Re: Crawl Stone Soup 0.5 released

Hi,

On Jun 22, 1:08 pm, David Ploog <pl...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 22 Jun 2009, Rachel Elizabeth Dillon wrote:

What sort of machine would you guys need, anyway? Could we just buy
someone one? Computers are cheap.

I don't think that computers are the issue. We'd need someone who would
like to care of Crawl under Windows. They should be able to compile
natively on Windows and have some understanding of OpenGL. This would be a
great help.
Something similar is true for DOS, but here a good soul (sorear of
##crawl) already provided a working DOS build.

Yes, sorear (Stefan) did recently make a DOS .EXE available when no
official one existed, and it worked fine. He was very helpful.
However, it seems that the now-official (June 20th) DOS build is
different from his. So either he used a different setup or someone
else compiled it. (Deductive reasoning: am I wrong?) You keep dangling
the idea that DOS is barely supported, but you don't give much info
about that from "behind the scenes". DJGPP stuff can be cross-compiled
from Linux (see Andris Pavenis' RPM archives) or *BSD (like YASM dev
Peter Johnson used to do until recently) or (obviously) from non-AMD64
Windows (although DOSEMU supports running on x86-64). Heck, you can
cross compile for Linux from Win32 or vice versa if you really needed
to, which I assume is what you're doing for the Win32 stuff if all the
devs only work on Linux.

PS: The other issue with some Windows users is cultural, of course.
Windows is the main target for commercial games, so some Crawl players
will be used to commercial games. Crawl being free (in both aspects) is
completely counter to that and hence also how you deal with problems. I
admit that my reply was a bit rought; I apologise for that.

Realistically, if "Tiles" is such a problem, drop Tiles, but don't
kill console Win32 support! I mean, that's more acceptable "worst case
scenario", no?

PPS: I believe that the three most important features to draw (and keep)
new players are these: tiles, tutorials, internet play. I am not sure
about the order. If it was possible to play tiles online, the windows port
would become less attractive (not saying here that we should drop it).

I'm no developer, so I can't set or change priorities for you guys,
but my (mis)educated guess would be that popularity relies on several
things:

= widely varied (and fun!) gameplay [done]
= good docs / tutorials / online help / etc. [done]
= constant bug fixes [in progress, never fully done]
= graphics (it does greatly help although ASCII is equally cool by me)
[in progress]
= portability (NetHack has this in spades!) [needs work??]

And obviously (as a DOS user) I would say portability is more
important than graphics. :-) Most OSes seem to have G++ nowadays, so
you should probably enlist certain people to try building for those
OSes every now and then. In particular, confirmation that it works on
all major *BSDs or Syllable / Haiku would be good (even if I don't
actively or, for the latter, even passively use those).
.

Relevant Pages

  • DC Stonesoup 0.5 -- Tiles too slow? Read this!
    ... Dungeon Crawl Stonesoup and found Tiles to be painfully slow, ... was never slow in the first place) but I don't have a Windows computer ... Please visit http://crawl.develz.org/trunk/ and download the Tiles ...
    (rec.games.roguelike.misc)
  • Re: Crawl Stone Soup 0.5 released
    ... Windows builds of 0.5 trunk have been available ... version tiles we simply went by the assumption that everything was all ... If I can have instructions for compiling Crawl on Windows I can try to ... I play Crawl pretty much exclusively on Windows and in Tiles ...
    (rec.games.roguelike.misc)
  • Re: DOS support - still important?
    ... rogulikes (Angband, Nethack, Crawl) have one, though. ... would like to convert my roguelike back to DOS someday. ... programs run on DOS and Windows, but Windows programs only run on ...
    (rec.games.roguelike.development)
  • Re: Linux syscalls
    ... > A device driver or a rewrite of DOS could permit this, ... really "DOS inside Windows" or "Windows inside DOS"? ... > DOS interrupts are revectored... ... if you re-write DOS to use the _Windows device drivers_ ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • [Full-Disclosure] ron1n phone home, episode 4
    ... Hacking from Windows 3.x, 95 and NT ... Use secret Windows 95 DOS commands to track down and port surf computers ... Download hacker tools such as port scanners and password crackers designed ... Now you have the option of eight TCP/IP utilities to play with: telnet, ...
    (Full-Disclosure)
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