Re: Combat result tracking?

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Hi Chris,

Skeezics Boondoggle wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Hans Ronne wrote:

> as long as we poor unix users aren't completely left behind... 

As long as you guys are still out there, I am interested in supporting 
your platforms. Unfortunately, I have to rely on the feedback of others 
to support non-Linux systems, since I don't have any working Sparcs, 
etc... right now. (I do have an old version of Solaris for x86 floating 
somewhere; I suppose I could try installing that in a virtual machine 
and see what happens.)

As far as SDL goes, it looks like you might have to build it from source 
on Solaris boxen. I didn't see any Solaris binaries at http://www.libsdl.org

> the tcltk
> interface is playable even on my somewhat beefy sparc 20 (4x125mhz) as
> long as you're careful with "click-ahead"; it's plenty fast on my ultra2
> (2x300mhz).  i can't believe that anyone with a nGhz ppc or x86 box would
> have any performance complaints even with the tcltk version, but if sdl is
> faster/better/sweeter smelling/easier to build, then i'm all for it.

For me, the main advantage to the SDL interface would be not having to 
hop back and forth between Tcl and C, which is a slight PITA when doing 
development and debugging, IMO. Also, in terms of configure/make, I have 
had to do quite a bit a work to support the building of Tkconq on 
diverse platforms, because different '{tcl,tk}Config.sh' set different 
important variables on different platforms. The 'sdl-config' scripts are 
much more uniform in the way they report things. Another consideration 
is that Tkconq is not a pure Tk app; it has some raw X11 calls as well, 
and this has led to deficient functionality on non-X11 platforms.

I wouldn't classify the performance of the Tcl/Tk interface as being 
totally smooth under Linux on my 1.4 GHz Athlon XP+. In a virtual 
machine (on the Linux host) running Windows XP, the performance is not 
that good at all (I haven't tried improving the nice level of the VM to 
see how is just a result of the lack of scheduler attention, though).

> seems there's been so much going on lately, and so many new features and
> bug fixes getting rolled in i haven't done a solaris build in quite some
> time.  but i suppose i ought to try out the sdl version and see what state
> that's in, if it's buildable on solaris and if there's any feedback to be 
> given...

That would be great. I also did a pretty massive overhaul of the 
configure/make stuff, and I would like to know if anything broke on Solaris.

  Thanks,
    Eric