Re: [freesci-develop] FW: goodmorning all

[Christoph Reichenbach]

Robbert,

  welcome to the FreeSCI mailing list! :-)

  As you noticed, our pace has slowed down quite a bit;  while we're still
meeting to discuss ideas and implementtion in IRC here and there, most of the
recent improvements have been part of the ScummVM team's attempt at cleaning
up our code prior to inclusion into their system (which may or may not happen,
but that's a different discussion).

  Still, while we're busy with our lives right now, we're not dead yet, and
often available on IRC (#freesci on the Open Projects Network), and, of
course, via e-mail.

> I am an Visual Studio .NET developer for years now - started programming
> in Turbo Pascal when I was about fourteen years old. 

  Oddly enough, that's the same programming language I started out with ;-)

> Though I never worked with linux and source repositorys (svn) I would
> like to help out where I can. 

  Thank you very much for the offer!  We're badly in need of a Win32 developer
to help us straighten out and package FreeSCI for your platform.
Theoretically, most of the files you'd need for Visual Studio .NET should be
there (to my recollection), thanks to Matt Hargett, Jim Albert, Alex Angas and
others, but I'm not sure whether they are current.  Also, my statement only
holds for the stable version, not for the unstable (``glutton''):  to my
recollection, someone (Matt?) managed to build Glutton on Win32, but it
crashed right away.  I'm not sure if the neccessary Visual Studio .NET files
are checked in, and I don't know where the bug might be coming from.

  To get you started:  we have moved our repository to Darcs.  I've put up an
appropriate link on the homepage (on the development page); you should be able
to get a Darcs client via that link.  Then you only need to do ``darcs pull
<repository name>'' to get the sources, and with some luck they might build in
Visual Studio right away ;-)

  Here are some open issues on Win32 I'm aware of:

  - Glutton doesn't work (crashes, may not build ATM)
  - Graphics may be slow (unconfirmed; we have two graphics drivers for Win32:
    DirectX (thanks to Alex Angas!) and SDL (whose performance Walter van
    Niftrik recently improved-- I don't know how efficient the DirectX driver
    is, but we've noticed that the SDL one is quite inefficient, noticeable on
    low-end platforms, particularly WinCE portables).
  - config.c sometimes doesn't build, but this should be taken care of now.
    Note that config.c is auto-generated, so fixing it by hand doesn't
    permanently solve any build problems you might run into with it.


  So, that being said, you _should_ be able to get the stable branch working,
hopefully without too much of a hassle.  Glutton (the development branch) will
be more of a challenge, but might still work.

> With some help getting the sources compiling under my enviroment I would
> be able to do some work also. Now that projects are done at work.

  Please let us know if you need any help!  I'm generally unavailable Mon-Thu
during the day (MDT) due to various obligations and have limited time during
the rest of the week (due to other obligations), but I will try to get back to
you as fast as I can if you need help with anything or have questions.  Also
feel free to drop by in IRC, which may give you answers more quickly in some
cases.

  I'm planning on taking half a day off saturday morning (should be around
14:00-20:00 UTC) to work out some kinks in the sound subsystem; thta would be
a good time to meet in IRC if you want some help with setting things up.

-- Christoph