Re: Interested in starting some basic development

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Johnny Taporg wrote:

>> Well, nothing right now to be honest. As Magnus said above it
>suffers from
>> having only very few coders. 
>
>First of all, thanks for the answer, Christian.  Also,

Not answering would have been quite foolish ;)
If I get a possibility to wake interest in PPlay, I'll use it.

>I'm not going to give up on PPlay just yet - there's
>some specific stuff that I could use from you guys.

*grin* Let's hope you won't have to wait too long for it.

>Plus, I've seen open source projects go from "lot of
>talkers, few coders" to successful projects from
>having just one person plants a seed by starting to 
>code.

Thanks for these words. I'm getting quite depressed about PPlay from time
to time...

>> When it's usable, it will make game
>> programming easier by caring about much of the common tasks, e.g.
>fast file
>> access, 
>
>What does "fast file access" do?

"fast" means (optional) memory mapping, caching of files on hdd (to avoid
long cdrom seek times etc) and some other optimizations.

Perhaps I should have written "powerful file access" or so, as these speed
optimizations are very simple to do. The main part of the PPlay file
subsystem is aimed at giving game developers many comfortable ways to store
and access files, e.g. by supporting transparent access to PakFiles
(similar to WADs but more powerful), transparent access to files accross a
network (ftp/http/...) etc.

I'm currently reworking the PenguinFile design doc, you should have a look
at it: 
http://sunsite.auc.dk/penguinplay/PenguinDoc/PenguinFile/

>> 2d sprite control,
>
>Yes!  If you saw my other email, I listed some sprite
>libraries that I needed.  And I have yet to hear of
>one that does exist...

See Magnus' mail. Penguin2D sprite control is still far off. Hopefully
we'll have a tarball of the basic 2D system available next week, but that's
basically just surface control. The fancier high level features will come
later.

>> a basic GUI system,
>
>This, I'm questioning.  GUI seems very specific to the
>game.  It seems like in order to be useful for games,
>it would have to be incredibly themeable.  
>
>Perhaps it would be more useful to simply port GTK to
>GGI?

No, Gtk just isn't themeable enough ;)
Serious, you're completely right about the "incredibly themeable", and we
try to provide that. Or, more correctly, we want to build a basic system,
introducing concepts such as "window", "control", "mouse pointer", "menu
structure", "button" etc without enforcing any rules concerning the look
and feel. A button is something that can be pushed and has a binary state.
That's it.

On top of that a library of more or less concrete widgets will be built
with time.

The design spec of the system  is at:
http://sunsite.auc.dk/penguinplay/PenguinDoc/gui-draft/

>Maybe it would be a good idea to simply create 
>individual, special purpose libraries as the demand
>arises (I've got needs for some!  See my other email).
>Then, you can distribute the individual (finished!)
>libraries under the PenguinPlay name.  That way, you
>don't need to worry about questions like "when will
>PPlay be done?". :-)

That's more or less the way it is done right now. Most of the parts are
completely independent of each other, not only to faciliate the "release
date" issue but also to make it possible to freely mix them with code from
e.g. ClanLib or SDL or GAMES or ...


Cu
	Christian
--

"use the source, luke." (obi-wan gnuobi)