[Lazarus] 3D Window Manager / Desktop environment in Object Pascal

Graeme Geldenhuys mailinglists at geldenhuys.co.uk
Wed Jan 27 12:38:51 CET 2016


Hi,

On 2016-01-27 11:16, Chavoux Luyt wrote:
> Personally, I am very interested in developing a 3D Window Manager for
> Linux using Object Pascal. I am still not sure if I would need to work
> at the level of OpenGL (and if there are Object Pascal wrappers for
> all OpenGL functions) or if there are higher-level tools in Lazarus
> that could be used to write a true 3D Window Manager / Desktop
> Environment for Linux? Any ideas?

I suggest you take a look at XPde - a fully working window manager and
desktop environment, with accompanied system tools (task manager,
control panel, file manager, calculator, network monitor etc). XPde was
developed in Object Pascal using Kylix. Here are some info and
screenshots [http://xpde.holobit.net/shots.php]. For years I've been
meaning to port this over to Free Pascal and fpGUI.

Another Window Manager implemented in pure Object Pascal is fpwm
(available on SourceForge). This is Alpha stage though, but I do have
screenshots I made showing the old version (in a subdirectory in the
repository) running on my Linux system.

Neither of these two are 3D though, but it should be a very good start
to get a project going.

Speaking of 3D and OpenGL. I would personally opt to rather use SDL
instead of OpenGL directly. SDL will still give you 3D hardware support
(including a software renderer etc), but the API should be much easier
to use. SDL has also proven very successful in many commercial Linux
games (remember Loki Software), so it should definitely be up to the task.

Another alternative might be to use ORCA 3D (included with the Lazarus
fork, CodeTyphon). Though I'm still under the impression that this is a
rebranded illegal copy of the FireMonkey predecessor (bought and owned
by Embarcadero). [please correct me if I am wrong about ORCA]



Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp




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