Re: [liquidwar-user] Liquid War 5.6.1

[Christian Mauduit]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2004 at 07:38:17PM +0000, Kasper Hviid wrote:
> On 11. januar 2004, Christian Mauduit said:
> >Just released 5.6.1 today. Nothing very very new, just a few bug-fixes.
> >
> >Still Windows users might be happy to know that now the lwmapgen utility
> >by D. Redick fully works on this platform, that's to say that the
> >"random map" button is finally able to launch the external program
> >without too much trouble.
> 
> Thats great! :-)
> 
> However, WinRar refuses to extract lw561w.zip! :-(
> Other zip files works fine, so I think there is an error in lw561w.zip. I 
> Hope you can fix it!
mmm, "unzip -t" on my UNIX box seems to work. Will try Winzip at work
tommorrow. I'll see if it works. Did you try to reload the ".zip" file?
Or check its MD5 checksum? (not straightforward to do but doable)

> Christian, you have said that version 5.6.1 would be the final version. The 
> next step would be a complete rewrite of the game, since the code had 
> become too chaotic to work with.
mmm, well, 5.6.x, not 5.6.1, to be precise...

> I thought about that when I saw this article, which was one big crusade 
> against rewrites! It did have a few good points:
> 
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
yep, there's a lot of such articles like this arround. This may surprise
you, but I quite agree with them. Point is Liquid War is *really* old.
It's more than 5 years old, and designed for DOS. To sum up my position,
here's what I think:
- I *have* tried to make enhancements on LW, and did actually some of
them. It *is* difficult.
- I *did* developp another game (U61) from scratch meanwhile, and many
things proved to be easier to code from scratch, and they work.
- the question "why would the code you'll write next year be better than
the one you wrote 5 years ago?" has an easy answer. Next year I'll
have 6 years more experience than 5 years ago. I'm not a manager hiring
"the same kind of programmer" (and obviously getting nothing better). 
I'm the exact same man with 6 more years of coding behind him 8-)
And there's another point: 6 years ago a bunch of tools that exist today
did not exist at all. Coding UI (user interfaces) in plain C the way
it's done in LW5 is not very far from being a total nonsense...

But the article has some good points. Most important is the "old code is
well tested" concept.

To sum it up: what I will not do is "heavy hacking on LW5". But of
course I will patch it as long as LW6 is not ready yet. Maybe LW6 won't
ever be ready. In that case people will still have good old LW5 to play
with. But I'll still try the LW6 road.

Does Quake 2 has much common code with Wolfenstein 3D? I doubt it...

Have a nice day,

Christian.

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden>     __/\__ ___
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