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The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

wesnoth.org

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Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#91

Post by 0xCMP »

Narishma wrote: post #82
timdorr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then, to be extremely frank, it sounds like the game is a technical failure and should be abandoned. Trying to fix an older game such as this seems like an uphill climb. Better to greenfield it and start from scratch. The original engine sounds like it needs a rewrite anyways. Getting it running on an existing engine (UE4 can do 2d fairly well, for instance) seems like a better investment of resources. What they're b…

UE4 is overkill for such a game.

Yet it sounds from these comments like it'd be faster and more people would be willing to help maintain it.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#92

Post by WorldWideWayne »

eropple wrote: post #32
IsTom wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made a litte patch for Wesnoth long time ago. While the codebase wasn't small it didn't really matter that much. There are a lot of things in the game (animation, networking, ui, game logic) that are separated enough that it's not that much of a big code mess like most commercials projects you see. Also the C++ used isn't the monster from under the bed people tell tales of. It's mostly simple OOP/procedural code…

Agreed. Wesnoth's codebase is pretty straightforward, "dumb" C++ (and I mean that as a compliment--smart C++ can get you in trouble really easily). I think most of the bits of it I've wandered through are pretty good examples of how to write C++ for games without killing yourself.

It's shocking how much a wannabe game dev that looks like Philip Seymour Hoffman's younger sister can learn about enterprise development too, when they've never actually worked a day in their life at a typical enterprise shop.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#93

Post by copsarebastards »

I think a lot of these older open source projects have a tough time because they use C++ so extensively. There are plenty of people who "know" C++, but it's not a language many people can be productive in. The argument for using C++ is that it's faster and uses lower memory, but that's not actually true for naive implementations: C++ allows lots of tricks for speed and memory efficiency, but it takes work to make it actually more efficient. These days I tend to think that it's easier to write first in a higher-level language and optimize from a position of knowing where your bottlenecks will be than to write a low level language like C/C++ efficiently from the beginning, not knowing where the bottlenecks will be.

I'm not saying that a rewrite is the answer, however.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#94

Post by [deleted] »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #66

Out of curiosity, I dug for info on you a little bit after reading your comment. Found your Github: https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories Two things are clear: 1 - you have time to be prolific in open source 2 - you have significant Python skills Seems like you fit the bill for what Wesnoth needs! Why not step in and help yourself? I don't want to come across as calling you out here - I'm genuinely interested i…

[deleted]

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#95

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

[deleted] wrote: post #94
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #66

Out of curiosity, I dug for info on you a little bit after reading your comment. Found your Github: https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories Two things are clear: 1 - you have time to be prolific in open source 2 - you have significant Python skills Seems like you fit the bill for what Wesnoth needs! Why not step in and help yourself? I don't want to come across as calling you out here - I'm genuinely interested i…

[deleted]

Click profile -> follow link to website -> click "code"

His Github username is also the same as his Hacker News username.

Chill out.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#96

Post by m3talridl3y »

copsarebastards wrote: post #93

I think a lot of these older open source projects have a tough time because they use C++ so extensively. There are plenty of people who "know" C++, but it's not a language many people can be productive in. The argument for using C++ is that it's faster and uses lower memory, but that's not actually true for naive implementations: C++ allows lots of tricks for speed and memory efficiency, but it takes work to make it…

I think the real reasons are: Unity, Unreal Engine, HTML5, etc. People who would want to contribute never find BFW, instead they make their own games and satisfy their creativity that way.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#97

Post by throwaway999777 »

[deleted] wrote: post #94
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #66

Out of curiosity, I dug for info on you a little bit after reading your comment. Found your Github: https://github.com/rdegges?tab=repositories Two things are clear: 1 - you have time to be prolific in open source 2 - you have significant Python skills Seems like you fit the bill for what Wesnoth needs! Why not step in and help yourself? I don't want to come across as calling you out here - I'm genuinely interested i…

[deleted]

It's not directly linked, but it is shallowly indirectly linked by going to their home page which is listed on their profile. In any case I agree that presenting information in this manner can feel a bit invasive, as in putting someone on the spot/making the topic about them.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#98

Post by camperman »

lfowles wrote: post #86
caf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you build a component yourself and own all the copyright in that component, then the fact that you've contributed it to a GPL project doesn't stop you from using it in your own products as well, or licensing it again to someone else under a different (non-exclusive) license. In fact in this situation you would be better off with Wesnoth as GPL rather than MIT, because that way your closed-source competitors can't…

> In fact in this situation you would be better off with Wesnoth as GPL rather than MIT, because that way your closed-source competitors can't use your component in their games. Ehh, but there's no direct monetary loss. Not many games stay relevant for a decade, so it's likely the commercial competitors will drop support after X years while you can backport their blackbox improvements. That said, I wonder if componen…

Wait, how on earth do you backport blackbox improvements?

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#99

Post by angersock »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #79
ObviousScience wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Battle for Wesnoth looking for C++ programmers to maintain their codebase? It's not that I don't have significant programming skills myself, nor that I don't work on side projects, nor even that I don't really like Battle for Wesnoth... I've just sworn off every working on a C++ legacy codebase. So I'm not really sure what I have to contribute to a legacy C++ codebase. Ed: I went back and read, and they're look…

"I'm not interested in that kind of work" is a fair answer, but it seems pretty rude to dismiss it as an ugly hacky legacy code base without reviewing it first.

It's an old C++ codebase.

By near definition, it's ugly hacky legacy code.

That's just the nature of these things.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#100

Post by obstinate »

irascible wrote: post #58
mattmanser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, please drop it. Javascript is not used to code games much, C++ is. Javascript is pretty awful performance wise. Also, porting a whole code base to another language at this stage in the game is such a colossal task. Are you even a developer? I'm not sure you realise how infeasible what you're suggesting is.

emscripten would like to have a word with you. Also, Javascript is one of the most heavily optimized dynamic languages in existence, and has orders of magnitude more code and programmers using/written in it, than java, scala, ruby, lua, etc. Rewriting any game in javascript is imho a great idea. (I am a C/C++ game developer with ~25 years of experience.)

Orders of magnitude more code written in it than Java? Hohoho good one. HTH: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... http://githut.info
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