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Xenonauts engine


TrashMan

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We all know how much problems the devs have with Xenonauts because of the engine and the fact that the makers are giving Chris the cold shoulder.

Makes me wanna bombard them with e-mails till they learn some manners.

I wonder...would a coordinated "we're gonna bother you till you cave in" approach be too cruel and unusual?

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Yes, as it's uncalled for. Unless they have a legal obligation to part with the information (which should be then taken through those channels) then they can communicate, or not, as is their wish.

Disappointing perhaps depending on just how much it would help at this late stage, but harassing them over it?

surely that would be a lack of manners?

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If you want the suppliers of Playground to file charges of incitement to harassment against Goldhawk, then by all means email-bomb them. All "they" will see is that individuals on the offical Goldhawk forum discussed such activities and will hold Goldhawk responsible for it, as the discussion took place on a Goldhawk forum, granting Goldhawk foreknowledge of such actions, and possibly sanction.

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It's a much better idea to just send a polite e-mail asking if they would be kind enough to share the source code, rather than "e-mail bombing" them, as that would likely discourage them from sharing said source code. If everyone sent one polite e-mail asking then perhaps they would go: Ok, so all these people are asking us nicely to share our source code with Goldenhawk Interactive, I guess we might as well then. That of course is a best case scenario.

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I like to think that the playground SDK has taught Goldhawk some wonderful lessons.

Partly that would be don't listen to dodgy coders who don't really know their job, and partly to make sure your engine can handle what you want it to do before you get stuck in.

As erutan says, the engine is not fit for purpose but that is because the purpose is well outside of the scope of the engine, rather than some failing on its part.

Poor communication with the people wanting to use your product is another thing though.

That is something they should really work on.

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  • 1 month later...

Not that I know anything about game design, but working with large IT projects taught me that sometimes you just have to scrap much of your work because previously chosen solution can't comply with new demands. I know it's way easier said than done and involves a lots of frowning over wasted time and resources, but there's only one thing worse over wasting a part of your work: wasting all of your work because the final product is unable to satisfy project requirements.

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Not that I know anything about game design, but working with large IT projects taught me that sometimes you just have to scrap much of your work because previously chosen solution can't comply with new demands. I know it's way easier said than done and involves a lots of frowning over wasted time and resources, but there's only one thing worse over wasting a part of your work: wasting all of your work because the final product is unable to satisfy project requirements.

At this stage of the game, though, the team would literally be saying, "sorry guys, release won't be for at least a year yet because we have to recode everything to work with the new engine." It'd be like if you had a project that you were working on in VB (God forbid) and then somebody just decided, "hey, why not use C#. C# is nice and easy and everybody seems to like C# these days."

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At this stage of the game, though, the team would literally be saying, "sorry guys, release won't be for at least a year yet because we have to recode everything to work with the new engine." It'd be like if you had a project that you were working on in VB (God forbid) and then somebody just decided, "hey, why not use C#. C# is nice and easy and everybody seems to like C# these days."

Lets just imagine for a few minutes that Chris and the team decided to actually do that and scrap the whole lot and recode in a diff language. What would that achieve for the game? Would it be better for any reason?

This was just a random thought as I was trolling the forum, I have zero coding knowledge and don not pretend to have any, I have no idea why people use diff code for different things. Im just curious.

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Better VB than Java.

Freelandr, different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are really good at handling a lot of math, others handle strings and input/output better, and some are probably specialized in graphics. I've never used C# so I can't comment on that specifically.

Edited by crusherven
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Better VB than Java.

Freelandr, different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are really good at handling a lot of math, others handle strings and input/output better, and some are probably specialized in graphics. I've never used C# so I can't comment on that specifically.

Turing Machines are better than Java, so... you know. In any case, C#(.net) is like C++-lite. From what I've learned it's fairly fast but is a lot easier to code than C++. We really only have used it in my Client/Server Development class, where it was used for all the server-side stuff and everything that wasn't the VB.net client.

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It would take a long time and introduce bugs that may not be easy to fix with features that are currently in and working.

It could potentially mean reworking all of the sprites as well if the new engine didn't handle 2D in the same way as the current one.

On top of that the new engine would come with limitations of its own that would be very different from the ones that the dev team know about and are used to working around.

There would have to be an absolutely fantastic reason to even consider doing that at this stage of development.

One along the lines of 'The old engine is incompatible with the new service pack for windows so will not run' rather than 'You might be able to add hills more easily'.

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Turing Machines are better than Java, so... you know. In any case, C#(.net) is like C++-lite. From what I've learned it's fairly fast but is a lot easier to code than C++. We really only have used it in my Client/Server Development class, where it was used for all the server-side stuff and everything that wasn't the VB.net client.
We wrote a game in Basic and one in Pascal. The parts that were slow we did in-line assembly language. You aren't stuck with one language ever. It's better to write the stuff that doesn't need speed in whatever language allows the fastest development, that your staff has the most skill with, and has the greatest level of cross-platform flexibility. You can performance tune it as you go along. There are performance measuring tools available in nearly all languages (including JAVA) now and they will tell you what is bottlenecking your program. Often you can fix problems with just some different coding without even resorting to assembly. In a turn based game most of the graphics are static 99% of the time, so you can use a high level language easily. Xenonauts uses a pre-written graphics engine so it's even less a slave to speed. Unfortunately, the engine has limitations that make some things difficult or impossible. My guess is that Xenonauts could, in fact, have been written in JAVA or several other languages.
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If I remember what GJ said, the whole thing is written in C++. Let's see... Aha! Found it! I don't think it's a question of what lanbguage to write it in. It's a question of the basic fundamentals of the game being re-done all over again, which I don't think at this point is viable.
Yes. I was just making a general point about software development. Obviously, starting all over with a different engine would be a huge undertaking at this point no matter what language you were using. Besides, I don't think there is any reason to believe we aren't going to end up with a good game because of technical issues at this point. "I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission." :)
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