Re: [kidsgames] Generic adventure game engine

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Manuel Gutierrez Algaba wrote:

> Ok, my point is that compelling reason for most people are not
> long-goal-good-quality-products.
> These are the compelling reasons:
> - For the newbie programmer. Do something, with poor style but
> maybe good looking.
> - For the "geek". "Heavily technical" stuff, like handling
> sockets and IO in C, unbearable C++/C structures , lots of graphics
> (hardwired).
> - For the "user". Well, the user never helps, and the more popular
> Linux is, the more sad is to feel that _potential_ that the user
> doesn't want to feed-back, sometimes for his own indirect benefit.

That's pretty insulting.

Into which of those catagories would you put:

   The GIMP.
   Ghostscript
   Tcsh
   TuxRacer
   KDE
   NQC
   LeoCAD

...heck - we'll toss in one of mine too:

   TuxKart.

None of them are written by newbies, they are all extendable in one
way or another - or at least 'open ended'.
 
> Open source is not Clever source, I fear. The Clever source (Gnome,
> emacs , and stop counting) has been produced by clever individuals
> with clear ideas of what they wanted to.

Woah! Gnome and Emacs are both OpenSource. If you are going to remove
from the catagory of 'OpenSource' everything that you find to be
'CleverSource' then of course what's left is junk.

> How many Java based programs
> do you know that hold classes that are not reusable ( a sin
> in OO programming) ?

Nobody said you have to make things re-usable at the microscopic
level within a program.  If you do, it's generally a waste of
effort.  If I want (say) a routine to draw a dodecahedron - it's
much easier to write a new one than it is to trawl through the
entire web looking for one - only to find that it doesn't work
*exactly* how I want it to.

Code re-use in the context of such a wide-spread community is
at the level of entire code libraries.  Hence, GIMP gave us
GTK, TuxAQFH/TuxKart gave us PLIB.

I'll talk about my software as an example - only because I
happen to know it well:

  TuxKart contains a total of 44,000 lines of code - almost
  all I which I wrote.  I'm a geek - so it's full of that
  '"Heavily technical" stuff, like handling sockets and IO
   in C, unbearable C++/C structures...' (well, I don't think
   the C++ structures are unbearable - but I'm a geek).

  However, of those 44,000 lines of code, 40,000 are in the
  PLIB library suite - which is written in classical OOP
  style (albeit in C++) and which is now in use in over 100
  OpenSource projects.

  Less than 10% of TuxKart code is not re-used at least 100 times.

  Beneath that, PLIB uses freeglut and Mesa (both OpenSourced)
  giving a total code-reuse of better than 99% for the entire
  TuxKart package.  That's good by ANYONE'S standards.

If I was the only one who worked like this, you'd perhaps have
grounds for complaint - but I'm not. Every other package I work
on or have contact with builds upon (and frequently exports)
libraries that are also for other things.

FlightGear - for example - re-uses PLIB and exports SimGear
and TerraGear which are the parts of FlightGear that might
well be useful to (respectively) other simulation projects
and other terrain/geographic-information-systems.

PrettyPoly - re-uses PLIB, FLTK, Python and will export
an editing core (PEC) that can be incorporated into games
as the basis an in-game level design tool.

Code re-use is alive and well - it just doesn't operate
at the microscopic level because it simply isn't all that
USEFUL at that level.  I want to re-use modules of tens
of thousands of lines of code - not silly little 20 line
classes from some tiny Java program.

Now - what was it you were complaining about?

> Pity  you didn't understand the underlying concepts TeEncontreX
> has. Somehow is related to XML and the family of marking languages.

I couldn't understand it either...but I'll put that down to the
language barrier.

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net>
              WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net


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