ProtoCiv: porting Freeciv to Python CANNED

[Brandon J. Van Every]

"Dan Olson" <hatespam at fakeemail.com> wrote in message
news:pan.2004.01.14.01.17.00.970198 at fakeemail.com...
>
> As a person heavily involved in the pseudo-commercial Linux game industry
> and a Linux user in general, I must say that I agree with your general
> assessment that Linux users do far too little to make sure that their
> applications run and run well on Windows.

Yeeeeeeeey! agreement of some kind from some quarter.

> That said, I disagree that Open Source projects have little to no value in
> commercial projects.  There are countless examples that could be pointed
> out, but I'll just point out one of them: OpenAL.

I did mention there are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
OpenAL is once again not a game project.  Generally speaking, there is no
critical mass of Open Source development in the Windows world.  The vast
majority of Open Source developers are Linuxers, and carry with them Linux-y
baggage about how software "should" be developed.  Their notions of
"should," both ideologically and practically, lead to Windows build
procedures being rather shoddy.

> Here is my future advice: get a month and a half into a project before
> announcing it.

I'm curious what sky is going to fall if I don't follow your advice?
Really, so many engineers have this "I want everybody to shut up" mentality.
It's not like when I first spoke, that I promised anyone anything, or was
particularly looking for help (unless someone with a very similar agenda had
happened along).  Rather I offered up a set of ideas for people to kick at.
Thanks, one and all, for whatever small amount of intellectual labor you
performed for me at the time.

> Not only will you have people not saying "I told you so"
> if you scrap it, but people will in general be more interested in your
> project when you have something to show for it.

Dude, when you "are interested" in Ocean Mars, I will be worth millions of
dollars.  You are never going to be interested in it before then.  So why
should I care if you are interested or not, right now?  The only thing
people like you respect is money and success.  I am different, I respect the
honest attempts.  That's the "what it means to be an indie developer"
conversation I think is worth having.  Your kind of conversation, that "you
are only allowed to publically demonstrate success," is a conversation I
think worth ignoring.  It's bullshit: the vast majority of us do *not*
succeed all the time, or even a lot of the time.  We fear to admit this
because we don't want to look stupid.  But, at this point in my career I'm
quite beyond that fear.

> Are you planning to make your vs.net version of FreeCiv available?  Others
> might be interested in continuing the work.

Yes, I do.  The question is whether I can get the freeciv.org people to put
it in their source pool or not.

> Cygwin is a horrible horrible
> way to run things on Windows, and I'd like to take this time to insult the
> mothers of everyone who has ever made their Linux application run on
> Windows using only Cygwin.

I am not sure how I feel about it.  I think it only bothers me when they
claim to be cross-platform in theory, and the Windows build simply does not
work in practice.  A working Windows build should be easy to obtain all the
dependencies for, and it should just build.  When it doesn't do that, when
you have to chase all over Hell's green acre to find the libraries, and then
the build simply coughs and gags and dies, I'm not even slightly amused at
how "cross-platform" some Linuxer is claiming things to be.

Linux == grungy OS for people who mostly don't care about good deployment
and ease-of-use practices.

-- 
Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

When no one else sells courage, supply and demand take hold.