[twilight-devel] Re: feature request

[Joseph Carter]

On Fri, Aug 09, 2002 at 12:14:04PM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > That bug still hasn't been fixed? Sigh.
> > 
> > Added it as a release critical bug to TODO.
>  
> i'm working on it right now.  i hope you like what i have.
> 
> i'm also doing some small things.  like i noticed that your mkdir
> returns no information about success or not.  i changed it to return
> success or failure, and wrote something to catch errors.

Careful there - failure to create the directory because it already exists
is a success condition.  =)


> > Work is intermittent at the moment, because knghtbrd is going to college 
> > soon, and Mercury is working on renderer rewrites...
>  
> after 11 years of undergrad and grad school, i feel competant enough to
> say that college is over-rated.   i'll prolly be really bitter until i
> get phracking phd.  if i had known that grad school was so long and
> tough, i'm not sure i would've gone...  

Well you went and got tons of BS, then you decided to get it Piled Higher
and Deeper.  What'd you expect?  ;)


> > Thanks for reporting that too, also added to TODO.
> 
> this is beyond my ability right now.  i just started looking at your
> code.  it *looks* like it restores a game with the player "dead".

I swear we fixed this once!  LordHavoc and I poured over the writing code,
the savegame files, and the reading code for hours.  It was so simple too,
once we found the problem.  I fear I may have broken them again, but I
can't imagine how offhand.


> i also started taking some notes about the code.  maybe it could be the
> start of a README.hacking or something.

Originally, everything was going to be available as annotated diffs in two
categories, fixing Id's bugs and extending the engine.  If a bug in
extending the engine was found, we would go back and fix the diff.  When I
was the only one working on Twilight, this was practical, but Zeph and
Forest never really had much interest in doing this and we kinda came to
the conclusion that the engine was better a functional, playable engine
which was as good as we can possibly make it, rather than a hacker's
introduction to making cool stuff with Quake.


In some ways, I wish we'd suck with the hacker's introduction.  We'd have
more people today who actually understood the guts of Quake, its flaws and
strong points, and knowing enough to go write their own engines.  And yet,
if not for Twilight, what would gamers be using, QuakeForge?  QuakeForge
is today the laughing stock of engines among modders because of their
incompatibilities with the original Quake and refusal to implement even
the common standards.

What's amusing is that Forest, Zeph, and I all were part of QuakeForge.
In fact, Zeph and I were two of the three people who creating it, and yet
the project has never adopted the standards all other Quake engines today
follow, several of which the three of us are responsible for creating,
through discussions amongst ourselves and with other engine and mod
people.  *shrug*


> also, would anyone besides me find it be useful to hack the makefile to
> generate a ctags file?  i can't live without ctags...

I've never actually used them.  =)

-- 
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd at bluecherry.net>              glDisable (DX8_CRAP);
 
"What does this tell me?  That if Microsoft were the last software
company left in the world, 13% of the US population would be scouring
garage sales & Goodwill for old TRS-80s, CPM machines & Apple ]['s before
they would buy Microsoft. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement."
        -- Seen on Slashdot

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