Re: Well...

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

Just a few comments...

On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Matt Slot wrote:
>  * You need to actively port to a wider range of platforms, as there are
>    very few Linux-specific game projects -- people want to keep their
>    options open. WinSock would be an obvious next step, and then BeOS and
>    the Mac.

Well, I don't have access to a Mac not BeOS at home. We have a 95 and NT,
but no compilers (except Delphi). I haven't written anything in C/C++ for
any other platform than Unix for a while, so it would be expensive in both
time and money to do a Windows-port.

>  * There are too many public classes and files to wade through. If a
>    novice had to choose between BSD Sockets and Zombie, it'd be simpler
>    to learn sockets.

*Very* few classes need to be used by the developer, but *all* classes are
nevertheless documented. Someday someone might have been interested in the
server-specific classes and could then easily have looked at them from the
docs. I think 75% of the classes are never used/seen by the developer. I
don't know what should be done to separate them, as the docs are
autogenerated by a tool.

>  * I think Zombie tries to do too much -- it's both a low-level API that
>    wraps BSD Sockets and POSIX, and a high-level API that does a bit of
>    administrative work (like teams and names) but nothing useful. Pick one
>    or the other, or architect it so that each layer is clearly distinct.

Could be. I thought they could be handy for someone, and would relieve the
developer from boring and error-prone code. Maybe I was wrong?

>  * You provide a few high-level services, but punt on the major issues like
>    synchronized timers or tracking client latency/bandwidth.

What are those? Seems quite 'over the top' for me.

It is comments like the above that are really needed every now and then by
every developer working on free stuff. It makes you feel that someone has
taken the time to check out your stuff and even find improvements. The
fact that everything seems to be badly designed, do the wrong thing at the
wrong place and even do it badly can be safely ignored for now. 

---------------------+------------------------------------------------------
 Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm |    CS at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
    Linux Inside     | I'm the blue screen of death, no-one hears you scream