On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Josh Glover <
address@hidden> wrote:
> WRT Adonthell, it might be worth considering using a game engine and a
> modern programming language, instead of inventing all our own custom
> wheels.
The engine is one thing ... but then there's still the problem of getting suitable art and other assets, and a fair bit of customization work to be done as well. But not really sure whether perhaps plenty of usable art and models exist for something like Unity or similar engines, which would address one of the major problems.
One thing I would enjoy is a more modern language, though. Even doing everything properly in C++-11 would be great (did a project at work completely from scratch in C++-11 and it was really a big step from the mess that Adonthell has grown into ;-)). Java or C# would be even better choices with regards to the ease of refactoring, speed of compilation and nice debugging tools ... although in case of C# that still requires a couple hundred $ worth of plugins on top of Visual Studio Pro. Might change for the better though, with stuff getting open sourced by Microsoft.
I also thought about doing some of the prototyping for the the dungeon crawler in Python, but while I like it as a scripting language for small things, I don't really feel comfortable doing more complex things in a language that isn't strongly typed.
> All those contributions won't go to waste if we learned
> something from contributing them (which I think we did).
That's for sure :-).
> On 12 January 2015 at 00:03, James Nash <
address@hidden> wrote:
> > Truth is, with work, personal life and other hobbies there’s rarely any time left to do anything worthwhile for Adonthell. In the early days of this project I was still at school / uni and I was single (:-P) which meant I had lots of time and energy to put into Adonthell.
Exactly the same here ... that hour late in the evening isn't quite enough to write code, especially not when it might get interupted any moment. And there's also less incentive to do more of the same after an 8,5 hour workday. (So this is another reasoning behind the dungeon crawler idea), So more often than not, this hour is now spent playing Point & Click Adventures (my 2nd favorite genre after RPGs, and there's been a bit of a Renaissance these past years [1]) or reading (done some catching up on Sci-Fi -- some Simmons and Asimov and Moorcock). Even on weekends it's hard to really shut everything else out and go into hiding for the time needed to get something productive done.
> > I’m intrigued by your dungeon game idea. If the Adonthell code (and gfx?) can find some new life there, then that would be lovely! I can only imagine how much passion, time and ingenuity has gone into that code over the years. Do let me know if you go ahead with that, I’d love to follow the progress and at least be a beta-tester :-P
As it would use a first person perspective, the only graphics that likely might get reused are some of the artwork, such as the ones found here:
.
Well, I still remember how it all began when Alex and you teamed up with me in '98, '99? And all those guys from around the world came on board. When we had to have our IRC meeting on Saturday evening GMT, so that people from Australia and the U.S. could all attend! That was really something special :-). Not to forget the days at Alex' or Benjamin's place ...
[1] If someone's into Point & Click Adventures, I really recommend the Depiona Trilogy. For something more serious, Chains of Satinav and Memoria. And for foul language and 80s references, Randal's Monday.