RE: [AD] Possible new features for Allegro?

["Vincent Penquerc'h" <Vincent.Penquerch@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [AD] Possible new features for Allegro?

> - to re-write the GUI code. Black&White widgets don't look so

There are two components: the widgets themselves and the
dialog player. It's perfectly possible to use the latter
without the former, and many people have done it. Now, I
too agree that they're not very hot :)

> - and that networking support you already mentioned. Is it
> really so hard to
> portably(excluding dos support... no point in there)?

Well, you have to cater for lots of differences between
the machines that your game runs on: endianness, sizeof
different types (mainly int), possibly signedness of
default char type, FP format (strict IEEE?).
Also, which protocol to use ? A faster one which does not
guarantee reception ?
When you've done that, you fall into the tricks of out of
order packets, lost packets (sometimes depending on the
protocol you use). And packets which arrive 3 minutes
later... Error detection and correction, encryption (you
don't really want easy to write aiming proxies do you ?),
general purpose compression (very important as network
throughput is a bottleneck for many games)...
And there's optimization: what is the best packet size
to use ? You might want to send a smaller packet if none
was sent for some time, etc.

(Oh, do I sound like I would deter one from doing network\
code ?) :)

--
Vincent Penquerc'h