Re: [xsrcg-devel] objective-c, the project, design, updates

[Adam B. <co...@di...>]

On Jun 15, 2004, at 03:59 PM, Jesse wrote:

> that's great that you use FreeBSD as well.  i was worried that the
> GNU/Linux/*BSD support might be an afterthought.  it's definitely
> doable, and not difficult.
>

Even though I don't use FreeBSD as much anymore, it's not forgotten. 
And with the Cocoa/GNUStep stuff I've always thought it would be best 
to try and program as cross-platform as possible. Which seems pretty 
doable, unless you get into some of the new fancy Cocoa stuff I guess.

> one of the first design topics i want to discuss is file formats.  not
> necessarily for the CharacterFiles yet, but for the data files that 
> feed
> SR data into the program.  we could *possibly* just use property lists.
> or we could use xml (or whatever you guys were thinking previously).  i
> was messing with propertylists a little bit today, and there are
> built-in class methods to read and write them to files (from<->to
> NSDictionarys and NSArrays).  quite nice.  if we can figure out a file
> format pretty early on, it would allow us to mess around with stuff a
> little further.  for example, i could write a quick program that helps
> to populate the SR database from user input and/or flat files.
>

We had talked about doing XML, I think. I'm really keen on the idea of 
doing XML. It might be easier to work with in the long run, and it will 
possibly make our stuff more portable.

As far as what kind of XML layout, we have a few options I guess. We 
could design our own XML spec, we could copy NSRCG's verbatim, or we 
could use the XML definitions that Wordman has on his site. I believe 
that the NSRCG stuff is a watered down version of the Wordman stuff, 
but don't quote me on that. It's just a guess from what I've read and 
understand about it.

I sort of lean towards possibly implementing the Wordman stuff. It's 
extremely complete and covers everything we'd need as a character 
generator, and then some. So we might possibly want to do a similar 
Lite version.

The url for it is http://www.divnull.com/lward/srun/xml/ . I'm not 
super up on XML, but I've gone over his spec to some degree and it 
seems pretty usable. It's just quite large, so that's a hurdle there. 
Although it can be broken down pretty easily.


> i am really hurting for a good SRCG, too =).  that brings me to a
> question:  have either of you gotten the windows srcg to work under
> wine?  i really *hate* booting to windows because i've always got
> something going on (program compiling, video encoding).  i would love 
> to
> get it running in wine.  the bump that i hit is in the INSTALL!  it
> seems to install, and then tells me it can't create the program group,
> and then it proceeds to UNINSTALL.  it's completely ridiculous.  i was
> able to get the files installed once, but then they didn't work because
> they were missing OCXs, which i assume should have been installed by 
> the
> INSTALL program.  also, getting this program working might help in our
> development.  i don't particularly care for the program (used it once 
> in
> windows on a friend's machine), but it serves as our only example, and
> could be helpful.
>

I haven't tried getting NSRCG going under WINE is a long time. At least 
a year or more easily. I don't think I was ever very successful, 
although I do think I did get it to run at some point. You might try 
downloading all of the VisualBasic runtimes that it uses, which I think 
are what those OCX files it's looking for are.

The installer he uses is a pretty dumb installer and it's always had 
various issues. Even on XP it's sometimes tough to get it installed 
properly.


> let me know if either of you have had any luck in that area.  i'm
> running wine 20040408.
>
> also, could one of you get me on the sf project?  my sf username is
> 'omie'.
>

You're added. I kept meaning to ask what your sf username was...heh.

--
Adam Brown
co...@di...