Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Display Abstraction Landed?

[Timothy C. <da...@ma...>]

=20
On Tuesday, October 07, 2003, at 02:52PM, Br'fin <br...@ma...> wrote:

>
>On Tuesday, October 7, 2003, at 09:13  AM, Timothy Collett wrote:
>
>>> Mmm, I better go check saved games to see if I can find anything. In=20
>>> the meantime... do you know which version/date created the saved=20
>>> game? And could you email (directly to me at br...@ma...)  the=20
>>> saved > game?
>>
>> It was saved with this version; however, I'm no longer entirely sure=20
>> that I've got the pertinent changes.  Running cvs update -AdP should=20
>> bring my copy of the code fully up-to-date, yes?  Only when I ran it,=20
>> it didn't seem to do much, and Project Builder seemed to think there=20
>> weren't any changes when I built the thing.
>>
>> I'll email you the save in a separate email.
>
>I still don't know what's up with the public CVS servers, certainly I=20
>can't manage to check anything out that way currently :/

Yeah, I got an email from sf.net Saturday detailing their CVS woes.  I supp=
ose this is just more of that.  They said that it should be fixed soon.... =
*crosses fingers*

>
>My own up-to-date version of AM seemed to have no problems loading your=20
>save game though.

Hmm...that wasn't exactly the problem, I'm afraid.  I think I can load a ga=
me from the main menu.  The sequence of events here was the following:
start new game
save
die
attempt to resurrect
AM quits itself

But this suggests that at least the savefile was good.

>Yes, Networking is currently disabled. It was easier to stub it out=20
>then to grok everything and rewrite it in OpenTransport. The most=20
>likely thing to occur here is that we graft in A1's networking ;)

Star protocol & all? :-)

>With respect to replays, I don't know if there is a better way to do=20
>things. There are improvements we can make ... like eliminating the=20
>need for the Vidmaster's dance. But beyond that, it's hard storing all=20
>of the world state umpty times a whatever. On the other hand, even in=20
>modern games, I don't recall seeing that many replays in FPS ( and=20
>usually they work in a similar fashion when they do... reset simulation=20
>to x point in time, let run :) )

Yeah, I know.  But...couldn't there be some more robustness in the format? =
 One thing that comes to mind is making the RNG a little more solid in sync=
hronization, if this is possible/sensible (this would help net games, too).=
  Another thing is to put information about the environment used into the f=
ilm.  Ideally, each Shapes/Sounds/Map/Physics file would have some sort of =
checksum that the films (and savefiles) could reference, and if it's not th=
ere, there should be some sort of warning. =20

However, I'd say don't make it fatal: just tell them that it's not right, t=
hen let them watch the poor marine running into walls if they want (it can =
be a lot of fun, sometimes!).

>Networking could probably receive a lot more help in this department=20
>and mostly I'm just clueless and don't quite understand it currently. :)

Hmm...I'm afraid I'm not much help here.  I know next to nothing about netw=
orking.  Woody, any thoughts?

>We have to deal with resources as long as the file system does and we=20
>can run old M2 maps. This should cover a nice long while. It would be=20
>nice to mix things up to have a scenario bundle. However, even then=20
>this might be resource routines now working with an expanded format=20
>(that is hidden from the rest of the code.)

I didn't say that quite right, did I?  What I really mean is that we should=
n't have any current file formats=97the ones we output=97using resources.  =
I think that having support for *loading* resource-based formats is great, =
and should remain forever (at least where it makes sense to do so, like Map=
 and Images).  But if any current formats (ie, savefiles & films) use resou=
rces, the use of them should be abstracted away from the core, so it's easy=
 to plug in a new function to save them on Windows or Linux systems.

Another issue I've been thinking about is the real modularization part...yo=
u know, being able to just take the network bits for a pure game server, an=
d the rendering code for Visual Mode of an editor, that kind of thing.  How=
 much is that inherent in what you've been doing, and how much must be done=
 separately?  More to the point, how much remains to be done?

Anyway, once again, keep up the good work!

Timothy Collett

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
 -Teddy Roosevelt