Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Interesting milestone... world_pixels removed this night

[Woody Z. I. <woo...@sb...>]

Yeah, neat stuff Br'fin; congratulations!


On Saturday, August 30, 2003, at 08:29  AM, Timothy Collett wrote:

> Also, perhaps you could give a very brief summary of what AM has that 
> M2 does not...'cause I'm afraid I've lost track.

It's my impression that (in keeping with AM's spirit) these early 
versions of AM are as close to M2 as possible "from the outside".  So I 
doubt a user would notice much difference (well, except for it running 
natively under Mac OS X of course).  Instead, so far most of the 
changes would be seen "from the inside"; i.e. in the code.  AM is 
restructuring M2's internals into a strong, rigid framework, a 
foundation on which to build future additional features without things 
getting a bit slippery and sloppy as some things have in A1 (especially 
when cross-platform issues are considered).  You know, replacing that 
wooden beam with this steel girder, drilling down to anchor on bedrock 
instead of just digging down into the dirt a few feet, etc.  I suspect 
it may be a while before AM has visible feature enhancements over M2, 
but once it gets to that point, it ought to be fairly easy to add lots 
of features and have them work correctly on all platforms.

I'll of course invite Br'fin himself to fill the gaps in the above and 
make any corrections... I know I'd also be curious to hear a brief 
'state of the project' summary/opinion from the one who can comment 
best.

I should note that one piece of AM technology, "AStreams", is already 
in use in some parts of Aleph One (principally the star protocol code) 
to handle data packing/byte-swapping issues.  AStreams replace A1's 
"Packing" mechanism with something that's in most cases more pleasant 
to work with and easier to use correctly.  Though I'd like to see more 
of this sort of thing - AM cleanliness coming to A1 - I know Br'fin's 
plan is to focus on the other way around: making AM clean, then moving 
over A1 features to it... and I certainly can't fault him for wanting 
to layer the goodies atop a sound foundation rather than trying to swap 
structural elements out from under a heavy shifting pile of code.  I 
guess we'll just have to be patient :)

At some point (if it continues to progress) I think AM will reach a 
sort of 'critical mass' where users and developers alike will find it 
more pleasant to work with than A1, at which point AM will quickly take 
over as the principal open-source descendant of Marathon.  (Though, 
depending on how things go, it may appear more like a merging of the 
two projects than wholesale supplanting.)  At the moment, though, it's 
awfully hard to overlook A1's allure, what with OpenGL rendering, wide 
cross-platform-ness, Internet netplay with latency hiding, Lua 
scripting including netscripts, scenario control over all sorts of 
things that were hard-coded in M2, etc.  In other words, AM offers much 
more in the long term, I think, but A1 wins the short-run contest 
currently.  Somewhat unfortunately, in this sort of effort, with 
sporadic contributions from volunteers each with his own wishlist and 
interests, I suspect the sexy short term is going to win out almost 
every time.  We're lucky indeed to have the rare Br'fin willing to 
focus on the comparatively unglamorous (but vitally important) long 
term and work toward those goals.

Woody