Re: [Metacosm-dev] Informal IRC meeting summary 10/9/03

[Laurent PEREIRA]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 09:50:07 +0200
Cyril Hansen <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi all,

> Yesterday, three of us (Elkine, Oumph, Horus) hold an informal meeting 
> on irc.
> We discussed motivation, schedule and developer availability problems as 
> well
> as technical choices. Feel free to skip until the end for a summary,
> especially if you are offended by my English.
> 
> Motivation:
> 
> It appears that we are still motivated by the completion of the 
> milestones, as
> they were described on the web. Oumph said he was mainly interested in the
> server side, aka simulation model. Elkine expressed willingness to work on a
> (graphical) client or editor, and was eager to work with another
> language&library than Java.  I just said that I would like our milestones
> objectives to be more graphical, more fun, to be able to do some cool 
> demos, a
> la World Forge.
> 

More fun, that is really an important point.
I could not work anymore on metacosm because I did not find any pleasure in it 
anymore.
Working on RFC was fun, but it became a nightmare trying to implement them.
Worse, I had the feeling our efforts were futile.

I hope that this will change and I will come back with more motivation.
Anyway, I stay tuned.



> Technical choices:
> 
> We discussed if C++ was more a appropriate language for the server. 
> Every one
> seemed to agree that most games were written in C++, especially the
> client/server ones, and that it was kind of a standard, with a bunch of
> network libs to choose from.  But no one among us has previous experience in
> C++ networking or multi threading. The step is going to be huge : 
> Rewrite the
> code base, learn new tricks with new tools, update the specs to reflect the
> language change...
> 
> On the other side we agreed that the existing framework was in some 
> places too
> complex (Action classes..).  We decided to reduce the complexity, in new 
> code
> as well in existing code as time allows it. This means that Metacosm is 
> not a
> framework project anymore, just a client/server project.
> 

Hum, it was already more or less the case.
I guess this means the API will be less general, hence simpler ?


> For the editor, we talked about SDL, which seems to be a simple / portable
> choice of graphical library. Everybody was wanting to try out something more
> "native" than Java and its VM.  As a language, both Oumph and I made so much
> publicity for Python, that Elkine became curious about it. We checked that a
> SDL wrapper for Python exists.
> 

Personally, I am not a supporter of Python. But if Elkine is decided to use it, 
that is very well.
However, I can't see where SDL is needed for the editor. qt or gtk could not do 
the trick ? Could you explain this choice ?




Jansel.