Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Re: networking, everything over christmas ;-)

[Br'fin <br...@ma...>]

In addition to his email, I had a nice little chat with Chris via ichat 
last night to help flesh things out my response further.

WHAT IS MY VISION OF THIS PROJECT?

My initial vision is 'it runs marathon great', 'it has the networking 
that people have been craving since the source code was first 
released', 'its been decomposed into nice clean building blocks to work 
with' right

I happen to agree with Mark's post. Keep the application working with 
Marathon's files through all stages of development (Currently Marathon 
2) I didn't release 0.2 until I had the code base just plain running 
Marathon 2 albeit unpolishedly in the GUI. (Mark, Sourceforge does have 
an archive of the mailing list as well if you want to see what led to 
Chris's post :) )

My goals for 1.0 are fairly feature light to the end user. But if we 
can release a nice solid app in running and network play, it's going to 
get decent coverage.

WHO ARE MY TARGET USERS?

Myself, Marathon Die-hards, and developers.

The core release package may be able to play more than Marathon files, 
but it has to handle Marathon.

For developers, I want to throw the code wide open. Give them nice 
clean code. Give them seperated parts so that 'rendering' can be 
compiled seperately from 'physics model' and seperately from 'UI'. Mods 
that make use of AlephModular are nice. Projects which use AlephModular 
as a base to springboard to something beyond Marathon are better.

WHY 2.5D OVER 3D?

Oddly enough, Marathon is a 2.5D engine. I don't think this is a 
shameful thing, or a bad thing. I also think it still has a lot of 
potential in and of itself. I feel that the 2.5D is a strength to be 
enhanced. It still has room for enhancement, it still has room to be 
exploited.

In the context of Marathon, going 3D seems a waste of time. It's a lot 
of work to reach a stage which other projects all already ahead of in 
some form or another. There is Quake, there is Crystal Space. There are 
other 3D engines out there. What is so compelling about 3D or Marathon 
that people seem compelled to force Marathon's engine to that level?

IN SUMMARY:

Requirements before a 1.0 release
	Networking
	Polished Code state
	Polished UI state
	Runs at least Marathon 2 and Marathon infinity

Niceties before a 1.0 release
	OpenGL
	Cross-platform support

-Jeremy Parsons