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
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