RE: Mono, anyone?

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery at indiegamedesign dot com>]

Lincoln Peters wrote:
>
> Has anyone considered taking advantage of Ximian's (Novell's?) Mono
> project?

Have you?  I can think of a zillion things Xconq *could* have in it...
but I concentrate on the ones I'm fully willing to implement myself.  No
harm in asking if someone else is also interested in Mono, but my point
is you have to be the one to lead the effort for that sort of thing.

> * Allow Xconq to talk to a other application.  This may
> initially sound
> silly, but imagine how much easier it might be to play games such as
> bellum.g if you could use a spreadsheet to represent various
> aspects of
> your empire (particularly such things as supply of 'c') using charts.
> It might not be quite so bad for Xconq to behave (to some extent) like
> an office application.

What I *have* considered, is writing the Windows UI in C# and .NET.  I'm
a .NET nunce, I don't know what its GUI features are.  Maybe it has some
kind of applicable "spreadsheet form."  Thanks for reminding me that
right-click popups won't solve all UI problems, I'll need a National
Budget screen somewhere.

If I go the C# .NET route, then I'll simply leave it to others to worry
about porting it to Mono.  But one thing I've discovered, that I didn't
realize before, is that C# is not exactly a good language for interoping
with C directly.  You have to create DLLs and do all this marshalling
stuff, it's a tedious function-by-function job.  Either that or wrap
stuff up in Managed C++.  Neither would be so bad if the C was legacy
code awaiting conversion to something more modern, but I expect it will
be a live target for some time.  I have no interest in chasing the C
coders' tails with my manual labor.

So today, I'm looking at Python / C interop.  Possibly a "make this more
OO" effort needs to precede C# .NET efforts.  Once I have a higher level
construct summarizing the Xconq interactions, use that to bridge to C#.
NET.  This is like the idea of wrapping stuff up with Managed C++,
except I'm wrapping stuff up with Python.  And then accepting possibly
some more difficulty implementing the interop bridge.

Or there's Door #3: finding a Python GUI that has the right-click popup
and spreadsheet tables I need.  Another thing I'll be looking at today.
But my concern is there's probably no RAD tool at the same level of
quality as C# .NET in the Python world.  I want to bang out GUIs
quickly, not futz manually.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.