Hi Ryan, Yeah, That’s pretty much why I was thinking of using C# .Net with the Mono Framework rather than port the C++ version of the engine to Mac OS, Linux, etc. Mono seems to be fairly stable, and I’ve used it myself a number of times for cross-platform projects between windows and Linux. It is not perfect, but is probably the easiest solution in terms of developing cross-platform applications without a lot of overhead. Plus I know that C# .Net is a fairly straight forward and simple programming language to use. It borrows some concepts as well as the C-Style syntax from C++, but without all the extra overhead, complications, and headaches to go with C++. I know the moment I began converting Genesis from C# to C++ it took quite a long time to do the code conversions just because of all the extra little steps involved in getting something done. For example, in the .Net Engine I had a simple Speech class that wrapped the SAPI 5 library Speechlib.dll. That was pretty easy to do because the String class automatically can convert ascii strings into Unicode on the fly so no conversions had to be done on my part. Of course, with C++ nothing is quite that simple. In my C++ speech class I basically had to create a Speak() function that wraps the SAPI library and converts a standard C-style ascii string into Unicode before passing it to the SAPI speak function. I can’t remember but it was a good 10 to 12 lines of code to take a standard character string, get the length, create an Unicode string variable of equal length, convert the string from multibite to wide char, pass the converted string to the Unicode string variable, and then finally give it to SAPI to speak. In my opinion that’s just a bit ridiculous and a lot of unnecessary work just to give one of Microsoft’s com based libraries a simple string of text. However, that is the way it is since Windows XP on up are all heavily Unicode based so we are stuck with doing those kinds of lengthy code conversions from ascii to Unicode in C++. Fortunately, .Net languages using Mono or the .Net Framework don’t have to mess with that hassle. As far as Python goes I just don’t know. I am sort of bias towards the language primarily because I like C-style languages like C++, C#, and Java as I like the C-style syntax. I’ve never gotten use to Python’s loose free style format where you just use spacing to keep track of blocks and statements. I always get lost without some kind of comment to tell me where a block of code ends and where a new one begins. It is just things like that which irritate me when working with Python so that’s not really my first choice that’s for sure. However, as for network programming I agree that UDP would be my first choice. To my knowledge SDL supports UDP so that’s not a big deal. I imagine we can look at that aspect of the engine when and if we get that far with it. I’m glad you are excited about this project as I was beginning to think that people weren’t that interested in it. I know that the Linux and Mac user base is way smaller than the Windows user base, but I thought those users would be happy to hear about an engine being aimed at those platforms. So far response has been pretty much limited to a couple of Mac users and a couple of programmers like yourself. Everyone else appears not to care to much about it. It is a bit discurraging not to have much feedback on this project.
Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
