[crossfire] Am interested in porting to Mac

[Alex Schultz]

Amorya North wrote:

>
     
      I'm interested in porting Crossfire to MacOS.
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      I know that the existing client can be made to run on MacOS - I am 
     
     >
     
      using it myself. However, it requires Apple's development tools to be 
     
     >
     
      installed, an X server running and a lot more technical knowledge than 
     
     >
     
      most users possess. If we had a native client, it might become more 
     
     >
     
      popular amongst Mac users.
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      If I go ahead with this, I'll write the client in Objective-C using 
     
     >
     
      the Cocoa API. Hopefully I'll be able to reuse some of the backend 
     
     >
     
      code (such as packet parsing) by wrapping it in an objective-C object. 
     
     >
     
      That does depend on my learning exactly how the existing client works 
     
     >
     
      though!
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      I write this message looking for opinions. Do you think it's a good 
     
     >
     
      idea? Anyone interested in seeing such a thing? One reason for taking 
     
     >
     
      on the project is for me to learn more about Cocoa, especially 
     
     >
     
      relating to graphics - so all is not lost if I'm the only one using it!
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      Please post your thoughts.
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      Amorya
     
     

Another option is that someone could build the existing GTK client with 
gtk-cocoa (
     
     http://gtk-cocoa.sourceforge.net/
     
     ), which would allow it to 
run without the X server running and such.

If you do make a native MacOS port with Cocoa, then remember to look in 
the 'common' directory in the client source tree, as stuff there is 
supposed to be applicable to all clients no matter the graphics toolkits 
and such used. You may want to build it within the existing framework 
and link directly to the C code in the common directory, because that 
way this native MacOS client could eventually become an official part of 
the source tree, and one advantage of that is that many protocol changes 
would be handled from the code in the common directory which would then 
make handling such changes in the MacOS port very easy.

Alex Schultz