ralphtricky
Posts: 6685
Joined: 7/27/2003 From: Colorado Springs Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lobster Well, from what I understand the code for TOAW is a bit of a mess. I guess Norm was not so much a programmer as a game designer and maybe had not heard of organized code. So, given that it's a mess and someone who had nothing to do with the coding is working on it I can imagine it must be somewhat frustrating. Still, having some kind of communication at all is better than none and I appreciate it as I'm sure everyone else does. For instance, "I can't look at this crap anymore. I have to walk away for a bit". I'm perfectly fine with that. As for getting a patch soon. Probably not if he's found other botched or out dated programming. TOAW is very old. Don't misunderstand me, TOAW was very well written for it's time. I've looked at other programs written around that timeframe and they are absolute messes in comparison. Norm did a fantastic job given the constraints. It was written before C++ so there is a huge reliance on global variables. There is some separation between the logic and display but some parts are better than others. I'm pretty sure it was also written originally as a DOS program and the conversion to Windows works, but it used to have lots of loops polling the input which was the only way to do it in DOS but not the best way in Windows and impractical for mobile. The interface code was written assuming an 800x600 display and everything was coded using pixel coordinates and an 8x8 font. While it wasn't OO, it did do some sensible things like passing x, y as the first two parameters when looking at terrain and other sensible things like that. I've got the advantages of both using C++ and OO and having used several windowing systems (Delphi, C#, HTML, and a few others) so I have some ideas on what the programming interface looks like. So I'm taking the time to do an almost complete rewrite of the graphics system to isolate the windows pieces in a couple of source files and writing an abstraction layer above it.
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