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Games Come to Pidgin
Tovok7 writes "Free software instant messengers have long been lacking the support to play games with your friends. The waiting is finally over, because today Pidgin Games was released. It comes as plugins for the popular Instant Messenger Pidgin and is running under Linux and Windows. The special thing about Pidgin Games is that it is written in the new programming language Vala which has a C# like syntax, but compiles to pure C."
Bloat Comes to Pidgin
Why have I never seen Vala featured on Slashdot before? If anything, the language intrigues me, and seems to be a nice way to get OO GTK going on without silly C hacks or writing it in Perl/Python.
When on earth did this happen?
- oZ
// i am here.
I thought they just spent all their time removing features for new releases these days.
I don't understand how years and years back, Gaim had rudimentary support for voice and video (the most requested feature) and tons of other features. In the past 3-4 years of development, voice and video was never finished and is no longer an option to even compile in I do believe. And instead of new features, I keep seeing more and more features removed to streamline the app.
I'm not sure it has moved forward in years.
I'm waiting for kopete on Windows.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Games. There's a rather useless feature, if you ask me. I feel like the effort would have been better allocated toward something like, say, voice/video chat. I've been waiting on this one for years. But no, games.
I use Pidgin. No one I chat with does.
For simple instant messenger games, wouldn't a virtual machine suffice? I'd just find it easier to trust a game someone's happened to write for this if it presented far less risk to my system.
Where is the Audio and Video?!
(Formerly FunPidgin) Forked after the resize box debacle. http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/
No sig, sorry.
Look, I know it's open-source and they're doing it for free and yadda yadda yadda.
But try making a functional prog before adding more plugins we don't care about!
Oh, you must mean Finch. But could someone port, say, a tetromino game to run on top of Finch?
I know it's not the same as how it used to be, but now (as of at least 2.4.2) you can set a minimum number of lines for the text box. If you go over that number of lines, the box grows.
Custom Emoticons isn't "stalled", he regenerated into David Tennant 3 seasons back.
Most if not all internet based games have a layer of chat behind it, is almost a plugin. That a chat program have could games as plugin is something potentially good. Connecting people is the 1st step, maximizing what they can do together is the 2nd one, and games fits perfectly there.
The next steps is to have an standard for implementing those games in more chat clients/platforms, and of course, adding good multiuser games.
I thought I'd have a look, but no it wouldn't install go figure.
Before I go on: I use pidgin for all my chatting activities, and it is an invaluable tool for me.
That said one has to wonder why Pidgin takes longer to startup than does OpenOffice Writer...
Luckily though, I only start it once a week, the day after booting into Windows for lan games.
As you humorously point out, C++ started simply as C with Classes and was a pre-processor which convert a C language with extension for classes, onto pure C.
So yes, Vala is only the circle coming back to its starting point. (in a way which almost reminds the wheel of reincarnation)
But the subtle reasons that makes that Vala matters today, is that C++ has since long become a language of it own, which is not any more simply pre-processed into C, but compiled on its own.
C has still a couple of advantage in some specific situations (is simpler to compiler ; even more hardware has C compilers thatn C++ and/or Java ; etc.)
So a C-based GObject system has some peculiar advantages over the objects found in C++ or Java, which makes it useful in a select number of situation.
Except that, due to its heavy reliance on macro preprocessor hacks, C programs using GObjet are ass-ugly, and trying to creates one's own GObject class is headache-inducing.
Vala comes as a nice preprocessor which gives some simple syntax, yet still produce C at the output, something that C has stopped doing for some time.
And the good thing it that, down hill, that C GObjet can have bindings automatically generated for a really big number of languages. Which is not the case with C# against which Vala is directly competing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...that cause it downhill to create a world in which a furious community is playing networked multi-player nethack from their Finch IM, while the rest are trying to get eaten by a grue.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Was I the only one who read the title and first thought it meant a game was being made in a pidgin language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin)?
Then I woke up and realized, no, this is slashdot, 10% really interesting news stories, 90% linux gibberish (to me personally, not trying to flamebait here).