Well not much really to talk about. I get back online after the weekend to see nothing newsworthy so today I will just talk about a few FOSS things related to moi.
Although first, budding FOSS artists, check out this rather awesome animal print patterns pack that should boost your creative texturing efforts! It's CC share-a-like attribution licensed so basically no restrictions as long as you credit the creator. They are photoshop patterns :( but I'm sure there's a way to get them into el Gimp.
I imported FreeTrain CVS (from sourceforge.jp) into SVN (on sourceforge.net) and set up a basic website:
http://freetrain.sourceforge.net/
The next step is to get the thing compiling and have a dig around to see how deeply rooted all this Japanese stuff is, and to find somebody who actually knows Japanese. The game is written in C# and uses WinForms. However Mono recently got improved WinForms support so hopefully this will make FreeTrain run on Linux. :-) However that's the latest version of Mono and the Ubuntu Edgy version is the previous one... installing these things on Linux is a hassle and a half if something is not "officially" in a distro and probably why Linux adoption is as poor as it is. I guess I'll just have to take a gulp and get a little feisty.
If you fancy whipping together a few tracks into a compilation, I suggest you check out Mixxx. It's a great FOSS DJ application and cross platform.
That brings me to today's music tip, which is unbelievably good. I actually forgot where I was when listening to this the first time on my headphones and drifted into some kind of dream world:
Robbie Rivera - Floating Away (Deep Dish Dubfires Casaplex)
Is anybody checking out this music? Opinions are always welcome (as are suggestions).
Anyway, on a final note this is the 86th post to the Free Gamer blog. That's quite a lot - how time flies. Anyway I promise to completely overhaul this website before post #100 and, if I fail, I expect vitriol and abuse from disgruntled readers. ;-)
Seriously though, I need to move the list into a sortable table on it's own page because I just got fed up updating the nasty mess you see on the right. There's a bunch of games missing from it too. On top of that this theme sucks and there's no logo and generally too much crap on any 1 page. Anyway, enough that's ranting for now...
4 comments:
You can post on the help wanted section of Sourceforge for Japanese translations.
As for the winforms / mono. Is it possible to just to rip that out and use libSDL?
I am sure you will be able to make freetrain work on windows, linux and mac if you did so it might be worth taking a look at that.
I'd be apprehensive about changing technologies if it is not necessary. Increased adoption of Mono means that getting the latest version soon won't be problematic - especially not by the time this project reaches any kind of satisfactory conclusion.
There's no point writing a load of code if the current stuff is fine, if you see what I mean. I think WinForms is adequate if Mono supports it and, lately, it does!
I hope you know how to program in C#. I ran MoMA on the assemblies in the root directory of FreeTrain and got a bit more then 100 pInvoke's, most appear to be with the DirectX stuff. There are also 7 functions used that are flagged with TODO but if you talk with the MONO guys they will help you on those.
I guess you could get rid of a lot of pInvoke's if you threw out the DirectAudio code overall it looks like you might need SDL for .NET anyway, even if you stick with WinForms.
What I would do is:
1) get the game translated to English but stay with Windows
2) talk to the mono people and see what you need to take out and what they need to implement
3) get some help form the CS-SDL people replacing the DirectX parts you can't use
I think your right that you should get the game translated first.
Although Mono is great for Linux, if I am correct it doesn't work with Macs? Which is why I mentioned libSDL.
Whatever direction you take. Good luck. :D
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