First PyCairo Test

So I did a little more research on PyCairo this morning. It turns out that the requirements for using it with pygame are really simple - you only really need PyCairo, numpy (or numeric, whatever), and pygame installed. There was even a section in the pygame.org site dedicated to this exact thing.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I also discovered that InkScape uses Cairo! Neat!

EDIT: Oh, yeah, also Cairo has built-in masking stuff, so I won't need to use my slow-ass algorithm anymore :D

As a quick test, I took the old outline program and created a duplicate version for testing out PyCairo.

So here's what the outline looks like WITHOUT PyCairo:

...and here's what it looks like WITH PyCairo:

You can see that the antialiasing is absolutely superb! However, it seems that rendering a scene using an immediate mode algorithm creates some small problems... you might have noticed that there's some artifacts that appeared between the curves and their miter joint; that is the result of the separate shapes being rendered independently, one at a time. When doing this, the library doesn't have any way of knowing that there's two shapes connecting where the gap forms, so it just does antialiasing of the individual shapes, which in the end creates those gaps.

The proper way to deal with this is to create a scene using a retained mode algorithm and then use multisampling to render the entire scene. I don't know yet it Cairo can do retained mode rendering, but in the event that it can't I'll have to find a work-around so these gaps don't become a problem.