ProtoCiv: porting Freeciv to Python

Corey Murtagh wrote:

> Actually I kind of agree here. I've had plenty of problems with
> Cygwin
> - although less with MinGW. An OSS project that requires a Linux
> emulation shim to run on any other platform is not, IMHO,
> cross-platform
> at all.

Problem here is, Freeciv _does_ have a native win32 binary available.
So the entire premise that Brandon was starting with was totally false.

--
__ Erik Max Francis && max@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && &tSftDotIotE
\__/ In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Corey Murtagh <emonk@slingshot.no.uce> writes:

> Actually I kind of agree here. I've had plenty of problems with
> Cygwin - although less with MinGW.

It's always performed flawlessly for me. Have you reported the
problems to the Cygwin folks, or tried to fix the issues yourself?

> An OSS project that requires a Linux emulation shim to run on any
> other platform is not, IMHO, cross-platform at all.

Linux != Gnu, though to some that might seem like splitting hairs.

What other free development environments are there for Win32 that
offers power and flexibility comparable to the Cygwin tools? Visual
Studio is not free (quite the opposite!), and for many OSS developers,
that makes it impractical.

Sorry, I realize this is getting pretty off topic, especially for the
Python group, which is where I'm reading it.

Nick

--
# sigmask || 0.2 || 20030107 || public domain || feed this to a python
print reduce(lambda x,y:x+chr(ord(y)-1),' Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAcboefstobudi/psh?')

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> Peter Ashford wrote:
>
>>>>doesn't mean that all OSS is non portable. You're
>>>>over-generalising.
>>>
>>>
>>>Sounds more like you're bringing your own strawman into the debate.
>>
>>What is the strawman argument you claim I am making?
>
>
> I never made any claims about "all OSS is non portable." It's your
> contribution to the debate.
>


You characterised OSS as:

"Cross-platform, so long as your platform is Linux."

terrypauley54@hotmail.com (TerryPauley) wrote in
news:8b6a581a.0401061431.7dc796a9@posting.google.c om:

> "Brandon J. Van Every" <try_vanevery_at_mycompanyname@yahoo.com> wrote
> in message news:<bshcae$d17k3$1@ID-207230.news.uni-berlin.de>...
>> Note followup to c.g.d.industry.
>>
>> "Stephen Coy" <scoy@infiniteinstant.com> wrote in message
>> news:qTUGb.20132
>> > "Brandon J. Van Every" <try_vanevery_at_mycompanyname@yahoo.com>
>> > wrote in
>> > >
>> > > Yes I do. One tangible difference between myself and a hobbyist,
>> > > is
>> that
>> > > when I choose to work on something, I can work 40..60 hours a
>> > > week on
>> it.
>> >
>> > Being unemployed by choice doesn't raise you from the ranks of
>> > hobbyists. It just makes you an unemployed hobbyist.
>>
>> I have -$60K that says otherwise. When you've lost big money to
>> pursue your own game development goals, let's talk again. Otherwise
>> as far as I'm concerned, your opinion on the matter is a bunch of
>> yadda yadda from someone who has not set foot in the trenches of
>> self-funded game development.
>>
>
> That just shows you know how to lose money and please note in any
> business 60K is not a signficant sum. If I understand your past
> messages you also have nothing to show for it not even a failure.
>

If 60 isn't significant sum you could give that sum to me. I would 3 years
build game libraries to make game development more simple and would do AI
research. (not tailored to some profit activities, but tailored to games)
At least games wouldn't be so dumb and any game companies would have their
work done at least two weaks faster.



>>
>> False. In fact, I spent *way too much* time designing, in the years
>> before I actually started coding Ocean Mars like crazy. It's easy to
>> get lost in your background materials when you don't have a firm ship
>> date. I made far more progress when the financial noose finally
>> tightened around my neck. I seem to need a financial crisis to
>> motivate me, or at least to get me past significant roadblocks.
>
> In otherwords you werent operating as a professional, but as a
> hobbyist with money to burn. It sounds like your having problems with
> the fundamentals of game design let alone a completed game. The
> critical question is did the financial crisis motivate you to finish
> the game or to toss it in.
>
Important question is just if his product would show up even if as a proto
library for rapid game development.
I think he needs to learn a little about game design and about spliting
project into independent, but finishable parts.




>>
>> > spent way too much time wrestling with
>> > getting a small part of the technology that you _might_ need
>> > working,
>>
>> False. The spherical hexified icosahedron was and still is a core
>> project component of Ocean Mars. Absolutely essential. Well
>> truthfully, a *spherical planet* is essential, to cinematically sell
>> that it's Mars. That's the driving concern, it's about film. Also,
>> such a planet would be a Unique Sales Point in today's gaming market.
>> But I have considered several spherical representations of planets.
>> As far as I'm concerned, the planet does have to be regularly
>> quantized for AI and random map generation purposes, and the hexified
>> icosahedral quantification is the one I want to use. I looked at
>> arbitrary triangulations and measuring distances directly on the
>> surface, and I do not consider such approaches to be computationally
>> sane on today's hardware. We will need another 5 years of FPU
>> improvement before it does become sane.
>
> Of course there are alternatives, however, I really dont think a
> hexified icosahedron is going to be a retail grabber, I'm assuming at
> some point your intention was to sell this game.
>
>>
>> My hubris was far more specific than you suggested. I tried to map
>> Mars at 10 km/hex detail on a GeForce2. That's 1.6 million hexes,
>> the card can't push it without a lot of implementation pain. It
>> *can* be done, but the implementation effort to get there is too
>> much. And there's a risk of not enough juice being left over for the
>> AI. So I've dropped these performance jock / overweening realism
>> concerns for now. This has a lot to do with why I changed my domain
>> name from 3DProgrammer.com to indiegamedesign.com.
>
> Why did you change it sounds like your still into the programming side
> and not the design side.
>
Just a little question. Did he put that few million of polygons into GFX
and then rotated it?

> If 60 isn't significant sum you could give that sum to me. I would 3 years
> build game libraries to make game development more simple and would do AI
> research. (not tailored to some profit activities, but tailored to games)
> At least games wouldn't be so dumb and any game companies would have their
> work done at least two weaks faster.

First, 60 grand is not a significant sum when the issue is producing a
commercial game. It is paltry.
Also, why would somebody give you 60 grand to have you work for 3 years
building unknown game libraries and performing AI "research"?

WTH

>The conclusion may seem obvious to _you_ but this is no guarantee that
>everyone else also possesses this knowledge. OSS is being hailed as
>the second coming, and it comes as no surprise therefore that some
>people might be deluded into thinking they could harness this power to
>cure cancer overnight or land a man on Mars by 2005.
>
If you can get by his trolling and unbearable arrogance, there are
some kernels of truth in there. I come from a commercial background
as well but instead of trying to exploit the OSS community, ive been
lurking around looking for a project I feel I could contribute to.

Most geeks by their nature, are very independent and abhor order.
You have to have order to get anything done. Thats why most
successful projects have one or at most a few people pulling the
strings because if you don't, the project will flounder. I've
personally based a few of my projects on some OSS projects and they
failed miserably. Because of the bugs and the Authors unwilligness to
address them or even accept them as bugs. You can say "well why didnt
you just fix it yourslef" but I just didnt have the time.

On the other side of the coin, i've used OSS projects like PHP and
Postgres with great results.

The other problem with hobbyist geek programmers is they are just in
it for the fun of it. They get bored when the last 10% of the project
which is mostly bug fixing and rengineering code coes about and
generally abandon it. I've poked into literally over one hundred
sourceforge projects that started out as good ideas and had lots of
activity. i'd come back in 6 months and There would be almost no
activity. With a developer with a commericial background, he might be
more willing to see the project through.

I too get annoyed when an OSS author pulls a massive library into his
project just to get a few functions out of it he could have written
himself. It's really problematic as Brandon has said when you are
using CygWin or Ming because a lot of these libraries dont work on it.

My bread and butter is palm and windows development so I cannot
abandon the platform yet. What i've been trying to do is build up a
nice linux dev environment using ming and python. The python side of
things works great but the C++ side... well.. sucks.

Thankfully, I finally decided to evaluate VMWare and being able to run
linux and windows together has been a godsend so I can hopefully
abandon the cygwin stuff.

Chuck Spears <Chuck@spears.com> wrote in message news:<ojof1057b4o9kurh6a55f1rfan4d8v3l53@4ax.com>. ..

[Quoting someone else...]

> >The conclusion may seem obvious to _you_ but this is no guarantee that
> >everyone else also possesses this knowledge. OSS is being hailed as
> >the second coming,

....by generally clueless analysts and journalists whose day job seems
to focus exclusively on speculation and rumour forwarding, switching
over to hyping Microsoft and other vendors "du jour" when they feel
the need to encourage a "debate".

> If you can get by his trolling and unbearable arrogance, there are
> some kernels of truth in there. I come from a commercial background
> as well but instead of trying to exploit the OSS community, ive been
> lurking around looking for a project I feel I could contribute to.

Yes, this is the key to the issue. If you regard open source software
as a huge pile of "free stuff" to plunder, then whilst you may get
some productivity benefits in the short term, the longer term will
most likely bring maintenance issues as the community continues on its
own course and you continue on yours. (If you actually have a course
of developing the code, that is, as opposed to just dropping the
plundered code into some directory and virtually forgetting that you
have it.)

> Most geeks by their nature, are very independent and abhor order.

I'm not sure that I equate "open source developer" with "geek" in the
same way that this generalisation demands, but if you mean that most
open source developers who are working on projects in their own time
or under their own motivation won't take orders from newcomers, I
think it's quite obvious why that is.

> You have to have order to get anything done.

True, but numerous open source projects have "order" without
conventional forms of management. On the other hand, if you're saying
that a bunch of "elite" 13 year olds on IRC can't scale their project
beyond a slightly larger group of well-trained primates, then you're
making an obvious point.

> Thats why most
> successful projects have one or at most a few people pulling the
> strings because if you don't, the project will flounder. I've
> personally based a few of my projects on some OSS projects and they
> failed miserably. Because of the bugs and the Authors unwilligness to
> address them or even accept them as bugs. You can say "well why didnt
> you just fix it yourslef" but I just didnt have the time.

There are lots of reasons why developers can't or won't fix the bugs.
It's quite a common phenomenon in the commercial software world, too,
but the reasons are more likely to be political there. Meanwhile, you
don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand developer
motivations around such issues in open source projects; quite often,
developers don't have access to the same environment and can't
reproduce or diagnose the bugs that you're experiencing, for example.

> On the other side of the coin, i've used OSS projects like PHP and
> Postgres with great results.
>
> The other problem with hobbyist geek programmers is they are just in
> it for the fun of it.

How many people with a hobby do it because they don't enjoy it?

> They get bored when the last 10% of the project
> which is mostly bug fixing and rengineering code coes about and
> generally abandon it.

Perhaps many projects need assistance from real-world users in order
to get that last 10% done. Consider cases like The Gimp where the
original developers basically dropped the code before the 1.0 release,
but where interested parties picked it up and finished the job. If
every project suffered from the same symptoms that you describe, there
wouldn't be such a thing as GNOME, Sun's Java Desktop System and so
on. Perhaps JDS would be based on KDE instead, however. ;-)

> I've poked into literally over one hundred
> sourceforge projects that started out as good ideas and had lots of
> activity. i'd come back in 6 months and There would be almost no
> activity. With a developer with a commericial background, he might be
> more willing to see the project through.

Yes, perhaps because he'd be paid to see it through.

> I too get annoyed when an OSS author pulls a massive library into his
> project just to get a few functions out of it he could have written
> himself. It's really problematic as Brandon has said when you are
> using CygWin or Ming because a lot of these libraries dont work on it.

Just because one is developing with open source software doesn't mean
that one is suddenly exempt from normal software engineering
principles. Perhaps that was what the quoted contributor meant by
those "second coming" claims, but most people understand that the
universe doesn't change its rules on the basis of rumours derived from
misinterpretations of claims by Eric S. Raymond.

Paul

In article <7oo4vv0s2bkvrp85ar8e7bsb9essjmpa23@4ax.com>, tomas@fancy.org
says...
> [...]
> What we do is not rocket science. I have yet to see a compelling
> reason for "logically complex" code in games, and I've been doing
> it for the better part of a decade.

What is your definition of "logically complex?" Can you give
an example of a progamming task that would be minimally
"logically complex" (ie. meeting the minimum requirements of
your definition without going much beyond it)?

Christer Ericson
Sony Computer Entertainment, Santa Monica