Re: How to continue

[David Philippi]

On Tuesday 11 June 2002 13:39, Ingo Ruhnke wrote:
> As long as the changes keep you at the code and give you motivation
> there are ok. I mostly do such cleanup work while I work on other
> parts of the code, instead of focusing directly on the cleanup.

Well, I probably don't like doing cleanup anymore then you. ;-)
The big difference is - you know the code. I'm forced to read the documents 
about the code (not much to learn yet), look into Doxygen (include graphs 
resembling fractals aren't very helpfull) or read the code itself (not 
really easy).
To change this I'm forced to do cleanup first to reduce the redundant 
information to a point where I can recognise it as such. Beeing a guy who 
likes to compile often to see wheter a small change works as expected, 
optimizing compile time is very importen too.
This certainly doesn't mean that I'm not bored by just doing cleanup. It 
means that I see no other way if I ever plan to understand Pingus.

> The editor needs some support for ClanGUI. Most objects currently have
> some properties, which don't show up in the editor and are only
> accessible via 'vim level.xml'.

If you provide a bit more detailed information, I can take a look at it. I 
may know much about C++ but I don't know nothing at all about GUI, graphic 
or game programming. That's one of the main reasons I'm interested in 
pushing Pingus forward: I want to learn by doing something usefull.

> ftp://pingus.seul.org/pub/pingus/contrib/ideas/

I read them all when you wrote the first mail. There are nice ideas, but 
sadly all of them are to unspecific for me right now.

> http://pingus.seul.org/todo/

There are only two points where I'm quite sure that I may help already are: 
fixing core dumps and optimizing the game itself.

> for some more issues that need to be resolved. Record/replay features
> would also be nice to have, but depending on how power full such
> features should get this could be a bit more complicated.

Complicated is a word with many meanings. I suppose most people would 
consider writing a Middleware which is a combined CORBA client and server, 
multithreaded and performance critical complicated. For me this doesn't 
really pose a problem since I've got experience with this type of 
programming.
If you see problems just on the level of C++, I won't fear them.

> There is also the good old pause problem which we currently have. The
> pause-button is simply too powerfull and makes gameplay rather
> slow/ugly (most of the time I go pause/forward/pause/forward/...).
> Solving this without completly removing the ability to pause the game
> would be good, some things like bullettime, limited pause, a special
> pause action for a pingu come to mind.

Well, what is the pause problem? Is there to much that can be done while in 
pause mode? Are there parts that don't react correctly so that the game by 
dump core?

> There are also quite a lot other gameplay issues which could need
> fixing. Pingus getting stuck in walls and other such things.

Explain me the relations between background, objects and a Pingu and I'll 
perhaps be able to help you there. ;-)

Bye David