Neutronicus

For me, games with a lot of right-clicking are basically unplayable on a mac trackpad. I only play e.g. Don't Starve or Stellaris at a desk with a two-button mouse. Avernum I can play on a Laptop sitting on a couch, which I appreciate.

Originally Posted By: Niemand Quote: Common Lisp Ahhhhh! I wouldn't call it obscure, but it sure isn't all that common a choice for non-research work, from what I (as a non-computer scientist) have seen. I've meant for some time to learn it, but haven't gotten around to it, in part because there a bunch of other things I ought to be learning instead (like that new-fangled python stuff my colleagues are pushing). I heartily endorse learning CL. Python is nice for scripting because of the standard library but, personally, I experience about one "damn it, if this were CL I could x" per 10 lines of Python written. Just my .02 Once my project gets to a hackable state you'll be welcome to learn by contributing. Quote: I'd no idea that there was anything special about Carbon that made it hard to interface with, but there's also good reason to avoid using Carbon (and Quickdraw especially) at all if possible. No already written CL bindings Probably because it's deprecated. Quote: It's certainly possible, given that people will really devote the time to get it done. My thought was to eventually end up using none of the original code, but to have the new code have the legitimacy of inheriting, conceptually, at least from the old. Either way, a finished product is likely years off no matter what, so there's no reason to nitpick over details. Given the editor related nature of this discussion, I'll see if I can relocate this to the Editor Forum. This is why I'm starting with the editor - I figured I might as well generate some useful code before throwing code into a black hole.

Originally Posted By: Niemand Quote: My language of choice is not C/C++ Fair enough; out of curiosity, what are you using? Common Lisp. It is pretty obscure, but very well suited to parsing, and I can use C libraries like SDL, Qt, and even Cocoa (but not, as near as I can tell, Carbon... hence my troubles with resource forks) via a foreign function interfance. Quote: Aside from maintaining the existing editor, my hope had been to write a Mac only editor using Objective-C++, with the core parts being pure C++ and shading more into Objective-C nearer to the UI. The other part of my thought was that good core libraries, like for reading and writing the scenario data and so forth, could be reusable whether one decided to use a cross-platform UI library or not. The other thing I would suggest keeping in mind is that there is a serious hope in the community that eventually Jeff will make the game code open source, as he did with BoE. Should that come to pass we would like to be able to improve and extend that game engine, and assumedly our editor as well. It's for that reason that I've been working (although admittedly not all that much lately, real work keeping me busy and all) on an improved script engine, and a library to load and save both existing scenario data, and a more flexible format that might be usable in future. (Just to be clear, the former is up to the point where, while not yet able to do many of the things I eventually want, it should about be a drop-in replacement for the existing engine, while the latter is in nothing like a usable state.) Tridash was taking a look at re-writing the 3D Editor's drawing code to use Open-GL, which if done well could assumedly be reused. For my GUI needs, I am going with Qt, but that will be as decoupled from the parsing and editing stuff as I can make it - because, like you, I think a cocoa editor would be nice. I've used Qt at a job before, and, barring unexpected hurdles, I think displaying the game world actually shouldn't be too difficult, provided I can access the relevant content. Of course, the fact that I can edit .bas files by hand in my Lisp REPL has me feeling unreasonably optimistic right now - the Qt might turn out to be a bigger pain than I thought. I also share similar ambitions with respect to the game engine, except I think that an open-source clone is a reasonable objective for a couple of people working together.

I suppose I should just be honest. I'm working on a ground-up rewrite of the 3D editor. I intend to use cross-platform libraries wherever possible (and I believe that wherever possible means everywhere - GUI and game development toolkits are good enough that I can get away without a line of platform-specific code). I have already successfully implemented a .bas file reader and scenario data script parser. So, in principle, I can read everything about a scenario from disk. The next step is obviously to draw it on the screen so that the user can edit it. My language of choice is not C/C++, so using deprecated Apple API's is more than I really want to deal with. So, I would prefer to have my ground-up rewrite work only with folders full of pictures a la windows, because there are several cross-platform solutions for doing so. And thanks, your tool was indeed very useful, it was the first "resource editor" with which I was actually able to open the resource files on Leopard. As to why I don't just download the windows version myself, it only comes as a self-extracting executable from the spidweb site.

I'm working on some utilities for editing Blades of Avernum Scenarios, and I'm on a mac. I intend to be cross platform, so, the OS 9-ish resource fork stuff is out. With that in mind, could someone on windows send me the folders Blades of Avernum Files and Blades of Avernum Scenarios since I am failing to extract images from the .cmg files that come with the mac version. Just to be clear: I'm not trying to pirate, I just want all of the .bmp's that come with the windows version.