Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Hello

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

On Thursday, December 26, 2002, at 04:12  PM, Michael Adams wrote:

> Hello, I've joined the AlephModular list and thought
> I'd introduce myself.

A pleasure to have you aboard. :)

> Now I would like to mention a few of my concerns/goals
> for AM.  These may  be a little bit contraversial and
> may offend some (I have trouble with that).
>
> Crossplatform:
> Something that you may hear me whine about often is
> being cross platform.  I think AM is already moving in
> this direction, but I want to reenforce and encourage
> it.  With A1 it happened to often that sometime would
> get implemented on one platform but not another.
> Please try to orginize the code so we only have one
> code base.  A good example is the preference dialogs.
> A new crosshair chaging feature was added, but only on
> the Mac version.  It was never added to the SDL
> version.  The preference file actually has hackable to
> change it, but because of the way the preferences
> dialog was split between platforms it wasn't in the
> GUI.  Please avoid this.  Using a good crossplatform
> foundation library (like SDL or whatever) and having
> everyone write for that foundation would prevent the
> need to rewrite code for every new platform that comes
> along.  If you have to write some utility functions
> like makeButtion that are #ifdef'ed for multiple
> platforms that's alright, but please don't do #ifdef
> platform tricks with stuff like a showPeferencesDialog
> function.  Based on the mailing list archives I think
> you are leaning towards this, but I think it should be
> made clear.

I admit, I'm currently mixed on the issues of how platform specific UI 
is handled. On the one hand, I hear what you're saying. And it would be 
great, especially for things derived from AlephModular, if someone just 
made some preferences changes on their app. Made sure it worked on 
their platform of choice, and knew that if someone compiled it for 
another platform, it would be just fine.

On the other hand, I'm worrying about some issues of polish. For 
instance, AlephOne-SDL runs on MacOSX, but never felt like a Macintosh 
Application. I don't know how it felt on other platforms compared with 
what you expect of your programs and games.

For the current term, I would have to say platform specific GUIs are a 
go. (Though all platform GUIs would speak to the same underlying 
preferences objects) It keeps things moving and if someone can get 
enough polish into a cross-platform GUI, then we can adopt that as the 
default in the future.

> Modular vs. Marathon:
> I must agree and dissagree with some things that have
> been expressed earlyer.  In order for AM to be
> sucessful it will have to be able to read and run the
> old Marathon maps.  What good is a game with no maps
> it can run.  However I don't think the Marathon map
> file format should be more than another module that
> can be poped in and out.  Suppose someone writes a
> Doom map file reader.  Then the Marathon and Doom
> modules would be equals as far as how the code works,
> but the Marathon module is still takes presidence in
> cronology and maintinance.

I do agree with this sentiment. And we may need to devise a solution to 
this sooner than you might think. As I've been tweaking headers I came 
to realize that Marathon has a few more game definitions (Like the 
physics stuff) but not all of it is actually loaded from the physics 
file. For instance, some sound definitions.

-Jeremy Parsons