Re: XARCHON Data files

[Ronen Tzur <rtzur@shani.net>]

Hello Joerg!

> Joerg Osarek wrote:

> > Yes, one problem is the thing with symbolic links for double images. My
> > opinion is
> > that this way to slow down animation is not tat pretty clean because you
> > never know how fast computers will be in 2 to 5 years. We have seen lots
> > of good DOS games
> > that are absolutely unplayable today if you don't have a CPU slowdown
> > program (a time
> > wasting program that consumes CPU time).

XArchon works at a constant frame rate - 40 frames per second.
On a slow machine you might get less than 40fps, but who has a slow
machine these days?  ;-)

> >
> > Therefore my suggestion is to do two things:
> > 1) have every image only once. But have a config file in every image
> > directory - or
> > if you like that better - a central config file per theme where you can
> > define how long
> > each image of a certain character shall be displayed in milliseconds. The
> > rendering
> > machine of XARCHON would be responsible to guarantee the update to the
> > next image to happen only after the defined time in milliseconds. This
> > would ensure that XARCHON is playable in 10 years.

That would be precisely the same as putting additional X symlinks, except it 
is 'handled' differently (by using the config file instead of the symlinks).   
What is better, that might be a matter of opinion.   And on the other hand, 
the symlink approach is already implemented, so naturally I favor it...

> > 2) Keep the file based structure for every image because it is an easy
> > way for theme developers to create and test themes. The concept is simple
> > and good. A theme developer should not have to program in C to submit a
> > new theme. I think this would prevent people from doing work for XARCHON.

I think there would be the 'classic' datafile that comes with the game and has 
the original theme, and any further themes would have their own datafiles.
The game should notice the presence of these other datafiles, and consider 
them as extra themes.

All this, without a theme developer having to touch any C code while preparing 
the theme.

> > The strength today is that XARCHON themes are based on open standards.
> > If you do think the one-datafile-attempt is a good Idea it should at
> > least be built that way that a theme developer can develop the way it is
> > now and then for example call a script the programmers provide to "pack"
> > the theme into one file.

Regarding that last paragraph, yes, I was thinking exactly about that.   
Having a "pack" tool to convert a directory (which might also contain 
symlink) into the datafile, and an "unpack" tool to ... well you get the idea 
;)

Underneath the datafile, everything remains the same - xpm files, and a 
file/directory structure, and all the other things we're used to.  Except 
that instead of distributing them as separate .xpm files, they all come to be 
under the umbrella of the single datafile.



Sounds better I hope?