Re: Changing the Standard Game

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Lincoln Peters wrote:

> On Sat, 2004-09-04 at 10:45, Eric McDonald wrote:

> 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.  

I think that "Default Game" is a reasonable name. Especially since that 
is the default game that gets loaded by interface that don't bring up a 
game selector, such as Curses and SDL presently.

> > 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.

It depends largely on the severity of the bugs.

To be honest, I have reached a frustration point regarding the lack of a 
good UI for Linux and Windows. We were told that the 7.5 release was 
"imminent" a year and half ago. Even though I have worked on this 
project for over a year now, I still have no idea when the 7.5 release 
is going to be. Up until recently, I have restrained myself from taking 
on any big projects (such as UI building) because I didn't want to have 
7.5 announced while I was in the middle of one, and I certainly did not 
want to hold up a release on account of my work. At this point, I don't 
really care. If someone announces that the Macconq 7.5 release is 
looming, I'll just fork the sources and continue my work on the SDL 
interface; I've already got more than one foot pointed in that direction 
as it is (for other reasons).

I am aware that there are some network bugs out there that need to be 
fixed. I consider the network setup bug (not more than 2 sides can join 
properly) to be something that Hans should look at it, since he is the 
last person to have mucked with that sort of stuff. I will eventually 
take care of it, if he doesn't, but that is not my focus right now.

> 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).

I see. I think the prototyping work you are doing is useful, but I 
imagine that it would not take too much work just to generate all of the 
UI elements from code (once we settle on what it should look like from 
the prototypes). This would give us the possibility of a more dynamic 
layout.

Eric