[Alephmodular-devel] Developer Rant #1 :)

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

Since I haven't really gotten myself organized, I'm going to give the 
list a little bit of an earful. Though Matt might want to find 
someplace on the website he's building for this. :)


I have to admit that the #1 priority on the top of my list is to 
continue to keep Marathon running nice and happily on my machine. I've 
now carbonized Marathon twice and I want something that runs really 
nice and well. And I want updated networking. which I suppose could be 
odd seeing as I've rarely had chances to play Marathon on a LAN :)

Second of all, I want to open up the code in way that it isn't just one 
monolithic beast. While it may or not ever materialize, I would like to 
use this code to support other development efforts. This includes tools 
for itself (map making and such) and game changes beyond scenario and 
physics making.

Then around third is being cross-platform. Yes, I admit it, 
cross-platform is less important to me than having a kick-ass game of 
Marathon. However, I do agree that it is important and I will support 
it. Calls for standardizing on this or that, while good arguments, do 
not necessarily mesh well with my first two goals. Accept that your 
platform of choice will be treated as a separate platform, take 
ownership of it and make sure it remains kick ass too.

With respect to staying in sync API-wise, we should be discussing 
issues like that to begin with. And include appropriate tracking or 
document matters on Sourceforge. If something UI-wise gets implemented 
on one platform and applies to the others, they should get stubbed 
interfaces if necessary to compile and someone should be responsible 
for filling out the specific platform.

Does this mean we should be making wrappers around set control/read 
control/hit control? Or should we just be doing 
PLATFORM_GUI->do_preferences(PrefObject)? I admit I both haven't 
decided and haven't yet had a chance to research this. I'd love a 
decent run down of the pros and cons of each.


I should point out that addressing the platform issues directly is why 
I haven't polished the interface of the OSX builds yet. Yes, the lists 
of all the gui glitches in fading in and out and menu buttons are good. 
I'm just not trying to polish that aspect of the game yet. Not until 
the framework underneath has been revamped. Likewise for the mouse. 
Right now I can use AlephModular to play Marathon 2. It confirms that 
the game core and such are all still working. For this stage in the 
project I find this to be an acceptable 'almost shippable' state.

This doesn't mean that I'm ignoring all bugs, just the ones relating to 
the GUI in its current state. Crashing bugs or other glitches within 
the game core are definitely a priority. I find it interesting that in 
recent days I've patched several bugs in AM that either are still 
noticeable in AO if you know where to look or have been addressed only 
relatively recently. Make of my focus what you will.


I should remind folks that once we have cross-platform support, I am 
going to want and need folks to do the release builds for other 
platforms. We aren't going to have a random mac release here and a 
random linux release over there which happens to be using code from a 
different date. I want that Sourceforge release page to have the 
AlephModular release and below that the current version release and 
below that the builds packaged for different platforms.

I admit I've been having some visions of things I'd like to see. 
Whether as proof of concept or samples of what we can do when we get 
there, I don't know.

For instance, how about a Replay to Quicktime converter? It ditches the 
UI and renders the whole game out to a full 30 fps Quicktime.mov. 
Possibly several movies if the replay had multiple players. then people 
can watch your vidmaster epics even if on a slow computer or without 
needing AM, the map, the sounds and so forth.

Or multi-part monsters. Like a unified squad of Pfhor, or a long 
segmented worm.

-Jeremy Parsons