Addenda to maze of twisty little scripting langauges all alike

[jack]

* I'll no doubt need PERL (or equivalent) as well to tie everything together.
* I have successfully run my gimp export script from the command line (the trick was to give it an .scm rather than .scn extension)
* I downloaded the development release of the gimp to do it though. It's always a very pleasant feeling when you think "Hey, there should be new features in this program," and you go check the website, and there they all are :)
* Step 1, blah. Step 0, setup. Step 00, config. Doh.

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Is this going to end up being a platform specific executable?

It should be cross platform, that is, the game engine uses the allegro graphics engine (though might one day be ported to SDL), which are cross-platform C libraries, so you can compile for windows or linux, and anything else they've been ported to too.

I very much wanted to do that, partly to practice some linux compatible programming, and partly so a lot of my friends who use linux exclusively can play.

I also looked at platform-independent languages, java and flash (and, I suppose pygame, a python based platform independent games framework). But I don't feel like learning java at the moment. Flash can be very frustrating; it's a great way to get started but to do anything at all intensive you have to either (a) fail or (b) link to libraries written in another language which is (b1) tedious and (b2) not independent any more (though at least those wouldn't use any graphics). I think the latest version of flash has a more extensive language, but I don't want to buy it.

So on balance I preferred the idea of making it in terms of a "real" program.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Don't forget OS X!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

What's that icon?

I was including that in the category of "everything else" :) That is, windows and linux cover most of *my* friends, and if it's still going well, allegro and sdl have osx ports.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

The icon is one of the posters used in this amusing campaign.

everything else...
Yikes!

If I included everything else I'd have to write stuff that ran on the Acorn, Atari ST, Amiga (various flavours), and god knows what else.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I meant, the category of everything else the graphics library has been ported to. (I assume everything has a C compiler :))

FWIW allegro says "DOS, Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris, Darwin), Windows, QNX, BeOS and MacOS X," and SDL says "Linux, Windows, Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. The code contains support for AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, SymbianOS, and OS/2, but these are not officially supported."

I don't think I'm ever going to have the time or desire to get something tested in more than two OSes -- I'll probably hope someone else helps with the linux version, at least of the authoring stuff, if I get that far. But I want to not write myself into a corner, by using something that *can* be expanded to others if it's ever desired.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Sure. Other platforms might be worth considering though. This list doesn't include WindowsCE for instance, and I know people who play adventure games on their phones (ScummVM ones).

I also play ScummVM games on my Nokia N800

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Sure. Other platforms might be worth considering though.

Oh, yes. Certainly. But I probably can't stand a better chance for making it portable than making the prerequisites C and SDL -- lots of people hopefully have an interest in porting SDL to any upcoming operating system.