Reply to Re: v1.09?
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(thanks for the beep Someone 
)
It sounds difficult to write any moderately complex enhancement to the engine.
- It's easy to break compatibility with existing D-Mods
- While I cleaned-up the "senses" of the engine (screen, keyboard, sound, etc.), the "brains" (DinkC parser, sprite management, etc.) are still much messy; and cleaning-up while preserving backward-compatibility takes an insane amount of time.
(FreeDink still brings Ogg Vorbis/MODs audio support, a translations system, and mainly portability
)
I'm contemplating the idea of rewriting the engine with more solid foundations, keeping the current graphics, but no playing of previous D-Mods. The original game could be ported to this new engine. I've experimented a bit with Python/Pygame/OpenGL in that regard. I'm currently busy on another project but I could spend more time on it if there's interest.
Backward compatibility is an interesting topic and I'm still unsure about what's best:
- continue playing old games, but complexify your engine, to the point of making it unmaintainable
- request users to update their games regularly for newer versions of the engine. But often authors disappeared shortly after releasing their D-Mod; in any case I think it's good that authors allow other people to update their D-Mods if they don't do it themselves, like we did for v1.08.
What do you think?
I don't think it's worth making a MMORPG Dink, because there're already several similar Free 2D mmorpg around (Stendhal, The Mana World, Deliantra). What I like in Dink is the ability to tell a story. MMORPG is a different beast.
)It sounds difficult to write any moderately complex enhancement to the engine.
- It's easy to break compatibility with existing D-Mods
- While I cleaned-up the "senses" of the engine (screen, keyboard, sound, etc.), the "brains" (DinkC parser, sprite management, etc.) are still much messy; and cleaning-up while preserving backward-compatibility takes an insane amount of time.
(FreeDink still brings Ogg Vorbis/MODs audio support, a translations system, and mainly portability
)I'm contemplating the idea of rewriting the engine with more solid foundations, keeping the current graphics, but no playing of previous D-Mods. The original game could be ported to this new engine. I've experimented a bit with Python/Pygame/OpenGL in that regard. I'm currently busy on another project but I could spend more time on it if there's interest.
Backward compatibility is an interesting topic and I'm still unsure about what's best:
- continue playing old games, but complexify your engine, to the point of making it unmaintainable
- request users to update their games regularly for newer versions of the engine. But often authors disappeared shortly after releasing their D-Mod; in any case I think it's good that authors allow other people to update their D-Mods if they don't do it themselves, like we did for v1.08.
What do you think?
I don't think it's worth making a MMORPG Dink, because there're already several similar Free 2D mmorpg around (Stendhal, The Mana World, Deliantra). What I like in Dink is the ability to tell a story. MMORPG is a different beast.
