I have been using the Gloss Library for some game programming, and have got to the point where I am having the most difficulty laying out different elements on the screen. I was wondering whether it was possible to limit a Picture type to display only a certain rectangular area of the screen. The library already has the concept of a rectangular area with the Extent type, but there does not appear to be any way to ‘subtract’ from pictures.
If there was a way of doing this then it seems like creating a View type or similar that takes over responsibility for a certain area of the screen — which can also contain additional views, and with suitable coordinate substitutions between them etc — would be an achievable and sensible goal. But without a way to limit drawing areas it doesn’t seem like this would be possible within the Gloss framework.
It seems that clipping is not supported in Gloss.
Nevertheless the recursive drawing of views each with their own relative coordinate system does still seem to be a viable and useful goal, and I am part way through writing code for this now.