Re: THE problem with xconq (long)

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>Linus wrote the original kernel in under a year.  Galactic Civilization
>(OS/2 game) was written in a little under a year.
>
>I don't claim to have written an RTS game before, but it seems to me that
>rather then trying to treat symptoms, that maybe more folks would be
>interested in contributing to a project using technologies that would be
>beneficial to them during the day and that were designed to deal with
>exactly the cross-platform and networking problems being discussed.

As a molecular geneticist, I have little use for either C or java during
the day. The code I deal with is mostly A, C, G and T. Nor do I have the
time to spend every waking hour on this project, like Linus did. I'm doing
this just for fun in what little free time I have.

This being said, I do agree that we should use the best technologies
available. I'm just not sure that java is the answer. It held great promise
once, but it didn't deliver. While it may work fine on some platforms,
support on others is less than perfect. Anybody who ever ran a java app on
the Mac knows what I'm talking about. Clunky, slow and prone to crashes. I
would say that if plain C is a Model T then java is perhaps a 1955 DeSoto.

I was sceptical about SDL at first, but in retrospect I think Stan made the
right choice. SDL is fast, smooth and stable. And it is amazingly easy to
port the code to new platforms. It took me less than one hour to fix
sdlconq so that it would compile and run on the Mac. Too bad the SDL
interface was not completed. Yet.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se