Re: [Help-liquidwar6] About rules.xml

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi,

On Tue, January 27, 2009 1:32 am, Kasper Hviid wrote:
> How about I do some brainstorming for a few months. If I come up with
> something,  the menu might get some attention, after the high-priority
> tasks?
2 thumbs up!

> Glad you like it. After submitting this idea, I got a tiny bit of
> paranoia. I got notion that a large quantity of ideas, which a single
> sparetime programmer could never put into code by himself, might
> perhaps feel more like a burden than a inspiration.
Yeah, it's true any "new idea that comes in the path" delays the final
release. Really. But it makes no sense to just hurry and release something
hastily if it only matches my views on the game and players don't like it.
The worst program in the world is a program which has a 0-item wishlist,
it means it's a program which nobody is interested in ;) Therefore I try
and pay attention to suggestions, many cool features in LW5 were proposed
by players, and many of them I just didn't like at all when they were
first submitted. Today before I decide wether to code something or not,
several points are considered :
- will this improve the game popularity and ease-of-use for newcomers?
- what's the programming effort?
- is it cool?
- is it fun to code?

Please really don't worry about submitting ideas, this list is a good
plays for suggestions, brainstorming. Don't worry, if it's too complicated
or if I do not have enough time, I'll just let you know and won't code it,
it's as simple as it gets. And if the idea is really cool and the only
problem is coding time, maybe someone else will do it. It happens the
major problem with Free Software - AKA "Open Source", but I prefer "Free
Software" ;) - games is that they don't match player's expectation. There
are tons of cool lines of code arround, but they aren't running very often
just because they lack cool graphics, ease-of-use, humour, entertaining
music...

LW5 is no exception. I'm trying to do something better with LW6, but I'm
aware I'll very probably fall again in those common pitfalls. However,
I'll try. And I'll do my best. I'm sort of a "never give-up" man, it's a
bit out of topic for this list, but well, if LW6 has missed the "network
works in 2008" deadline, a good explanation is to be found in the fact
that I trained for this -> http://www.spartathlon.gr/

> Also, I don't get the same feeling of "being inside the game", when I
> move a mouse curser with no relation to the gamefield. Some kind of
> psykological thing. I just miss not being able to move through walls.
> :-)
mmm, I sort of agree. In fact, I did have to improve mouse support, there
were - and there are still - always complaints about the way mouse is
handled in LW5. So I decided to allow the mouse pointer to go anywhere. It
would have been unfair for keyboard users to just be blocked by walls when
the mouse isn't. Hey? So everyone can cross walls now. But... there's a
but ;) it's still an option (doesn't exist, not implemented, not a
priority, but technically possible and "not that hard") to decide that, in
some cases, walls can't be crossed. This would typically be a rules.xml
entry for it's a behavior all players must share - remember LW6 is
designed to be network oriented.

About the look of the cursor -> just don't worry, if you run "liquidwar6
--test" you'll see that the test suite displays some levels in ASCII art.
Cursors could really be represented "inside" the game if you wished. If I
had lots of time - HA HA HA - I would certainly code a "look as LW5"
rendering engine, but well, as you imagine, this is a very low priority
item in my TODO list.

> The first one is the image viewer in Adobe Bridge. Here, an extremely
> low-res preview of the image is shown in the short moment before the
> full-res preview is loaded. It's still fullscreen, but with lower
> resolution. I don't know how they do this. Maybe they only load some
> part of the image data.
Some image formats allow such preloading, many browsers support it. The
libraries I use certainly support this when it's possible however if I had
to implement it, I would just do it another way -> make in possible for
the map designer to put a "preview.png" file in the map folder, and let
the program load this. This preview could even be generated automatically
by a script in the upstream packages I maintain.

Have a nice day,

Christian.

PS: WOOOPS! I recently ran an "rm *" in my "tmp" directory and accidentaly
lost the sound files you submitted a few days ago. I tried to re-download
them but the entry had expired. Could you re-send them please? Thanks in
advance.

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/