Re: [Super-tux-devel] SuperTux's future (that brilliant?)

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

Ricardo Cruz <ri...@ae...> writes:

>  While implementing a new bad guy, I could see how much the code
> sucks for extensability. Really, how do we expect to have scripting,
> lots of great enemies and scoped tiles, if all stuff is hard coded!

I don't think that scripting will ever be usefull for coding enemies.
Scripting can however be very usefull to customize enemies (change
there speed, etc.), but it becomes useless for coding them. After all
an enemy can do all kinds of weird things in the engine when required,
you can't get that from scripting unless you start to export every
damn little bit of the engine, but then you spend much more time with
wrappering than with scripting the enemies, so you'd better code them
in C in the first place. I think scripting will mainly be usefull for
custom events in the levels, ie. have dialog-boxed pop-up when the
enemy approaches, for scripting little in-game cut-scenes and such
stuff that can't be all that easily done in C and especially shouldn't
be done in C, since its artistic content and doesn't belong in the
core engine. 

>  It took me half an hour just to add a basic bad guy.

Half an hour doesn't sound that bad.

>  Tobias told me in the IRC that he was not thinking about a C++
> port.

At this current point it would really makes no sense to port to C++,
the engine is up an running (well, almost) and we should care about
content, levels and getting the gameplay right, not about which
languaged was used to implement the stuff.

> That was my last hope for a redesign of SuperTux and I really felt
> like abandoning the boat. 

After milestone1 we can do whatever we want, we can throw the whole
engine away and use wolfman8k's python engine or reuse the windstille
engine (which btw. is from a gameplay point of view far behind
Supertux) or recode supertux in C++ or whatever, but that is something
to decide after milestone1, not right now.

If somebody wants to just compile with C++ and use std::string instead
of frickling around with char* I am all for it, but that something
else then rewriting everything as classes.

>  These months are crucial for SuperTux, if it doesn't improve it
> will probably die. I don't think there is anyone willing to start it
> over and over again. In my opinion, we should focus our attention in
> releasing the next version by putting the gameplay as it was before
> and adding a few levels.

Yep, exactly, we should focus to get the basic gameplay right now, not
about how we can extent the engine with some super-duper-thingy which
I can't currently even think of. As far as it looks like for me at the
moment all enemies planed for Milestone1 should be doable with the
current engine, after all, most of them are pretty similar to the
current ones, just with little modifications in the behaviour and the
look. My only goal at the moment is to get milestone1 good enough, if
after that all people agree that the codebase is unusable for
extension we have to find a solution, but we aren't there yet, so we
should better stop discussion this and get back to work.

-- 
WWW:      http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/ 
JabberID: gr...@ja... 
ICQ:      59461927