Re: Changing the Standard Game

[Lincoln Peters <sampln at sbcglobal dot net>]

On Sat, 2004-09-04 at 10:45, Eric McDonald wrote:
> Well, I think that part of the problem might be simply that when you 
> call one game the "standard" game, it implies that the others are either 
> substandard or offshoots of it.

Perhaps, then, we should change the name of the Standard game to the
Default game, or something else that doesn't imply that other Xconq
games are sub-standard.  At least, if _I_ saw that the first choice on
the list was called the "Default game," I wouldn't be as inclined to
doubt the quality of the other games.

Or maybe it needs a more descriptive name.

> 
> When I first tried out Xconq back in 1999 or 2000, this was one of the 
> things that kept me away from the other games. And I barely did more 
> than open a few of the others before I abandoned Xconq then because the 
> UI was not very good.

Even more reason to build a better UI, although I think we all agree
that bug-fixing usually takes precedence over UI building.

> 
> >I can envision a "Welcome" screen that looks like
> > the following (which, as usual, I designed with Glade without having to
> > write any code):
> 
> Of course, code would still have to be added for event handlers for the 
> various UI elements, so that a click on, say, a radio button will 
> translate into the proper Xconq internals being updated.

Of course.  Right now, I'm just trying to figure out what the interface
should look like.

> > Furthermore, as soon as you click "Apply", you could theoretically jump
> > to the existing SDL interface and thus leave behind anything that even
> > remotely resembles an Office app.
> 
> I would suggest the "Apply" button be relabelled to "Accept" or "Start 
> Game".

I'm pretty sure that there's a way to do that, but I'd have to write
actual code (Glade won't let me change the labels of buttons when the
buttons are part of a Druid widget).

> 
> What you propose is interesting. This would certainly save time in the 
> development of the startup screens, a task I have only half been looking 
> forward to. The tradeoff is that the Windows installer would get quite a 
> bit larger, because we cannot reasonably assume that a Windows user 
> would have the GDK, GTK+, Pango, etc. libraries on his/her system.

I'll have to study the Mono framework, but it might be possible to
implement one UI that runs on both Linux and Windows with minimal
platform-specific code or dependencies.  It also looks like Novell (the
company that now owns Ximian) is working on a Mono implementation for
MacOS X, which might simplify things further (but not until there is a
Mono-based interface that is actually better than the existing MacOS
interface).

If I remember correctly from that talk I attended back in 2002, the
biggest stumbling block that the Mono project encountered at the time
was the difference in widget styles (coordinate-based vs. hierarchical,
although I don't think he used those exact words).  However, since
they've finally released Mono 1.0, I would assume that they found a
solution to that problem.

Based on their FAQ, it looks like an application written for Mono/.NET
should work fine on UNIX/Linux or Windows with no difficulty as long as
it is a "100% .NET application" (essentially it is fully compliant with
the .NET standard and contains no platform-specific code).  Although I
have no idea how much work it would take to convert Xconq into a "100%
.NET application," and I don't think any of us want to find out (at
least not until post-7.5).


And, of course, there's the possibility of drastically simplifying
network games by implementing ZeroConf/Rendezvous (to make Xconq LAN
parties easier to set up) and/or an Xconq game server (maybe just a
modified IRC server to put Xconq players in contact with each other). 
Although that would almost certainly cause the appearance of Page 4 to
change somewhat, and it's not something I'd consider a high priority.


(Yes, I remember that the idea of using Mono was originally floated in
the midst of last year's great flame war, but I think that it's an idea
worth taking seriously, even if it was originally accompanied by a lot
of hot air.)

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln@sbcglobal.net>

"Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!"
-- Looney Tunes, "What's Opera Doc?" (1957, Chuck Jones)