(Seen my glasses? I'm a dork.)
If you want a specific section of my plan, you can use the web interface
like this:
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus§ion=intro
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus§ion=proj
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus§ion=general
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus§ion=ssam
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus§ion=todo
Or directly through port 79, if your finger client will let you get away with:
finger icculus?section=ssam@icculus.org
This is part of the new, improved IcculusFinger. Yay.
Thanks,
--The McManagement.
(This is in no particular order)
- The icculus.org open source incubator.
- SDL_sound.
- PhysicsFS.
- The Build Engine.
- Toby.
- Serious Sam.
- IcculusFinger.
- Unrealty.
- IcculusNews.
- Other stuff.
I have projects on icculus.org (some are even mine) that are already
abandoned. I will have to figure out what to do with them. If you want to
peek around, look at The CVS Tree.
I'm a militant feminist. There's no way around it. I've got ticket stubs
from an Ani Difranco concert and The Vagina Monologues in my wallet.
To keep my status as "honorary cunt", I've picked up some new grrl music.
First, the latest from The Jennifer Nettles Band. This album is good:
definitely worth hearing. "Gravity: Drag Me Down" is more backwaters than
Jennifer's first release, but I like the fact that she's branching out. The
jazzy, bluesy, soulsy sound is still there (reference "Cold Sweat Scream"),
but listen to "El Camino" and you'll understand why I call this
"backwaters". I mean, she actually gets away with using the phrase, "why
don't we go sugar-footin'?" No shit.
Sadly, neither this, nor "Story of Your Bones," has that dripping erotic
appeal of her work with Soul Miner's Daughter, but I still like the new
album.
I also got Alanis Morrisette's new disc. It sounds just like the second
CD she put out. I don't understand how Jagged Little Pill can be so well
done (fuck you, you liked it too in 1995), and her next two offerings be
so...lackluster. I need to listen to it a few more times, but even
"Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" had one or two songs that were catchy,
like "Joining You"...this one, is, well...(*shrug*).
I'll stop acting like I know what I'm talking about now.
Yes, I'm porting it. No, there's no timeframe right now. Email me with
questions, and I'll start a FAQ or something.
Current Status:
I occasionally get an email saying, "hey, where the hell is Serious Sam
for Linux? It's been months, and your .plan has been collecting dust!"
My current favourite response:
Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the
tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the
blessed sun himself a fair, hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see
no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of
the day. I wasted time and now doth time waste me.
-- William Shakespeare
That being said, it's still being worked on. I'm so far behind schedule,
it's not even funny, but this is the danger of free work. I need to eat,
so when paying contracts come along, they will always take priority
over charity ports. In the past few months, a lot of Linux and MacOS
game porting work has come my way. Candy Cruncher was one such beast
(which, if you haven't tried it, then you are missing out on an
addictive little game). Other games, plus open source contributions to
SDL and friends, maintaining and improving icculus.org, etc...I'm a
mover and a shaker, apparently...but I'm still plugging away at the code
when I've got time. I can't thank you Linux gamers enough for your patience,
and hope it pays off for you shortly.
In related news, I squashed that motherfucker of a rendering issue. I moved
over to the Intel C++ compiler, since their 6.0 release doesn't suck ass
like version 5.0 did. I might stick with GCC for the final builds, but Intel
C++ has one thing going for it that makes it a great porting tool: it can
grok both GNU and Visual C style inline assembly. This was a godsend,
and fixed at least three major rendering problems. For example, there's
code that looks something like this in the original source base:
__asm
{
fld dword ptr [f]
fist dword ptr [slTmp]
fisubr dword ptr [slTmp]
fstp dword ptr [fDiff]
// ...some other stuff ...
}
I had this for the Linux build:
__asm__ __volatile__
(
flds dword ptr [f]
fists dword ptr [slTmp]
fisubrs dword ptr [slTmp]
fstps dword ptr [fDiff]
// ...some other stuff ...
);
(okay, the operands aren't right in the GNU one, but follow me here...)
Apparently, this is wrong, and created a very subtle rounding error in
the Linux version. I didn't discover this until I got the Intel compiler
to generate an ELF binary with the MSVC inline, and the bug mysteriously
vanished. At that point it was just a matter of compiling each source file
with inline assembly (there's about 10 to 15 of them) with Intel C++,
trying both the GNU and MSVC inline until I found the file that had the
buggy code. When I narrowed it down to that code fragment, I used gdb to
disassemble the MSVC inline version...this spits out assembly in AT&T (GNU
inline) format, and I could compare.
Here's the difference:
What I had: What I should have had:
flds (%%eax) flds (%%eax)
fists (%%ebx) fistl (%%ebx)
fisubrs (%%ebx) fisubrl (%%ebx)
fstps (%%ecx) fstps (%%ecx)
Why I was supposed to know that I needed to specify a different precision
to two of the opcodes and not the other two is beyond me. This is why
everyone thinks inline floating point assembly is broken in gcc. It's not.
Inline assembly in general is broken in gcc. Or rather, it's
braindead. I'm sure there will be people that disagree, but they don't
port games to Linux for a living. I think I'll send Michael Abrash a
love letter and send the Free Software Foundation a photocopy of my ass.
Anyhow, next hurdle is networking, then some polishing, and then (dear
lord), The First Encounter might be ready. Thankfully, the Second
Encounter should be a much smoother ride, since I just need to get the
entities (many of them cut-and-pasted from The First Encounter) compiling.
Again, thank you for sticking around. I'll keep this .plan more updated
in the future.
Those old Screenies.
Keep me and icculus.org going.
--ryan.
(FAQ snipped. Check the archives.)
Somewhat immediate TODOs:
- Unicode support in UT2k3.
- Look at SDL audio conversion code.
- Check for zlib 1.1.3 remnants on icculus.org.
- Yuri's Revenge support in csmhax0r.
- Have csmhax0r flip read-only flag.
- Reburn damaged music disc.
- Finalize text for Bernd.
- Read Bernd's Gamasutra article.
- Send zakk his stuff.
- Sort out icculus.org hardware donations.
- Get more RAM in the iMac.
- Nag Kent about MindRover again.
- Nag Vince about dedicated server stuff.
- Shut down legacy OpenAL mailing list.
- Report compiler issues to Intel.
- Reply to Sam.
- Add a "noarchive" tag to IcculusFinger.
Ongoing TODOs:
- Port Serious Sam. ( 8%)
- Rewrite IcculusNews. ( 50%)
- Get Duke3D/COMMIT net API implemented for modern platforms. ( 0%)
- Release SDL_sound v1.0. ( 90%)
- Release PhysicsFS v1.0. ( 90%)
- SDL_mixer rewrite, using non-existant SDL_sound library. ( 0%)
- Toby rewrite #4. Way overdue. ( 20%)
- Documentation for Toby. YEARS overdue. ( 0%)
- Major SMPEG updates. ( 0%)
- Rewrite web interface to mailing list archives. ( 0%)
- Write The Hook Book. ( 0%)
- Read A Beautiful Mind. ( 1%)
Backburnered, but reasonable TODOs: (in no specific order):
- Make the logs rotate automatically.
- Hook up CVS to IcculusNews.
- Let people submit to IcculusNews via email.
- Figure out how to monitor exactly how much bandwidth we've used per month.
- Hook up mailing list software to IcculusNews.
- Hook up Bugzilla to IcculusNews.
- Rewrite Toby's parser.
- Finish writing Punk Ass Comedy.
- Finish writing The Street.
- Finish reading The Dragon Book.
- MBOX support in PhysicsFS.
- Increase memory/swapspace.
- Remove http://icculus.org/sysinfo/todo.html
- Clean up room.
- Clean up home dir.
- Set up meldrew.
- Get nerf updated for SSL support.
Blue sky:
- Get Dreamcast Linux working.
- SDL OS/2.
- SDL LightPen/tablet support.
- SDL MsgBox API.
- Make BUILD Engine support OpenGL.
- Fix the Linux Realtek drivers.
- Write scratchware.
- Physics engine.
- BuildX.
- Get BUILD engine ready for Matt Saettler.
- Get Duke3D sound API implemented for modern platforms.
- Beat Zork III. I will someday, I swear.
--ryan. (icculus@clutteredmind.org)
