Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Feneric Brown]

> Mi povis kompreni vin!  Kaj vi povas relerni nur per klopodi.

Estas vera.  Mi ne uzis esperanton dum plia yaro.

> Eric, la teksto enhavis kelkajn etajn erarojn do ne konfuzighu.  Vi
> pravas pri la akordo inter sustantivo kaj adjektivo ("Ludoj estas
> bonaj").

Mi ne suprizighas.  Mia esperanto estis neniam bonega; mi scias ghi 
estas pli malbona nun.

Mi shanghas la temo -- mi rimarkigi ke Xconq flikis por elmontro 
japana; chu levpovas chi tio por aliaj lingvoj?

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Jim Kingdon]

> Mi shanghas la temo -- mi rimarkigi ke Xconq flikis por elmontro 
> japana; chu levpovas chi tio por aliaj lingvoj?

Se oni deziras uzi tcl/tk, aux aliaj (gtk?), shajne oni povus
simple uzi la UTF-8-on kaj la grafik-sistemo havus la solvon.

En sdl, ni havas la dosieron images/font.bmp kaj ghi enhavas nur la
signojn el US-ASCII.  Do ni bezonas solvi la problemon ni mem, aux
elekti programon (ne parte de sdl mem) por teksto.

Eble la plej grava lingvo estas la elfa de JRR Tolkien (kaj la Tengwar
kaj la Angerthas), por la ludo "Mastro de l'Ringo".  Kun la helpo de
la apendico de Reveno de la Regho, oni povus skribi lok-nomojn en la
Tolkienaj lingvoj.

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Eric McDonald]

Jim Kingdon wrote:
>>Mi shanghas la temo -- mi rimarkigi ke Xconq flikis por elmontro 
>>japana; chu levpovas chi tio por aliaj lingvoj?
> 
> Se oni deziras uzi tcl/tk, aux aliaj (gtk?), shajne oni povus
> simple uzi la UTF-8-on kaj la grafik-sistemo havus la solvon.

"If __ desires to use Tcl/Tk, or others (Gtk?), ___ ___ able to simply 
use the UTF-8 and the graphic system has the solution."

"oni" -> "unus" -> "one" (?)
"shajne" -> "certainly/surely" (?)

> En sdl, ni havas la dosieron images/font.bmp kaj ghi enhavas nur la
> signojn el US-ASCII.  Do ni bezonas solvi la problemon ni mem, aux
> elekti programon (ne parte de sdl mem) por teksto.

"In/with SDL, it has the file 'images/font.bmp' and this contains only 
the symbols from US-ASCII.  That it ____ to solve the problem it ___, or 
to select programs (not part of SDL ___) for text."

"bezonas" -> "tries" (?)
This would seem to make sense in the context of your comment about me 
and "pri". (I try to learn the meaning of the word "pri".)

Now, for an actual Xconq-related response: yes, I too have given 
consideration about what a pain in the posterior the 
internationalization aspect of the SDL may cause. I think that other 
font tables, similar to 'fonts.bmp' may need to be used for other 
languages, and the 'draw_string' code will probably have to be rewritten 
to dispatch to new functions such as 'draw_string_en_US', 
'draw_string_eo' :-), etc... as appropriate.

Of course, first thing is to get newlines and horizontal tabs supported, 
__something I did only a few weeks ago.

> Eble la plej grava lingvo estas la elfa de JRR Tolkien (kaj la Tengwar
> kaj la Angerthas), por la ludo "Mastro de l'Ringo".  Kun la helpo de
> la apendico de Reveno de la Regho, oni povus skribi lok-nomojn en la
> Tolkienaj lingvoj.

"Possibly the most heavy/troublesome language is the elvish of J.R.R. 
Tolkien (and the Tengwar and the Angerthas), for the game "Lord of the 
Ring". With the help of the appendix of the _Return of the King_, one is 
able to write place-names in the Tolkienish languages."

"Eble" -> "possibly" (?)
"plej" -> "most" (?)

Shouldn't "Mastro de l'Ringo" be "Mastro de l'Ringoj" ?

Eric

P.S. The appendix of the _Return of the King_ does rock. Also, if one 
picks up _Unfinished Tales_ (released after John Ronald Reuel's death by 
his son Christopher), one can gain even more Middle Earth lore. (Though 
the secrets for making the rings are not revealed....)

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[mskala]

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Eric McDonald wrote:
> P.S. The appendix of the _Return of the King_ does rock. Also, if one 
> picks up _Unfinished Tales_ (released after John Ronald Reuel's death by 
> his son Christopher), one can gain even more Middle Earth lore. (Though 
> the secrets for making the rings are not revealed....)

I used to follow one of the Elvish-language mailing lists (i.e. a mailing
list *about* the Elvish languages; actual messages on the list were mostly
in English).  It's been a while since I paid attention to that, but I see
that Ardalambion, one of my favourite Web sites on the subject, is still
around at http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/ .
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Eric McDonald]

mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Eric McDonald wrote:
> 
>>(released after John Ronald Reuel's death by 
>>his son Christopher)

I just realized that the above was open to a possible patricidal 
interpretation. If I remember anything from a Tolkien bio that I read 
about 15 years ago, Tolkien died naturally and not by the hand of his son.

> It's been a while since I paid attention to that, but I see
> that Ardalambion, one of my favourite Web sites on the subject, is still
> around at http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/ .

Nifty site. Thanks for the URL.

Eric

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Jim Kingdon]

> I think that other font tables, similar to 'fonts.bmp' may need to be
> used for other languages, and the 'draw_string' code will probably
> have to be rewritten to dispatch to new functions such as
> 'draw_string_en_US', 'draw_string_eo' :-), etc... as appropriate.

Well, there is the easy way and the hard way.  The easy way is to just
pick up one of the existing rendering packages, such as pango (
http://www.pango.org/ ) and existing sets of fonts.  Something along
these lines is surely the way to go if we see it as a priority to
support a wide variety of modern languages with minimal effort on the
part of the game designer.

The hard way is more custom, and has as a goal having more of a
distinctive xconq look and/or a look specific to a particular xconq
game.  One possible solution which passes the buck to the game
designer (or UI translator): rather than specify a unit name (or menu
item) as text, specify it as a bitmap (in how many sizes?  etc).  This
pushes all the rendering issues (bidirectional, combining glyphs in
languages like thai, arabic, etc) to design-time than runtime.  This
doesn't help with cases in which humans enter text - the chat and "M"
(message) features of a multiplayer game are what spring to mind.
There's also "name a unit".

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Eric McDonald]

Jim Kingdon wrote:
>>I think that other font tables, similar to 'fonts.bmp' may need to be
>>used for other languages, and the 'draw_string' code will probably
>>have to be rewritten to dispatch to new functions such as
>>'draw_string_en_US', 'draw_string_eo' :-), etc... as appropriate.
> 
> Well, there is the easy way and the hard way.  The easy way is to just
> pick up one of the existing rendering packages, such as pango (
> http://www.pango.org/ ) and existing sets of fonts.  

I was aware of Pango, due to the fact that I have read GTK+ 
documentation before, and that Pango is fairly heavily required package 
when one installs a Redhat distro (attempting to do without it breaks a 
fair number of deps).

I just sat down and looked at the Pango docs. It would appear that Pango 
can pretty much handle everything up to the point of rendering to the 
output device. I saw a note that it actually does have a function, which 
is not considered part of Pango proper, that handles rendering to an X11 
display. However, this leaves the question of the Mac and Win32 
platforms. Unless there is multi-platform, lightweight rendering API 
that can take a list of Pango glyphs (which I am led to believe is what 
comes out of the far end of the Pango pipeline) and actually draw them 
on the display, I am not sure how much use it would be to us. (I don't 
particularly consider GTK+ to be a lightweight rendering API, and there 
would be the question of how to get it to render in an SDL window, anyway.)

>Something along
> these lines is surely the way to go if we see it as a priority to
> support a wide variety of modern languages with minimal effort on the
> part of the game designer.

Possibly. But, I have previously mentioned the possibility of writing 
labels in runic alphabets (both historical and fictitious):
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/xconq7/2004/msg01213.html

Of course, in that message, I was assuming that a select set of glyphs 
would be mapping to US-ASCII (as is currently done with 'font.bmp'). If 
they are Feanorean runes mapping to a character set representing the 
lexical tokens of the Quenya language, for example, then the task would 
be somewhat more complicated, I think (draw_string_quenya ?). And I 
doubt Pango is up to the task....

> The hard way is more custom, and has as a goal having more of a
> distinctive xconq look and/or a look specific to a particular xconq
> game.  One possible solution which passes the buck to the game
> designer (or UI translator): rather than specify a unit name (or menu
> item) as text, specify it as a bitmap (in how many sizes?  etc).  This
> pushes all the rendering issues (bidirectional, combining glyphs in
> languages like thai, arabic, etc) to design-time than runtime.  This
> doesn't help with cases in which humans enter text - the chat and "M"
> (message) features of a multiplayer game are what spring to mind.
> There's also "name a unit".

Yeah, it's a thought, but not only does it have the shortcomings you 
mention, but it would likely lead to an explosion of new bitmaps. I 
personally would shy away from this solution.

Eric

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Jim Kingdon]

> Unless there is multi-platform, lightweight rendering API that can
> take a list of Pango glyphs (which I am led to believe is what comes
> out of the far end of the Pango pipeline) and actually draw them on
> the display, I am not sure how much use it would be to us.

It is possible that http://sdlpango.sourceforge.net/ is such a thing.
Although that page seemed to describe lots of issues, without quite
saying just what SDL_Pango does.

> Possibly. But, I have previously mentioned the possibility of writing 
> labels in runic alphabets (both historical and fictitious):

It is the kind of thing which wouldn't be off the shelf.  But using
Unicode's private character numbers and writing yourself a font which
the usual UTF-8 tools can process might be just as easy as doing
everything from scratch.

Of course the real point of using something like Pango would be if we
want to deal with arabic, thai, bidirectional, and the other
complicated cases.  If you just want to put up characters next to each
other, something much simpler like the following (or even home grown
solutions like what we have now) are much more plausible:

http://www.linux-games.com/sfont/
http://www.geocities.com/andre_leiradella/#sdl_bdf

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Eric McDonald]

Jim Kingdon wrote:
>>Unless there is multi-platform, lightweight rendering API that can
>>take a list of Pango glyphs (which I am led to believe is what comes
>>out of the far end of the Pango pipeline) and actually draw them on
>>the display, I am not sure how much use it would be to us.
> 
> It is possible that http://sdlpango.sourceforge.net/ is such a thing.
> Although that page seemed to describe lots of issues, without quite
> saying just what SDL_Pango does. 

I looked at their code example. It appears to be just what I had in 
mind. It takes a Pango context (containing the glyphs) and draws it onto 
a SDL surface. Perfect. Case closed.

>>Possibly. But, I have previously mentioned the possibility of writing 
>>labels in runic alphabets (both historical and fictitious):
> 
> It is the kind of thing which wouldn't be off the shelf.  But using
> Unicode's private character numbers and writing yourself a font which
> the usual UTF-8 tools can process might be just as easy as doing
> everything from scratch.

Ah, I forgot about the private character numbers in Unicode. I think 
that this solves the abovementioned problem. Good thought.

> Of course the real point of using something like Pango would be if we
> want to deal with arabic, thai, bidirectional, and the other
> complicated cases.  

Sure.

Based on the info you just provided, it looks like we can cover both the 
internationalization issue (for people who want to use SDL Xconq in a 
language other than en_US), and the game designer-specified labels issue.

   Thanks,
      Eric

Antarcticonq

[Elijah Meeks]

Finally played the standard game on Skala's map and,
wow, I never thought a bunch of mountains and tundra
could look so good.  It's amazing what accurate
terrain data can do to make even a game with (only) 13
units so much fun.

Tremble, America, for now Morocco controls all the
Strategic Ice Reserves!!!




		
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Re: Antarcticonq

[Eric McDonald]

Elijah Meeks wrote:
> Finally played the standard game on Skala's map and,
> wow, I never thought a bunch of mountains and tundra
> could look so good.  It's amazing what accurate
> terrain data can do to make even a game with (only) 13
> units so much fun.

It does look quite good. Though it didn't have quite the same features 
as the other map of Antarctica that I saw recently:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040926&mode=classic

> Tremble, America, for now Morocco controls all the
> Strategic Ice Reserves!!!

If your Moors, Berbers, or whatever so much as touch the IceCube 
neutrino detector, I will shoot your entire caravan of snow camels. Capiche?

Eric

Re: Antarcticonq

[Elijah Meeks]

> It does look quite good. Though it didn't have quite
> the same features 
> as the other map of Antarctica that I saw recently:
>
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040926&mode=classic

Oh lord, the Mountains of Madness...  I can't think of
any way to model Lovecraft in XConq, but if I do,
beware.  Nyarlathotep won't work until manual
change-type is fixed, unless you want him/it to be a
human-only controlled character.  Hmmm, maybe you play
Nyarlathotep as he seduces and destroys various parts
of humanity...

Well, one thing's appealing, it does lend itself to
the number of units I like to put in my games:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos

> If your Moors, Berbers, or whatever so much as touch
> the IceCube 
> neutrino detector, I will shoot your entire caravan
> of snow camels. Capiche?

You'll find our snow camels to be far more resiliant
than their warm weather counterparts...  Besides,
we're phasing them out in favor of Tauntauns.




		
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Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Lincoln Peters]

I don't mean to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for adding multi-lingual
support to Xconq and/or the website, but since not all of us know
Esperanto, would everyone mind speaking so that we can all understand?

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln@sbcglobal.net>

By perseverance the snail reached the Ark.
		-- Charles Spurgeon

Re: New Proposed Xconq Web Site Online

[Eric McDonald]

Lunch time == attempted Esperanto translation time

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Feneric Brown wrote:

> > Mi povis kompreni vin!  Kaj vi povas relerni nur per klopodi.
> 
> Estas vera.  Mi ne uzis esperanton dum plia yaro.

"[This] is true. I am not using Esperanto while/when ___ ___."

"plia yaro" -> "doing my job"/"plying my trade"  (wild guess??)

> > Eric, la teksto enhavis kelkajn etajn erarojn do ne konfuzighu.  Vi
> > pravas pri la akordo inter sustantivo kaj adjektivo ("Ludoj estas
> > bonaj").
> 
> Mi ne suprizighas.  Mia esperanto estis neniam bonega; mi scias ghi 
> estas pli malbona nun.

"I am not surprised. My Esperanto was never very good; my 
knowledge is bad to none."  (??)

> Mi shanghas la temo -- mi rimarkigi ke Xconq flikis por elmontro 
> japana; chu levpovas chi tio por aliaj lingvoj?

"I changed the topic/theme -- I ____ __ Xconq ___ ___ ___ Japan; 
what possbility for other languages?"   (Something about the Xconq 
internationalization effort by the guy in Japan....)

Eric

Re: Antarcticonq

[Eric W. Brown]

> Oh lord, the Mountains of Madness...  I can't think of
> any way to model Lovecraft in XConq, but if I do,
> beware.  Nyarlathotep won't work until manual...

I don't know; portions of Antarctica's history according to Lovecraft.  
I could easily see both the shoggoth uprising against the Elder Things 
in Kadath and the possibly near future -- if we're to believe news 
items like the one found here:

	http://www.ufoarea.com/aas_kadath_antarctica.html

conflict between humans and shoggoths after the ruins of Kadath are 
opened.

:)

The biggest challenge with these scenarios is that (in modern times, 
anyway) Kadath is mostly below the surface, and there is some argument 
to extending it for multiple hexes; if this approach is taken it would 
be reasonable to have units on the surface and units in the caves 
beneath not be able to interact with one another or even be aware of 
one another.

Didn't Matthew Skala mention that the ultimate goal of his Antarctica 
work was to create a Lovecraft based module?

Re: Antarcticonq

[mskala]

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Eric W. Brown wrote:
> Didn't Matthew Skala mention that the ultimate goal of his Antarctica 
> work was to create a Lovecraft based module?

Yes, though I had in mind more to just mix some Lovecraftian ideas into an
exploration-and-conquest game rather than to actually simulate the events
described in the literature in precise detail.  For instance, I have a
list of ideas for advances kicking around that includes "The Delapore
menu" - which would increase your food production.  Never mind that _The
Rats in the Walls_ didn't originally have anything to do with Antarctica.

I'm going to have to think hard about playability and scale, though; the
rough draft module I have (which doesn't have any Lovecraftian stuff in it
yet) suffers a lot from my being unclear on the appropriate time scale.  
The thing is that activities like building bases and (especially) roads
take a long time, weeks to months, but other things like the flight of
airplanes take place on a much shorter time scale.  It seems like I have
to abstract out one or the other.  I also had some issues with background
economy.  I tried to make it so that you could build a network of caches
and have them automatically refill from bases, and so that bases in
low-productivity areas could be supplied by bases in high-productivity
areas by way of a chain of caches in between, but that doesn't seem to
actually work.  I need a better understanding of why the existing code
does what it does, before I'll know whether that's a bug in my design or
in the system itself.

Playing Wreckreation recently, I noticed that my units seemed to alternate
between getting 10 action points and getting only 2, and it's only in the
last couple days that I finally figured out that that's due to day and
night.  I wonder if I might do be able to abuse day/night to deal with
different time scales - have a bunch of "fast turns" for things like
airplanes, and then the occasional "slow turn" for things like base and
road building.  I think it's possible to make some units move only by day
and others only by night, but I haven't looked into that yet - I got the
idea just now while typing this message.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/