[Freeciv-Dev] Re: the lack of respect for cloners

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Thomas Strub [mailto:ue80@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf
>
> Why should i care about the Game Developer Conference (GDC)
> which isn't
> able to programm ONE single game which is playable under
> LINUX. Ok, that
> isn't fair because many games are playable under Linux with
> some tricks.  But most devolopers don't think about it!

Here's how game developers perceive the Linux crowd.  Some of them are
part of the crowd themselves, ideologically pine away about how nice it
would be to see games on Linux, and sometimes are actually able to move
and shake within their companies to get it to happen.  More often than
not, though, they are shut down by fiscal rationalists.  A lot of us
think that Linuxers are crybabies who expect to get everything for free,
and those aren't the kinds of people you want as your customers.  Our
goal is to make a living doing what we want, first and foremost.  Thus
we consider Linux support to be anything from an expensive luxury to a
rather stupid idea.

I'm about midpack on that.  I'm doing Ocean Mars with Python and .NET,
and I'm not looking back.  I'll port to Linux someday when / if Mono
makes it easy to do.  But I've been down the "portability primrose path"
plenty of times and will never worry about it for a commercial project
again.  The money is on Windows, and I'm going to sell something and
actually make money before worrying about porting it.

I'd do a Freeciv-based project differently.  First, I can't immediately
escape Cygwin anyways.  Second, the language interop concerns are
different: Ocean Mars is Python-to-C++, a Freeciv project would be
Python-to-C.  It's a much different problem, and Python has good C
interop already.  Third, Freeciv is Linux-centric, so to woo developers
it would be foolish to make life difficult for them.  So I'd stick to
typical open source technologies for that project.

Anyways it's a chicken-and-egg problem.  If Linuxers bought more games,
game developers would be more interested in making them.  If game
developers made more games for Linux, Linuxers would be more interested
in buying them.  The critical mass isn't there, so you end up with
projects like Freeciv and Xconq.

> Adding more technology doesn't help. I know a little bit about theory
> of programming languages. As far as i know (afaik for an acronym
> fetishist like you are) all higher constructs from a language
> are macros
> which can be written in other languages. So, what is the benefit from
> languages like python?

Because with Python, you can literally type 1/2 as much code as C#, 1/4
as much code as C++, and 1/8 as much code as C to get the same results.
You are simply not required to deal with a lot of the low-level bullshit
that slows you down in other languages.  As long as performance isn't
your primary requirement, this is a Win.

> > I've suggested Migration rules.  Rebuffed.
>
> Yes you have suggested, but you haven't tried to modify your
> modell from
> Migration that it fits to the current model of freeciv.

Because the response was, "Well, we don't like anything that isn't
micro-incremental."  I have no interest in micro-incremental changes, so
I'm not going to submit the micro-incremental version of the general
concept of Migration.  Rather, someone's already got that in their minds
by now, and if they want to do it they can.  I'll look for some other
*major* change for Freeciv that has higher sales value.  Unfortunately I
bet any such major change would have to be multiplayer to meet with
general approval.  At least I know the crowd I'm playing to now.

Meanwhile, some people are tossing out a lot of interesting ideas about
Agriculture and terraforming.  If someone comes up with something cool
that people are willing to *do*, I may get on that bandwagon.  But
here's my gut feeling: you will talk, you will contemplate, you will
shut down the creativity on grounds of not wanting to change much.  A
game designer centric Freeciv project would solve this problem; the
question is whether I think it's feasible to lead it.

> As i wrote in
> other posts, i'm not averse to your idea. But i think that it can be
> improved. But YOU aren't trying to improve your own idea.

The idea is rather obvious to me, and I'm not interested in selling it
to obstructionists.  I consider specifying it further to be a waste of
effort, it is sufficiently specified.  There are always details that
have to be worked out, and that's a matter for prototyping and
implementation.  I'd be doing it already *if* I thought it would make it
into CVS, but I don't, so I'm not.  I see the Gatekeepers as the core
problem, for any outlandish idea.  So instead, I'm currently working on
what it would take to fix *that*.


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

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.