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Arx Fatalis Updated, Released Under GPL
Kevin Fishburne writes "According to WtF Dragon at Ultima Aiera, 'The long and short: Arkane Studios have released what is probably going to be the final patch for their Ultima Underworld-inspired game (which, indeed, they tried to license as the third entry in that series), Arx Fatalis. They have also released the source code for the game. That's right, the complete source of Arx Fatalis is available for download.' The readme notes that the original game installation is required in order to play the compiled game, as the data files are certainly still copyrighted. Linux is in need of a good FPS dungeon crawler, though the code will need a hell of a lot of cleanup as it's a VC8/9 project and uses DirectX (ugh...)."
An OS zealot and a homophobe, rolled up into one!
Do any of you people have any idea what an HINSTANCE is, anyway? As someone who has written code on both Win32 and free Unix-type OSes I find this all very odd. Would I criticize you for using some mundane typedef like (picking one at random) pthread_t? Of course not.
It's a Windows game written in C or C++. I expect there to be Windows-specific code. Is that really that evil? How do you expect them to accomplish their goals if they don't use some things that are specific to the platform they're targeting.
From a software engineering perspective the right way would be to isolate that platform-specific code to a clean set of modules. But let's be honest - the cleanest code is not always what gets shipped. How many GTK+ or Qt apps on Linux break the abstraction by calling directly into Xlib? I'm not sure about these days, but when I last developed for the platform the answer was "a lot".
I think a bunch of you guys need to grow up, or take a deep breath or something. Stop being so judgmental. These guys are kind enough to give you the code, and all you can say is it's not written with your favorite set of libraries.