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Re: XARCHON Data files



Hello Ronen,

I have the following feedback about your suggestion to put everything into one
datafile.
My point of view is from a theme creators angle.

At the moment it is easy to create new themes because we use low level standards
like
XPM files that can be edited by hand or can be wonderfully manipulated by using
NetPBM Tools (as I do).

My actual way of working  is: create an able-to-animate 3D file, render all the
resulting
images by script, convert them to xpm, make them transparent and reduce colours
also by script and voila - there is the result.

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).

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.

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.
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.

What do you all think about my viewing angle?

regards
Joerg Osarek


Ronen Tzur wrote:

> Hello everyone!
>
> I've been thinking a bit about the data files in xarchon.  Most notable is the
> issue with symlinks:  the sprite loading routines can identify two or more
> data items that are the same (one being a real file, the others being a
> symlink to it).
>
> In the move to cvs, all the symlinks have disappeared.  Perhaps this can be
> fixed, but I vote for one large data file containing all the data items,
> instead.   It feels more clean, and might even speed up the initialization.
>
> I may be thinking a little too much ahead here, but it should also ease the
> deployment of new themes.
>
> How does that sound?