Messages

1

Programming / Re: Supporting Multiple Platforms

« on: June 26, 2010, 03:47:16 PM »

I think its funny you piss on OpenGL yet one of sharplikes bullet points is "OpenGL audio and video system, using OpenTK."

This is like people screaming at Linux Hater because Blogspot's powered by Linux--it misses the point entirely.

OpenGL sucks, so I say so. That it is the only option for exactly what we want does not make it suck less--it makes it suck more, in a way, because there's no other option. I actively resent using OpenGL. Not because it's "open" or because it's "cross-platform," but because the API is absolutely Neolithic and it's an absolute shitshow to work with. Fortunately, one of our developers actually likes OpenGL and handles that so I don't have to.

On the other hand, I can just get things done in DirectX, and not really have to care about how it's done. Oh no, I can't target the almighty GAMEPARK 2X, but I can target the people who I actually care about.

I guess it will be interesting to see how long it takes (1, 2, 4 more releases?) before the mono side of things is abandoned in sharplike.

"Support" for Mono is if-and-when as it is; it exists because one of our devs has a Linux laptop. I personally could not care less, except in that I'm friends with a number of Mono developers and wouldn't want to bail on them when their project hasn't given me a reason to.

2

Programming / Re: Supporting Multiple Platforms

« on: June 21, 2010, 03:13:52 PM »

bad libs (win32/directx mainly)

"Bad"? Really? The DirectX libraries are vastly easier to use and often result in considerably more productive development--the time you spend reinventing the wheel using an Open?L solution is then spent actually doing what you want to do (and SDL/SFML are poor substitutes on their best day). The Sharplike team sorta-kinda cares about cross-platform capability (which is why we're using OpenTK), but I know that I personally would be a hell of a lot happier taking the DirectX route because it is considerably simpler to work with and use.

Our look on cross-platform development is "if it doesn't work on Mac/Linux, file a bug and we'll look into it when we can." It is not on my personal radar at all.

3

Programming / Re: Version control

« on: June 21, 2010, 03:09:34 PM »

Unless you are developing exclusively with Unix-based developers, git (it's not capitalized, by the way) is considerably inferior to Mercurial.

4

Programming / Re: Version control

« on: June 21, 2010, 05:13:35 AM »

CVS is crap. RCS is crap. Subversion is excellent at what it does.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 20, 2010, 09:54:28 PM »

Uh. 1.1? I don't know what the other two guys want to do, but I have no real plans to improve the library beyond 1.0, aside from bugfixes. 1.0 literally means "everything that we wanted is there"; anything past that is very much if-and-when. Sharplike is a project primarily for our own personal enjoyment; whether anyone other than us uses the library is not really a big concern for me personally, and I have a feeling that a lot of stuff will be looked at based on how interesting it may be for us to use.

As far as "ARRP," I don't speak for the other guys but I am much more interested in releasing code and games when they're done, not during a specific month. Sorry.

6

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 20, 2010, 06:35:00 PM »

Well, when I say "an @ walking around in 20 minutes," you have to realize I mean the following:

-a full tile system, with the ability to have walkable/nonwalkable tiles
-a paging, caching map of arbitrary size
-3D mapping, so you can make multiple pages and move up and down
-(in 0.6) full integrated pathfinding and line-of-sight
-(in 0.6) fluids - so you can just lay in water, lava, etc.

It's just the absolute basics that you see, but the software already supports pretty much everything that you'd want--it's mostly a matter of content generation (building your maps) instead of screwing around with reinventing the wheel. Which is kind of the point.


I expect us to hit 1.0 before September, so I have no idea.

7

Programming / Re: Version control

« on: June 20, 2010, 06:21:51 PM »

Yes, it is strange, because it doesn't give you the benefits of version control--which are essentially irrefutable.

Version control (usually) stores deltas of files. Changes are recorded, not entirely new files, along with a commit message--a message saying what these changes are. This lets you do a lot of things: you can trace the change of a file, you can effortlessly see the changes that might have introduced a new bug (i.e. if there's a bug in SomeObject, you can do a diff on SomeObject.cpp from revision to revision and see what's changed). It allows for much more coordinated collaboration between developers on the same project--two developers can work even on the same file, and so long as their changes don't directly override each others', any good version control system will merge your commits. If they do overlap, you'll be in a state of conflict, and you can resolve the conflicts manually and commit the fixed version in.

EDIT: For the sake of example: me and my devs have been working on Sharplike for about three weeks. We have around 270 commits from three developers. We regularly break things, and we regularly revert out to known-working versions and just keep on trucking. This vastly improves our productivity and lets us concentrate on working, instead of trying to remember what we did when we screwed something.

Basically: there's no good reason not to use version control.

8

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 20, 2010, 05:14:10 PM »

OpenCL is a part of OpenTK. As a rule we kind of hate "duct tape" code, that exists just to hook together a library with a new namespace. Like, we don't even have a "configuration loader" class/format...because we have System.Xml and we already pack the Nini INI library with out code. If someone wants to use OpenCL, they can.

That said, we may experiment with it for some stuff--like, have a faster noise implementation that works in OpenCL, and a .NET fallback.

And yeah, I agree, there's a pretty robust future for this code. We're not the best programmers ever to walk the earth, but we're pretty good, and we're focusing a lot on making the hard stuff transparent. I mean, after fixing the last embarrassing and stupid bug, I can write the start of a game--like, get an @ walking around--in maybe 20 minutes.

9

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 20, 2010, 03:11:46 AM »

As far as 3D goes, I was planning on the DF model of "layered" glyphs that you move up and down, one Z-level at a time. We currently don't (but probably should) have overloads for the various glyph display functions to allow for hinting as far as stuff that's a level "below" (in case a tile on Z-level 1 is transparent, the "far below" display for Z-level 0 should be rendered beneath it). For stuff like LoS, I don't see why it can't be made 3D. We haven't started writing that yet. =)

10

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 20, 2010, 12:39:00 AM »

Transparencies are fully supporting in basically all areas--I don't think there's anything that is expressly not transparency-capable.

I'm not much of one for video tutorials, but maybe we'll see about them. I'm working on a simple, straightforward text tutorial for creating a game right now.

11

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 19, 2010, 11:13:07 PM »

No multi-input, but that might be a feature request that we could do for 1.2 or something (i.e., after we get everything done _we_ want we can start looking into special requests that break API--if you'd like to see it sometime, post a Feature ticket in our system so we remember it when we get that far!).

Hexes...doubt it. Though I have a number of half-finished hex game engines in my files, I might polish one up and release it sometime.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 19, 2010, 07:48:07 PM »

Currently, no, there's a single size for glyphs (1x1). Later we could probably change that, but there's been no real need to do so yet. If we were to do it we'd probably create a single LargeEntity that was the parent of four smaller ones (or whatever size you needed), and moved them together. I don't think that would be difficult at all, now that I think about it.

As our code is C#, there is zero chance of using HTML5 or the like (not that I would anyway, I find the HTML5 spec catastrophically broken and nowhere near the Flash or Silverlight killer they say it is). Our code is relatively decoupled, though, and a Silverlight plug-in would be pretty easy to build (although possibly slow; there's no hardware acceleration for Silverlight, though there is for XBAP--which isn't cross-platform). There's nothing really stopping us from making networked games, especially with our message-passing framework. It'd be a pretty easy addition to the messaging system and we've been talking about it a little bit.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 19, 2010, 04:02:58 PM »

Ah. Well, here's the cool thing about our glyph system: so long as you are using a graphical rendering system (OpenTK, or our future planned Silverlight frontend), you can have as many arbitrary glyphs as you want. The default glyph set is 255, but our glyph palette doesn't care how many you have. So if you want to animate glyphs, just add more frames to the end.

Resizing of the play window is planned - we haven't figured out how to do so cleanly yet.

14

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 19, 2010, 03:56:57 AM »

I'm not exactly sure what you mean; I've never looked at Triangle Wizard. I can tell you that there's support for a number of glyph modifiers and other wizardry, and there's a post-logic, pre-render hook that can be used by applications if devs know what they're doing.

15

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Sharplike 0.2.0 released

« on: June 19, 2010, 01:10:39 AM »

Whoops. Thanks for the heads-up; one of us C&P'd it from elsewhere and forgot to format.

License: http://opensource.edropple.com/svn/Sharplike/trunk/Sharplike%20License.txt

Short-hand explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPAL