[CF-Devel] combining multipart images

[Mark Wedel]

Tim Rightnour wrote:

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      Thats actually an interesting problem with the windows userbase.  Look at the
     
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      difference in how the two communities grew up.  One grew along the lines of
     
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      "shareware" and "freeware", the other along the lines of open source.  In the
     
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      other side, I would bet that there is a much much greater percentage of unix
     
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      users that are programmer/free-help-out types than windows user.  I'd say it's
     
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      almost guaranteed that until you reach a sizeable critical mass of windows
     
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      players, you would get virtually none willing to develop.
     
     

  I actually think there other differences than just that.  Some of it may be 
the fact that most unix fanatics are more likely to be in the case of not having 
really cool apps for that OS, and were more willing to help make them.  I'll 
admit I carry some of that bias with crossfire - I'd rather give the unix users 
the cool app to use more so than the windows users, the later who already have a 
whole bunch of cool apps.


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      My point being, that if we break the DX client, and MT doesn't produce another
     
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      working client for flat maps, we may just be SOL.
     
     

  I'd say the window users would be SOL.  I agree that isn't necessarily a good 
thing, OTOH, its not like we're selling copies of this.  If crossfire was a 
commericial venture, I'm no fool - I'd make sure that the largest group of 
people could use it.    But if the windows are just users, and not contributors 
of anything, I really have to ask myself how much time I want to invest in 
providing something for them when I (crossfire) gets nothing in return.

  I certainly don't think it should MT's responsiblity to keep putting out 
windows clients, any more than it should be any of the other past people who 
wrote window or java clients to keep putting them out.  Perhaps a couple of 
those windows users who can no longer play will go and put out a client.

  But perhaps a related question - of the unix users, how many would use MT's 
SDL client if it supported flat graphics?  I know I would still use the gtk 
client, but if there are enough unix people that like the sdl client, then 
perhaps they can make it work with flat graphics, and thus indirectly provide 
the windows client.  I took a very brief look at it last night - I'm not sure 
how easy/hard it would be to integrate, but it appears to use a fair amount of 
code from the unix client, and thus borrows data structures and the like, which 
means that it may be possible to take the sdl map display from the gtk client 
and put it in the 100% sdl client.


Todd Mitchell wrote:


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      On related note - has anyone looked at wxWindows (
     
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      http://www.wxwindows.org/
      
       )?   It reports to be an opensource crossplatform
     
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      gui library that supports gtk, windows and motif (also I checked -  PNG
     
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      support).  It suggests you can build windows binaries in a Linux development
     
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      environment  (also mac and motif?). I have no idea if it is suitable
     
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      however. I wish I could be more helpful, I am trying to get up to speed -
     
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      but I have a long way to go yet.
     
     

  I took a quick look at the page.  I didn't see anything about making windows 
binaries under linux.  It appears that product just provides a common set of 
library/interfaces for all platforms, so that you can take the same C++ code, 
install wx windows on your unix/mac/windows system, and compile.

  I don't think this buys much, as both SDL and perhaps gtk 2.0 already have 
windows version available, and I don't think the client is otherwise doing much 
odd stuff.

  Perhaps more than the windows developer, is the windows release engineer - 
someone that will take the code, ahve the appropriate libraries installed on 
their windows system, and try to build the windows client (whether it be gtk or 
sdl based).  This person would need to be able to do some programming, simply to 
correct minor errors that may cause problems, or update the windows build 
environment or whatever else.