2009


All, 

As some of you know I have been hacking about a little with the built in
virtual keyboard code recently (from Stephen Kennedy's GSoC 2008 work),
adding 320*240 device support and a few other fixes. I am also working on
getting some new keyboard graphics done to replace the current defaults. 

One of the recent changes I have made (R41366) was to separate out the
source files for the keyboard packs from the archive (vkeybd.zip) stored in
SVN and provide a script to create keyboard packs (vkeybdpack.py). To that
end I would like to move (SVN move) the vkeybd.zip from /backends/vkeybd to
the new /backends/vkeybd/packs folder to make things a little tidier. I
would also like to rename the default keyboard pack in code from vkeybd to
vkeybd_default. Any objections?

The reasoning behind this is simple, the keyboard packs can look vastly
different when viewed on different types of screens (TV, monitors, little
LCD's etc.) so I can see that in the long term some backend authors may
prefer to offer a tailored keyboard pack for their device with ScummVM
reverting to loading the default pack if none is specified by the backend
and/or user (or it's missing). 

By treating keyboard packs like we treat GUI themes we can just let backend
authors commit any custom packs to SVN in there uncompressed form (so they
don't get lost). Backends can just set "vkeybd_pack_name" to suit whatever
custom theme they may need.

I would also like to consider adding some GUI controls to configure some of
the keyboard settings (default display mode, orientation, pack etc.) but
I'll hold off on that until the recent GUI changes settle down.

Does anyone else have other ideas on how we can improve the virtual keyboard
infrastructure? 

I am open to any suggestions (it does not mean I'll code them all however
;-)).

Cheers,

John

--

> What is a grue?

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth.
Its favourite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered
by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and
few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.






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