Re: [Adonthell-devel] high level libs (was: weather fx)

[ksterker]

Von: James Nash <address@hidden>
Datum: Donnerstag, 23. September 2004, 22:14

One thing I wonder is whether adapting an existing map engine to our backend 
and rpg code is really so much faster/easier than writing one from scratch. 
Remember the little v0.4 demo engine Alex put together? That was done pretty 
fast, if I remember correctly.

What I can more easily imagine is something between a full-fledged map engine 
and a gfx lib like SDL. Basically a renderer that can display the world we want 
to show to players. (with the abilities you descibe below, James). I think that 
would be cool, because we could plug in our 'AI' (i.e. python schedule 
controlled characters and beasts), our role playing system (items, combat, 
...), etc ...

Together with a lib for the user interface, that would already help a lot ... 
(one that might be interesting is wftk, from the worldforge people, although 
that one might be already too sophisticated for our needs :))

> Ok, as you know, I'm no expert on this stuff, but if we choose to use 
> someone else's front-end library it should support the features we were 
> going to implement, such as:
> 
> - the 16-bit style isometric 2D graphics we use :D
> - having 3D properties internally to allow for different height levels 
> on maps, jumping around etc.. as we discussed back at the 2002 
> summer meeting
> - cross platform support (wanna play Adonthell on my PowerBook as well 
> as my Linux box :P )

An ideal engine would sit on top of our abstraction layer, which would require 
some amount of porting work at first. However, it would be as platform 
independent as possible. 

Regarding portability (slightliy offtopic here):
Since I do all my development on OS X anyway, we shouldn't run into problems 
with that. Perhaps I'll even install a cross-compiler for making the win32 
version one day. (Getting it to build with cygwin might also be an option, 
although personally I believe that mingw32 is the better tool)

At least, with development occuring on both x86 and ppc, there won't be any 
endianess issues we first had with v0.3. There might be problems with 64bit 
though, unless we do something about our data type definitions.


Kai