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MSWL Olmec PBEM Soccer Game GPL'ed
zeb writes "MSWL is one of the most popular PBEM football (soccer for North Americans) game, which is itself a variation of a game of postal soccer invented by Alan Parr in England around 1970. In this game, each manager has to organise his team, manage fatigue, train his players and trade them.
Olmec is a game engine written by Alla Sellers. It helps the commissioner (game master) to simulate the games and publish the results. Allan has decided to release the source code of Olmec under the GPL, so that everyone can enhance the program.
The actual version of Olmec is written in Visual Basic and uses MS Access as a database. The author suggests Olmec could be rewritten in a multiplatform language, for example Java, using MySQL as the database. This task is made easy because of the rich documentation about the game engine (PDF format)."
If you don't like that, this is sure to piss you off:
http://home.att.net/~r.jarrett/bNES.html
It was the first release quality, full speed NES emulator to be written entirely in Visual Basic.
I contributed most of the graphics and sound code, but stopped working on it during v1.3, and the author has since rewritten large portions of it, fixing some major bugs but introducing many new ones in the process.
I recall having played -very- fast shoot 'em up platform games written in Amos Basic on a 8 MHz Amiga 500 about 12 years ago.
Todays PC's are simply too fast for most uses, so a game written in basic, even a bloated implementation like Visual Basic, is possible.
What kind of load that choice will impose on the target system is a completely different issue though.
The most popular is, hands down, Championship Manager.
(Ref sites:
www.sigames.com
www.thedugout.net)
Has MSWL been able to implement 10% of the features of CM?
> Having uncommented code is a hell of a lot better than having no code at all.
Agreed.
And the open source model means that someone can come along and fix that problem and many others. And yes I sympathize with doing reverse engineering. In my first job I reverse engineered Novell's DOS TCP/IP API and it's ugly work. Of course, having the code would have made my life easier.
But... that's not a good reason to object to the idea that open source software can do better. It can set a high standard.
> That's what I do with the commentless code I get from my co-workers. Do I bitch at them to add comments?
I truly believe that this is a mistake. I believe that either you or they should be fixing that situation so that the third person to look at the code understands it quickly and easily.
> Code is what runs ! Code makes me money ! I don't want these guys oppressed by my bitching of some bureaucratic requirements doc or checkin procedure.
I was *not* suggesting bureaucracy, I was suggesting that code can be made clearer by comments and that in the long run makes it more maintainable and that will make you and me more money (in the closed source world).
John.
It's not an acronym unless you pronounce it as if it were a word, like 'scuba', 'radar', 'sonar', 'SNAFU', 'FUBAR', or 'NASA'
Holy cow, I guess I've been pronouncing GPL wrong! Let alone PCMCIA! =)
...then why bother with MySQL? Use HSQLDB, an open source 100% Java database. The more hoops users have to jump through the fewer users will use the software. With an all-Java solution there's just one thing to install, and no configuration necessary.