A unified and portable client

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rotunda
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Posts: 77
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:19 pm

A unified and portable client

Post by rotunda »

There have been some discussions lately about different ways of attracting and keeping new players. The general consensus is that the clients available currently are not easy to use and have each a different set of useful features. The most efficient way of solving this problem seems to be choosing one client implementation and adding all the missing features to it. In addition, it is necessary to improve the built-in newbie help and simplify configuration of keystrokes. Now, for the question of which client implementation we should concentrate our efforts on. I think we will get the widest impact by concentrating on the SDL client due to its portability. It is missing several neat features, which should be ported from the other clients (NG X11 and BloodsPilot X11). I am going to start by porting the excellent HUD wall radar. If there is anyone who would like to contribute, please reply to this thread.
Angeba
Posts: 88
Joined: Sun Feb 06, 2011 11:23 pm

Re: A unified and portable client

Post by Angeba »

I would probably be happy with the sdl client if it had all the nice features that I like about the bloodspilot x11 client. The thing I miss the most about the sdl client is recording functionality. Especially buffered recording, so that I can review any interesting scene later. I guess it would be a lot of work to add either compatible recording functionality, or recording in some new format.

To be honest I don't feel like porting all the missing features to the sdl client, too much work and not sure if it helps to revive the game.

As i wrote in another thread, my intention is to add newbie-friendliness to the x11 client. I am aware that the client is restricted to unix-like systems, but that's okay for me, because it means much less work for me and I guess there are still more than enough potential players for the x11 client.

Currently I am looking into the widget code, trying to understand how widgets (buttons, labels, sliders etc.) work. The short-term aim here is to fix the remaining issues of the key setup function.

Another idea is to add "bubble help" functionality to the x11 client, like for instance the sdl client has (a description of a config option is displayed in a "bubble" if the mouse pointer hovers over an option). This would be part of the newbie help concept.
Unfortunately the widget code is quite big and like most XPilot code it has almost no comments/documentation. It's not enough to write nice code if it isn't documented. Any coder who wants to improve a program first needs to understand how it works, and that is helped enormously by comments. My proposal for minimal source code documentation is in the file `bloodspilot2-clients/src/comment_templates.txt' (in the git development version).
rotunda
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Posts: 77
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:19 pm

Re: A unified and portable client

Post by rotunda »

Ok, nice that you continue your work on the x11 client. Your ideas (e.g. the recording buffer or the newbie help) will be ported to the sdl client. But first kps and me are going to take the source code of the ng distribution, isolate the sdl client from it and build it for different platforms. Releasing it as is will be the first step towards attracting more players. The next step integrating newbie help should come relatively fast after that.
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