Re: Mono, anyone?

[Lincoln Peters <sampln@sbcglobal.net>]

On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 13:01, Eric McDonald wrote:
> Hi Lincoln,
> 
> On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> 
> > * 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. 
> 
> This sounds like a good idea. Gnome (and I think Qt, as well) has 
> an embedded object architecture, iirc. And, of course, Microsoft 
> does, so one could instantiate a MSExcel object within Xconq, for 
> instance. But as a cross-platform solution goes, I would have to 
> look; maybe the Ximian stuff is such; I will look at it.

I didn't get a chance to attend LinuxWorld in San Francisco this year,
but it sounds as if Ximian is still going strong on this project (I
heard that Mono received some kind of award, something like "#1 open
source project of the year").  And I expect that if they reasonably*
can, they'll use the same protocols as Microsoft applications, so that
you could just as easily embed MS Excel into Xconq as you might embed
Gnumeric.

* It's a totally different story if Microsoft refuses to disclose the
protocols, the protocols contains myriad security holes, or it is
grossly inefficient.

> 
> > It might not be quite so bad for Xconq to behave (to some extent) like
> > an office application.
> 
> As long as Xconq Office does not have any annoying office 
> assistants, such as Clippy, the Ammo Clip.

Although I suppose that, in some games, it might be interesting to have
a comparable assistant.  Perhaps Julius the military adviser could offer
free advice to those who play roman.g.  But I think we can all agree
that, if such a thing is to ever be implemented, it should be manually
enabled and set up by the game module and easily turned off by the
player.

Of course, it would open the door for a new generation of incredibly
annoying game modules ("You are about to send 1 infantry against 3
legions.  Its chance of survival is 15%.  Do you want to proceed?").