Re: [AD] Proposed changes for Allegro 5 (6?)

[Laurence Withers <lwithers@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In reply to Bob <ohannessian@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>Hmm, I have a feeling this thread will explode as everyone is commenting on 
>everyone else's thoughts :)

Yay! Combinatorial explosion...

>>  - network: why not use something like libnet?
>
>Because libnet is not being updated :)
>Really, its only for completion of Allegro - it does abstracts everything 
>else needed to make a game, so why not networks?

Then let's update libnet ourselves. The license is open enough that we
can either make our own branch or just submit updates to the authors.
Although I suppose it wouldn't do any harm to merge libnet sources in
later on.

>>  - dynamic loading of modules: this would work fine on i386 (with 
>>    stonewheel), but not on anything else. So at best, we couldn't rely 
>>    on it being available.
>
>Yes I know lots of people will disagree with me, but the fact is, if DOS 
>isn't dead now, it will be by the time Allegro 5/6/7 comes out, when Windows 
>YQ comes out.
>If we drop DOS, we suddenly can have access to all these nice features like 
>multi-threading, networking, dynamic module loading, and probably a lot more 
>things that I can't think of right now.
>Seriously though, who still uses a pure DOS system today? If you use 
>Windows, why not use Mingw and make Windows programs? (then port them to 
>Linux ;)

Erm... I didn't mention DOS. Dynamic loading does work fine on DOS if
you use stonewheel. And DOS does support multi-threading (you can get
POSIX threads for DJGPP), networking (via libnet), etc.

[snip]
>But then, the DOS port won't behave like the other ports, and we'll see lots 
>of those nasty #define tricks to get our games to run one way in DOS and 
>another (better?) way in other OSs.

No, Allegro will be the same; if people want their games to run on DOS
(ie. presumably if they are developing on DOS), then they will have to
include some extra macros, which would be #defined to nothing on other
platforms.

Bye for now,
-- 
Laurence Withers, lwithers@xxxxxxxxxx
                http://www.lwithers.demon.co.uk/

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