hi
thanks for this explanation. if youa re going cross platform with this
new library would that mean that msteries of the ancients could maybe
work again on the mac platofrm with others?
On 18 Jan 2009, at 00:38, Thomas Ward wrote:
Hi Will,
I certainly understand and respect your point of view, but there are
other issues to consider here.
First, right now Mysteries of the Ancients is currently alpha
software not a beta. What that means in programmer lingo is a
program functional for testing, but is known to have bugs and is not
a complete program. Betas are more or less complete programs, but
are known to have bugs. There is a big difference between an alpha
and a beta.
For example, Mysteries of the Ancients 0.4 alpha only has the first
level complete. So even if you guys got it you would come to the end
of level 1 and that would be it. no more levels. Of course I plan to
add more in the coming days and weeks, but for now obviously the
game is still lacking a large portion of the game. This is one
reason it is only an alpha not a beta.
Here is another case in point. Not too long ago one of the private
testers tried saving a game. When the game didn't save his game he
asked on the testers list why it wasn't working. I explained that
while the Genesis3D engine has that feature it was currently
disabled because I am currently rewriting or updating large
portions of the engine itself. If you save a game and you try and
load it using a newer version of the engine, like the one I am
working on now, the saved game will get scrambled in the process. i
don't want bug reports on something i already know needs to be fixed.
Second, the Genesis3D Engine uses a different product key system
than Montezuma's Revenge. That means bbefore everyone who paid for
Montezuma's Revenge can upgrade to Mysteries of the Ancients I will
have to generate a couple hundred keys, and process all of those
orders. Given the amount of time I have had lately to devote to USA
Games stuff it would take me a week to process all of those orders.
Personally, I think I would be more productive just working on the
game, trying to get a decent demo ready, than processing all 200
orders.
Third, the Mysteries of the Ancients documentation is still
incomplete. Yes, i know people can figure a lot out by playing
around with it, but I believe before I release anything to the
general public the documentation should be as complete as possible.
By supplying good documentation with the demo i can cut down on the
number of general questions people are likely to ask.
Finally, Mysteries of the Ancients is currently undergoing some
major changes. I am presently working on integrating a newer version
of the Genesis3D engine into Mysteries of the Ancients 0.5. There
are some extensive changes in the newer Genesis Engine such as SDL
support instead of DirectX support. I've dropped support for DirectX
in the newer Genesis engine not only to make it easier to go cross
platform, but installing and setting up SDL is much much easier
than installing and updating DirectX 9.0C.
However, I've not yet done a lot of testing with the SDL based
version of Genesis myself, and I have no idea exactly how Mysteries
of the Ancients will perform until i do the upgrade. In a case like
that it is better to do some testing with a small group rather than
releasing a possibly unstable demo on the general public. If it
turns out i need to downgrade to the previous release it is easier
to work with 10 people rather than 150 people.
HTH.
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