Re: [Adonthell-devel] Website rewritten, development stopped

[Alexandre Courbot]

Oh, my. It's almost 10 years since my last commit to this project. And my last email as well probably. >_<

Time has passed and things have changed so dramatically.

Linuxgames.com does not reply anymore. The Linux Game Tome is dead. Freshmeat.net has disappeared (seriously, when did that happen?)

It's all but gone. Still, those years developing this project with you all remain my best memories of the times when we were using CRTs. :) Just remembered that we even ported Adonthell on the Sharp Zaurus! That was some cool stuff. And the IRC meetings! How lucky we were to be there during these times.

Nowadays, I guess an amateur project needs to be some shit-ass closed-source free-to-play scam running on iOS to gather a bit of interest. As Kai mentioned there are now plenty of quality RPGs on Linux, but as far as I can tell none on this list is open-source or developed by the community. What we did with Adonthell, we did it out of pure passion, and although the result does not rival with what kickstarter-backed projects can do today, we managed to gather enough good will from various skilled people to release an actual (small) game that was appreciated by the community. Not too bad for a group of beginners at a time when dial-up was still mainstream! (and how did we even survive without git?)

Anyway, to my dismay I could not even compile the latest 0.4 code on my Arch system - it was not too happy that Python 3 was the default (that was easily fixed using ccmake), and then some of the STL code was apparently too obsolete for GCC 5.3. But I was delighted to see that the 0.3  Waste's Edge package for Arch compiled and installed gracefully, minor some warnings. I could even play a bit, even though the keyboard input was kind of broken with each keypress being sent twice (!). But wow, the dialog engine! The NPCs behaviors scripted in Python! That was cool stuff for that time. I may spend one evening sometime to fix that and maybe even adopt the Arch package out of nostalgia.

Urrk. I feel like I got old. Maybe in another 10 years there will be a new golden age of free software, and someone will dig out Adonthell? Hopefully we will still be sane and relevant enough to provide some guidance to these kids and transmit them the spirit, before it is gone for good.

"Listen to the water
that surrounds our shore -
To the wind
that blows into our face -
To the stories they tell
before all disappears in darkness"

- Tomas Hterin
Fare thee well, Adonthell

On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 5:48 AM, Kai Sterker <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hey everybody!
>
> Hope you guys are all well and enjoying 2016 so far!
>
>
> Last year has been a busy one for me, where I haven't written a single line
> of code (outside of work). So I finally decided to officially announce end
> of development on the Adonthell website. Turns out that this itself wasn't
> in a good shape, as SSI were no longer functioning. So I checked for the
> next best thing and replaced them with JS and Document.Write calls. Which
> led to warnings due to the table-based layout. So I went the extra mile and
> converted everything to a more modern CSS-based layout. And here it is:
> (hopefully) unchanged on the outside, but fresh and valid XHMTL 1.0 strict
> on the inside:
>
> http://adonthell.nongnu.org/
>
> Please let me know if you detect anything out of the ordinary. It's tested
> with latest Firefox, Safari 9, IE 8 and 11, as well as a number of mobile
> browsers (iOS 5, Android 4.2 and Blackberry OS 10.3).
>
> Speaking of mobile, I tried my best to make the site work nicely, but given
> the fixed-width content column, there's only so much to be done without
> spending more time than necessary.
>
>
> Anyway, as already discussed a year ago, Adonthell has served it's purpose,
> and given the availability of high-quality, native Linux RPGs, there is no
> longer a gap to fill. I listed a number of current and upcoming, story-based
> RPGs on the website, but there are two in particular that I'd like to point
> out here as well:
>
> [*] Pier Solar was initially released in 2010 for the Sega Genesis, but
> there's a more recent "HD" remake available for PC and current consoles.
> It's the only one from the list that has the 16bit era look and feel that we
> tried to convey with Adonthell. Haven't played it myself yet, but I'll
> definitely give it a try.
>
> [*] Project Resurgence is a classic western RPG with a vibe similar to
> Arcanum: Of Steamwork and Magick Obscura, currently live on Kickstarter.
> Since a lot of the games with Linux support were originally crowdfunded, it
> seems only fair to give back a little. So consider helping them out if
> that's the kind of game that interests you.
>
> See http://adonthell.nongnu.org/news/ for those and more. Let me know if
> there are glaring omissions on the list. I only added recent, high-quality,
> story-based games I have at least a little knowledge about.
>
>
> Finally, there's the matter of preserving the work that we've spent on
> various parts of Adonthell. With the overhaul, the website should be fine
> for the years to come, and all the design stuff on the Wiki should also be
> around in the future. What I plan to do is check on Waste's Edge and make
> sure that the code compiles on modern systems and with current libs. Maybe
> release 0.3.6, if changes are necessary. Since I am on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS,
> that will probably have to wait until after the release of 16.04, as that'll
> be more modern than what I currently have.
>
> Aside from keeping the source compiling, following the SDL mailing list, it
> appears that official SDL 1.2 no longer works (or has issues) on newest OSX.
> So I plan to verify that and update our binary with an SDL build from
> source. Maybe I even manage to properly sign the package, if that is at all
> possible without an developer account. If anyone here runs OSX 10.10 or
> 10.11, would be nice to give Waste's Edge a try. Our Macbbok Pro is still on
> 10.9 and I am quite reluctant to upgrade.
>
> I would also like to finally provide a 64bit binary for Windows. Though
> since I upgraded my PC last year, I got completely rid of it. So I may have
> to look into cross-compiling stuff. Testing might be possible in the office
> then, although my own work laptop is only 32bit. Shouldn't be too hard to
> find some lucky test subject, though.
>
>
> As always, any help with the preservation phase is appreciated. If you run
> up-to-date Linux and can check compilation of v0.3, or test the OSX binary
> on El Capitan sooner than I can manage that would be great. But I should be
> getting around to it eventually. Or if you find other bits that have rotten,
> that I am not even thinking about, let me know as well.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Kai
>
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