The Battle for Wesnoth needs help • Hacker News Board

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#151

Post by FossHub » Mon, Jul 27, 2015, 1:15 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #129

brownbat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was trying to diagnose this for KeePass last night... Between this and the adware scandal, it's like someone slammed the door on an era. What's the download service everyone's going to move to that won't have these problems? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/03/sourceforge_to_offer...

I wished something like distributed git for the masses or torrent distribution would replace services that are a single point a failure such as sourceforge or self-hosting. Maybe even some kind of `Dropbox distributing' ? Maybe Mega and other file hosting and sharing services are up to the job but most have a very suspicious kind of aura. I remember chasing the web after some rapidshare hosted android rom (they still…

FossHub, from a technological POV is no way different than Dropbox or any other service. FossHub relies on multiple sources to store the content and distribute this via multiple, separated locations. As for the most sharing services, I share your opinion and would like to assure you that FossHub is different. Disclosure: I am a member of FossHub team.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#152

Post by FossHub » Mon, Jul 27, 2015, 1:21 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #75

johnchristopher wrote: post #10

I am trying to download the latest release (1.12.4a) but I am caught in a never ending loop http://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/files/ . Edit: okay, sourceforge is broken for me for any download, no matter the browser. Let's consider that my sourceforge rant of the week.

Was trying to diagnose this for KeePass last night... Between this and the adware scandal, it's like someone slammed the door on an era. What's the download service everyone's going to move to that won't have these problems? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/03/sourceforge_to_offer...

I think we (FossHub) can be the alternative for certain devs and most people were happy with the service we provided so far. Disclosure: I am a member of FossHub team.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#153

Post by bertocq » Mon, Jul 27, 2015, 1:32 PM UTC

Udo wrote: post #45

kazagistar wrote: post #2

Why does the game need to keep advancing? Most games in the industry are written, released, and finished. The best have a timeless nature, still excellent even though they haven't been changed for decades. Battle for Wesnoth is an excellent game. But declining interest seems to indicate that maybe it is just finished?

I regularly play Wesnoth over the internet with a friend. Though we sometimes explore other games, we always come back to Wesnoth because it's compelling. However, and I say this as a fan, this game has severe issues - it's not just a few bugs and maintenance: Wesnoth makes current hardware sweat to the point where my relatively new MBP sounds like it's taking off, as is my friend's ThinkPad. It's also the only game…

I too was in love with this game when I only had a cheap pc with windows, but years later started burning my new laptop and got me angry and ended erasing it.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#154

Post by simoncion » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 12:49 AM UTC

ectoplasm wrote: post #147

simoncion wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. Many contemporary games are multi-threaded out of necessity. How would you deal with JavaScript's single-threaded, single-process model of execution? Experimental features like Web Workers?

No disagreement on that one! If your application must be multi-threaded, it does make sense to write it in a language with proper multi-threading support.

nod nod I just wish irascible would come back. I was interested in hearing what -from his 25 years of game development experience- makes him feel that "Rewriting any game in javascript is imho a great idea.".

I'm obviously missing something, and I was looking for the benefit of his insight.

Re: The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

#155

Post by copsarebastards » Sun, Aug 02, 2015, 7:07 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #113

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…

This is the case with old code in general, though. 2003 Javascript, 2003 C++, any Java, especially 2003 C#, any C, 2003 Python, etc are all horrible messes to work with today. C++ got so much better with C++11/14 I can't even think of it as the same language. Python literally broke itself. Java is pretty much dead except for on Android (consumer facing) for good reason. C# was practically an infant in 2003 and got so…

I don't really agree. The problem with C++ isn't its age, it's its complexity, or what I'd call the "too many tools" problem. None of the languages you mention approach C++ in sheer breadth of complexity. For a given problem there are 100 ways to solve it in C++ and these ways of solving it may look so different from each other that it's not even apparent they are solving the same problem. Java, in particular, doesn't have this problem: it was specifically designed to avoid this problem (read Guy Steele's interview in Coders at Work) and while I dislike Java for other reasons, it largely succeeded in solving that problem. Python's "there should be one, and preferably only one, way to do it" is similarly trying to solve a similar issue. C's lack of features also addresses this problem.

C++11/14 gives you much better tools, but it doesn't solve the "too many tools" problem. The old tools are still there, and in fact, people are still writing C++11/14 using those tools. The result is that even if you endeavor to only use the new, good C++11/14 ways to do things, you're still going to run into issues with the old stuff and you're going to have to understand a the old stuff: and there is no end to it. Every time you make a significant change to a C++ codebase, you have to learn another dark corner of a language that hasn't had a feature removed in three decades.

Java's solution to this problem is to add features very slowly and carefully, which makes the language hard to use sometimes due to its lack of features. Python's solution is to break reverse compatibility, which makes it difficult to run older codebases. C has this problem too, but they have been more conservative with the features they have added. C# has this problem badly, but it hasn't had as much time for it to get as bad as C++.