Re: [Sc2-devel] Where do Star Control images come from?

[Michael C. M. <mcm...@st...>]

Alex!  Good to see you're still reading the lists.

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Alex Volkov wrote:

> I think Serge van den Boom (aka Meep-Eep) is in the process of rewriting
> that entire code, if he hadn't done so already. I saw some CVS check-ins of
> the new resource system code. So if you hadn't checked out from CVS
> recently, you should do so, as all of that code is going to change.

The packaging code has been committed; the reworking of the resource
system has not yet been done.  This has, indeed, been Serge's main coding
project for some months now.  All of the old resource and memlib code is,
to my knowledge, slated for destruction once it's done.

Much of UQM's code complexity comes from the number of layers in the code;
TFB had a rather involved framework that they used themselves (some of
that has actually been removed so as to use SDL directly, but much still
remains), then there's the SDL layer on top of the 3DO layer which is
itself presumably on top of the original 386 layer (the PC-specific
parts of which would have been removed before the 3DO source release).

Most of the grotesque features of the original code (deliberate buffer
overruns or undecidably messy pointer arithmetic with deterministic
results, for instance, both of which were common in the old graphics
code) were cleaned away by the time of 0.2.  There have been various
proposals for rearchitecting the game; we've been deliberately
shelving/ignoring those until all the functionality is present unless it
blocks us.  (It has, several times, and then we rearchitected just that
part.)  Most of the code itself worked when we got it, despite being
really messy, so we try not to touch it unless we have to (fixing bugs or
tieing in new backends, usually).

We may pay for this later, but by leaving the original code alone as much
as possible, we have a fully playable game at basically all times.

Oh, and also, this list is pretty quiet most of the time; the development
community is mostly at #sc2 on the Freenode IRC network
(irc.freenode.net).

--Michael