> I am looking at tools to help me quickly build a GUI front-end to an
> Empire like game, and before I look into Xforms further I wanted to
> know if it will be able to handle having childprocess's under it's
> control which it must answer in real-time even if the user is doing
> something with the GUI.
Yes, it can. The signal and IO select mechanism allow you to respond
in near real time to most any external events as long as you aren't
tying up the X server with huge requests such as manipulating large
Pixmaps. If you're shipping a lot of large images around, you may
find that performance sags somewhat but that's not really an Xforms
issue as much as it is an X issue.
Refer to fl_add_signal_callback() and fl_add_io_callback() in the
manual. There are also idle and timeout handlers which you can
install to do things in the background. You may even find that with
idle and timeout callbacks that you can forgo the complication of
creating multithreaded processes altogether. I've found that with a
little thought about the overall design before I begin coding that I
can avoid such things almost invariably.
> Is this possible with XForms without unreasonable amounts of work?
Depends upon what you consider "unreasonable," I guess. :-) I'd say
that things are pretty straightforward.
spl
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