Well, I'd say if you have an 'older version', meaning anything from before my last checkin at 11:20pm last night, then I'll blame that.:-) More seriously, though, I'm not developing with Forge installed; but it should work, and I will eventually try it.
As for Origin, we've had no contact yet, although we're going to try. If they get nasty, I'd rather know now so I can go onto other things; but I'm really hoping they'll help us, or at least stay neutral.
Since you mentioned exult, I'll provide a bit of information:
We do have quite a ways to go before the game is playable, but progress has been much better lately. Two other developers have joined the project, one doing sound & config., the other doing the Win32 port (which is fairly straightforward, since Exult was converted to SDL a couple months ago).
It's true that U7 was written with a terrible memory manager; but one thing they did right was to have the entire plot of the game controlled by a script called 'usecode', which was then compiled into bytecode for a virtual machine (similar to the way Java works). A couple other guys figured out the 'usecode' bytecode and wrote an assembler and dis- assembler for it. And using that info., I've written an interpreter. So... conversations are working; you can open/close doors; and various flags/variables that control the plot are getting updated. But there are still several internal functions that aren't yet understood.
Re:SuSE making inroads in the North American marke
on
SuSE 6.4 Announced
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I've become quite attached to Suse (6.2), for a few reasons. One is that I like the single non-GUI YAST tool that does pretty much everything without a lot of fuss. Second is that they do a nice job of setting up the defaults for the window managers like KDE and FVWM2, and they include all the nice icons that I used to have to download. Third is that their X-config. tool, SAX, is really excellent, better than most Windows screen utils. And fourth, I find it mildly amusing when they occassionally forget to translate a dialog item or manual topic from German.
This is a dumb question, but didn't they start out in the early 80's selling MINCE (Mince is Not Complete Emacs)? I remember using it on a VAX, and then on my Atari ST.
...I and a few others are working on reverse-engineering it to run under Linux using the original data files. This may take years, but it's GPL, and you can take a look at "exult.sourceforge.net".
Ultima6 might work, since it works fine in DOS emulation under OS/2 (which I keep around because it's better than DOS emulation in Win95, for some reason). But forget U7 and U8, as they have wierd memory managers that prevent them from running under anything but true DOS or a virtual machine like VMware.
A few years ago, Ken and Roberta Williams sold their company to a larger corporation (forgot the name). They continued on for a while; but from what I can tell they're now retired. The entire facility near Yosemite, CA was let go about a year ago, so the old Sierra of adventure-game history is gone. However, I recently exchanged email with an employee of a game company that's setting up a new site there, and hiring lots of the former Sierra employees. And, he reads Slashdot, and is pushing for multiplatform development, so maybe there's some hope for the future.
I wanted to play Ultima9 when it came out, and knew that it came with a Glide and Direct3D binaries. Since (1) I'd heard that Glide was generally more efficient and stable than Direct3D, (2) that Glide had long been supported in Linux, (3) that the X-server for 3DFX cards, while new, was supposed to be one of the best available, and (4) that a Voodoo3 was only $99 US, it was a pretty easy choice.
It was also the right choice for me, since the Direct3D version of Ultima9 turned out to be extremely buggy and slow, while the Glide version was stable and performed reasonably, even on my modest K6/333 machine.
I agree, SDL is becoming a great library for multi-platform game development. It's low-level, extremely simple, and hardly incurs any overhead. And I notice on the SDL newsgroup that lots of the people using it are using it on Windows. It still has a way to go, such as builtin MIDI support; but it's getting enhanced all the time.
How will these kids survive in the modern world without knowing how to use MS Word? Can you imagine your son or daughter showing up at his or her first job, and then looking like a fool for not knowing how to use the Win95 "Start" menu? Can you run "Math Blaster" on Linux? No! So how are the students to learn math when they can't shoot laser beams at the problems?
Besides, where's the corporation standing besides this home- grown Linux stuff? When the network goes down, who can you call for support? Microsoft spends billions of dollars developing innovative AI wizards for keeping their software running with zero administration. How can open source compete with that?
Hmm... When I read one of those Windows-oriented rags, like PCWeek or Family Computing, I often feel like I'm reading something in a foreign language. Maybe those should count.
Sounds like a perfect situation for switching to Linux and open- source software. Even a 486 with 16Mb will do fine running X with one of the smaller window managers like Blackbox. And do kids really need to bother with a fancy word processor when they really need to concentrate on content?
Their software costs would head towards zero, and they could probably get lots of free hardware from people like me who don't know what to do with their leftovers after upgrading. The kids would learn some Unix skills, become familiar with hardware, and could also get introduced to programming, just as in the better-endowed school featured in the article.
What struck me as a bad idea is that all this "symlink" information is stored in a central database, as opposed to using "symbolic link" files like Linux/Unix do. So if you happen to have a power failure when one of those databasee sectors is being written, your entire multi-gig disk could be essentially hosed.
Wasn't Myst written by just a couple guys, maybe along with one artist and one sound person? I'm pretty sure Cyan was a very small company; they just got a big company, Borderbund to publish their game.
Yes, I mostly agree. But still, I'd think that an important part of architecture and design is choosing tools and libraries that don't tie you into a single platform, since it may not be the only place you want to be when your game is done 2-3 years later.
I agree, these things are almost always 2 or 3 years out of date, which is an eternity in the game world. Along with looking at others' code, you can also learn a lot about the latest techniques from various web sites, starting with Gamasutra.
But all that aside, even if the book has some good information, I just won't buy it if all the examples are for Windows. What I'd like to see is a book on multiplatform game development, using libraries like SDL and OpenGL.
... and you didn't even mention FrameMaker, which is currently in beta. Among word processors, I count:
1. FrameMaker - Hard to learn, but the most powerful. 2. StarOffice - Takes lots of RAM, but full-featured. 3. WordPerfect - This doesn't count as a word-processor? 4. Applix - Not as full featured as the above, but simple, fast, and solid. 5. Lyx - Not my cup of tea (how the hell do you add fonts?), but it's fast, free, and produces nice output.
Well, that's 5. And then there are at least 2 free ones (AbiWord, Koffice) in development.
Just because a word processor isn't your favorite, or doesn't run well on your machine, doesn't mean it isn't useful for lots of other people. Some might venture to say that MS Word isn't useful to them. Besides, how much do you need in a word processor? The one book I managed to get published was written in MicroEMACS on a 386, then formatted with FrameMaker just prior to submission. Writing in a text editor is, for me, a whole lot simpler and more pleasant than dealing with a bloated word-processor.
Apple has done some great things; but I've never liked their attitude towards the user, which seems to be "my way or the highway". I remember my disgust at trying to type on an original Mac with its cursor-lacking keyboard. Then there's the single-button mouse... If someone's going to lecture Linux developers about user-interfaces, I'd prefer that someone be one of the people who developed OS/2's WPS for IBM. That was an extremely consistent interface, with drag-and-drop enabled for everything. For instance, you could set an icon for a file simply by dragging another desktop icon into the dialog box, or change a folder's background color by dragging a color onto it.
Anyway, I think the KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, and WindowMaker (and BlackBox and XFCE) developers have been doing a great job on their own, and they give us lots of choices. (And I'm writing this from KFM, which is becoming one of the best browsers around.)
Maybe this is true of all people, but Americans always seem to need an enemy to be happy. When the enemy is truly evil, like in WW2, it brings out the best of us. But when there's no external enemy, like the situation today, many of us turn in on ourselves. During the '80's, as I recall, the "enemies" were the "abusers", and every other TV movie featured an average guy who either sexually abused his 4-year old daughter, or habitually beat up his wife (who was always brave and noble). Nowadays, large minorities see the enemy as the abortionists, or the internet purveyors of porn who are out to corrupt our children.
Ever eavsdrop on a couple "suits" in a computer store? Usually, I hear one recommending the best Windows "fixit" program for the other to waste money on.
So the other day, I was almost shocked when I walked down the software aisle at Office Depot, and heard a woman (in a suit) explaining the differences amongst various Linux distros. to a fellow.
Sometimes they run at that resolution because at least one of the crappy Windows programs they bought doesn't run otherwise. This includes the typing program we got a couple weeks ago, which displays a black screen if you aren't set to 256 colors.
Back to the topic, I think a typical Windows user would do just fine with a pre-installed Linux system, especially if he wasn't told the 'root' password.
I think "invested" is the key word. I've found that the time I spend setting up Linux really is an investment, in that I get back more than I put in. It's true that setting up a desktop machine a couple years ago took a lot of effort; but nowadays, with a modern distribution (I'm using SuSE 6.2), it's really fairly effortless.
Now, I haven't had a whole lot of trouble with Windows95 (which I use at home for playing games) either, but it has what I consider a much more irritating way to waste my time: application bloat. It's rare to install even the simplest Windows program without getting a good half-dozen entries filling up the "Start" menu. And often, the software that you need to run a new piece of hardware, like my scanner, installs a couple dozen entries that are mostly useless. Sure, you can delete the excess; but it's sometimes tricky to figure out what's safe to delete.
My other big gripe with Windows apps. is that they often install big parts of themselves to my nearly full C: drive, even when I tell them not to. At least with an RPM file, I can see in advance where it's going to go.
Yes, anyone profiling my web use will see that I spend most of my time reading Slashdot, LinuxToday, and browsing a few game sites for hints to get through Ultima9.
So if some snoopy corporation sees this, and then tries to sell me RPG's that run on Linux, I'll be quite happy!
No Linux won't be the deciding platform in the positive sense. But I believe it might be important enough to exercise a veto. In other words, a web designer trying to decide on a video format may avoid one if it doesn't have a client for Linux.
1. Linux users accept this "gift" from MS. 2. MS's streaming video dominates the net. 3. MS adds new "features" to the servers, but only updates the Windows clients.
Thanks, but no thanks. Video should be an open standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'd say if you have an 'older version', meaning anything
from before my last checkin at 11:20pm last night, then I'll
blame that.:-) More seriously, though, I'm not developing with
Forge installed; but it should work, and I will eventually try it.
As for Origin, we've had no contact yet, although we're going
to try. If they get nasty, I'd rather know now so I can go onto
other things; but I'm really hoping they'll help us, or at least
stay neutral.
Since you mentioned exult, I'll provide a bit of information:
We do have quite a ways to go before the game is playable,
but progress has been much better lately. Two other developers
have joined the project, one doing sound & config., the other
doing the Win32 port (which is fairly straightforward, since
Exult was converted to SDL a couple months ago).
It's true that U7 was written with a terrible memory manager;
but one thing they did right was to have the entire plot of the
game controlled by a script called 'usecode', which was
then compiled into bytecode for a virtual machine (similar
to the way Java works). A couple other guys figured out
the 'usecode' bytecode and wrote an assembler and dis-
assembler for it. And using that info., I've written an interpreter.
So... conversations are working; you can open/close
doors; and various flags/variables that control the plot are
getting updated. But there are still several internal functions
that aren't yet understood.
Yes, I've become quite attached to Suse (6.2), for a few reasons. One is that I like the single non-GUI YAST tool that does pretty much everything without a lot of fuss. Second is that they do a nice job of setting up the defaults for the window managers like KDE and FVWM2, and they include all the nice icons that I used to have to download. Third is that their X-config. tool, SAX, is really excellent, better than most Windows screen utils. And fourth, I find it mildly amusing when they occassionally forget to translate a dialog item or manual topic from German.
This is a dumb question, but didn't they start out in the early 80's selling MINCE (Mince is Not Complete Emacs)? I remember using it on a VAX, and then on my Atari ST.
...I and a few others are working on reverse-engineering it to run under Linux using the original data files. This may take years, but it's GPL, and you can take a look at "exult.sourceforge.net".
Ultima6 might work, since it works fine in DOS emulation under OS/2 (which I keep around because it's better than DOS emulation in Win95, for some reason). But forget U7 and U8, as they have wierd memory managers that prevent them from running under anything but true DOS or a virtual machine like VMware.
A few years ago, Ken and Roberta Williams sold their company to a larger corporation (forgot the name). They continued on for a while; but from what I can tell they're now retired. The entire facility near Yosemite, CA was let go about a year ago, so the old Sierra of adventure-game history is gone. However, I recently exchanged email with an employee of a game company that's setting up a new site there, and hiring lots of the former Sierra employees. And, he reads Slashdot, and is pushing for multiplatform development, so maybe there's some hope for the future.
I wanted to play Ultima9 when it came out, and knew that it
came with a Glide and Direct3D binaries. Since (1) I'd heard
that Glide was generally more efficient and stable than Direct3D,
(2) that Glide had long been supported in Linux, (3) that the
X-server for 3DFX cards, while new, was supposed to be one
of the best available, and (4) that a Voodoo3 was only $99 US,
it was a pretty easy choice.
It was also the right choice for me, since the Direct3D version
of Ultima9 turned out to be extremely buggy and slow, while
the Glide version was stable and performed reasonably, even
on my modest K6/333 machine.
I agree, SDL is becoming a great library for multi-platform game development. It's low-level, extremely simple, and hardly incurs any overhead. And I notice on the SDL newsgroup that lots of the people using it are using it on Windows. It still has a way to go, such as builtin MIDI support; but it's getting enhanced all the time.
How will these kids survive in the modern world without knowing
how to use MS Word? Can you imagine your son or daughter
showing up at his or her first job, and then looking like a fool for
not knowing how to use the Win95 "Start" menu? Can you
run "Math Blaster" on Linux? No! So how are the students to
learn math when they can't shoot laser beams at the problems?
Besides, where's the corporation standing besides this home-
grown Linux stuff? When the network goes down, who can
you call for support? Microsoft spends billions of dollars
developing innovative AI wizards for keeping their software
running with zero administration. How can open source
compete with that?
(Whoaaa, too much coffee this morning:-))
Hmm... When I read one of those Windows-oriented rags, like PCWeek or Family Computing, I often feel like I'm reading something in a foreign language. Maybe those should count.
Sounds like a perfect situation for switching to Linux and open-
source software. Even a 486 with 16Mb will do fine running
X with one of the smaller window managers like Blackbox. And
do kids really need to bother with a fancy word processor when
they really need to concentrate on content?
Their software costs would head towards zero, and they could
probably get lots of free hardware from people like me who don't
know what to do with their leftovers after upgrading. The kids
would learn some Unix skills, become familiar with hardware,
and could also get introduced to programming, just as in the
better-endowed school featured in the article.
What struck me as a bad idea is that all this "symlink" information is stored in a central database, as opposed to using "symbolic link" files like Linux/Unix do. So if you happen to have a power failure when one of those databasee sectors is being written, your entire multi-gig disk could be essentially hosed.
Wasn't Myst written by just a couple guys, maybe along with one artist and one sound person? I'm pretty sure Cyan was a very small company; they just got a big company, Borderbund to publish their game.
Yes, I mostly agree. But still, I'd think that an important part of
architecture and design is choosing tools and libraries that
don't tie you into a single platform, since it may not be the only
place you want to be when your game is done 2-3 years
later.
I agree, these things are almost always 2 or 3 years out of
date, which is an eternity in the game world. Along with looking
at others' code, you can also learn a lot about the latest
techniques from various web sites, starting with Gamasutra.
But all that aside, even if the book has some good information,
I just won't buy it if all the examples are for Windows. What
I'd like to see is a book on multiplatform game development,
using libraries like SDL and OpenGL.
... and you didn't even mention FrameMaker, which is currently
in beta. Among word processors, I count:
1. FrameMaker - Hard to learn, but the most powerful.
2. StarOffice - Takes lots of RAM, but full-featured.
3. WordPerfect - This doesn't count as a word-processor?
4. Applix - Not as full featured as the above, but simple,
fast, and solid.
5. Lyx - Not my cup of tea (how the hell do you add fonts?),
but it's fast, free, and produces nice output.
Well, that's 5.
And then there are at least 2 free ones (AbiWord, Koffice)
in development.
Just because a word processor isn't your favorite, or doesn't
run well on your machine, doesn't mean it isn't useful for
lots of other people. Some might venture to say that MS Word
isn't useful to them. Besides, how much do you need in a
word processor? The one book I managed to get published
was written in MicroEMACS on a 386, then formatted with
FrameMaker just prior to submission. Writing in a text editor
is, for me, a whole lot simpler and more pleasant than
dealing with a bloated word-processor.
Apple has done some great things; but I've never liked their
attitude towards the user, which seems to be "my way or the
highway". I remember my disgust at trying to type on an
original Mac with its cursor-lacking keyboard. Then there's
the single-button mouse... If someone's going to lecture Linux
developers about user-interfaces, I'd prefer that someone be
one of the people who developed OS/2's WPS for IBM. That
was an extremely consistent interface, with drag-and-drop
enabled for everything. For instance, you could set an icon
for a file simply by dragging another desktop icon into the
dialog box, or change a folder's background color by
dragging a color onto it.
Anyway, I think the KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, and
WindowMaker (and BlackBox and XFCE) developers
have been doing a great job on their own, and they
give us lots of choices. (And I'm writing this from KFM,
which is becoming one of the best browsers around.)
Maybe this is true of all people, but Americans always seem to need an enemy to be happy. When the enemy is truly evil, like in WW2, it brings out the best of us. But when there's no external enemy, like the situation today, many of us turn in on ourselves. During the '80's, as I recall, the "enemies" were the "abusers", and every other TV movie featured an average guy who either sexually abused his 4-year old daughter, or habitually beat up his wife (who was always brave and noble). Nowadays, large minorities see the enemy as the abortionists, or the internet purveyors of porn who are out to corrupt our children.
Ever eavsdrop on a couple "suits" in a computer store? Usually,
I hear one recommending the best Windows "fixit" program for
the other to waste money on.
So the other day, I was almost shocked when I walked down
the software aisle at Office Depot, and heard a woman (in a
suit) explaining the differences amongst various Linux distros.
to a fellow.
Sometimes they run at that resolution because at least one of
the crappy Windows programs they bought doesn't run
otherwise. This includes the typing program we got a couple
weeks ago, which displays a black screen if you aren't set
to 256 colors.
Back to the topic, I think a typical Windows user would do just
fine with a pre-installed Linux system, especially if he wasn't
told the 'root' password.
I think "invested" is the key word. I've found that the time I
spend setting up Linux really is an investment, in that I get
back more than I put in. It's true that setting up a desktop
machine a couple years ago took a lot of effort; but nowadays,
with a modern distribution (I'm using SuSE 6.2), it's really
fairly effortless.
Now, I haven't had a whole lot of trouble with Windows95
(which I use at home for playing games) either, but it has
what I consider a much more irritating way to waste my
time: application bloat. It's rare to install even the simplest
Windows program without getting a good half-dozen
entries filling up the "Start" menu. And often, the software
that you need to run a new piece of hardware, like my
scanner, installs a couple dozen entries that are mostly
useless. Sure, you can delete the excess; but it's sometimes
tricky to figure out what's safe to delete.
My other big gripe with Windows apps. is that they often
install big parts of themselves to my nearly full C: drive,
even when I tell them not to. At least with an RPM file, I
can see in advance where it's going to go.
Yes, anyone profiling my web use will see that I spend most
of my time reading Slashdot, LinuxToday, and browsing a
few game sites for hints to get through Ultima9.
So if some snoopy corporation sees this, and then tries to sell
me RPG's that run on Linux, I'll be quite happy!
No Linux won't be the deciding platform in the positive sense. But I believe it might be important enough to exercise a veto. In other words, a web designer trying to decide on a video format may avoid one if it doesn't have a client for Linux.
1. Linux users accept this "gift" from MS.
2. MS's streaming video dominates the net.
3. MS adds new "features" to the servers, but only updates
the Windows clients.
Thanks, but no thanks. Video should be an open standard.