I have decided.....

[tr1p1ea]

Well i believe Duck's Mario is still sitting there, if anyone wants to pick it up .

[Spencer]

Nah, any file hosted on your server not too long ago is gone.

[kalan_vod]

Well, when duck came back he posted a link to his website...and I have all his files ...

[Halifax]

ROL3, tifreaks game, got stolen and it was the finished product but since tifreak was bigtime then ticalc.org noticed the cope off and banned the idiot from ticalc.org.

And it is hard for people to give up their pride and joy that they worked on. They may want to help out the community but sometimes it is more than that although I am a strong advocater of open-source and all and every of my projects are open-source.

[kalan_vod]

ROL3, tifreaks game, got stolen and it was the finished product but since tifreak was bigtime then ticalc.org noticed the cope off and banned the idiot from ticalc.org.

And it is hard for people to give up their pride and joy that they worked on. They may want to help out the community but sometimes it is more than that although I am a strong advocater of open-source and all and every of my projects are open-source.

I believe that was Kevin...

[__Guest_]

I think it was, according to the readme on Omnimaga

[CoBB]

Which part? The stealing? I don't know, but people are always talking about how they don't want that to happen

I’m not really afraid that anyone would steal DR or AG.

The picking up where someone else left off? Well, one example I recall is GPP -> RGP. There are probably a few others.

I can’t say I’m overwhelmed by this magnitude. Just compare the number of people frustrated by the lack of archive support in AG and the number of those who added it.

I agree. But what I meant wasn't unfinished test code, but first running proof of concept demos of projects.

But it does happen. I had quite early releases for both AG (remember the version which was only a ball bouncing around in a level made of hand-drawn blobs? That was the first one others could see) and PTI (which isn’t released yet anyway ). Despite the long time span each project took I have to say I got very little valuable input. I think I know why: there are relatively few people with really good skills, and their energy is mostly taken up by their own projects. Does anyone remember how I literally kept begging people for artistic input on AG, to create some tables? Contributing code (or even useful programming ideas) would be much more effort.

Sure, but still it'd be nice to have a few tilemapping engines lying around to learn from, or to adapt, if you need one for your game.

Yes, and in fact there are some lying around.

And besides, how many forms of tilemapping are there..?

Smooth scrolling makes a difference, tile size, number of tiles, possibility of animation etc. You can’t make it so generic without losing a lot of performance.

Also; who knows someone combines several timemapping routines to make one big compile-time-scaleable tilemapping interface; those kinds of projects are too big for one person if you ask me.

And of dubious use. If you are to reuse code, it makes more sense to check out existing engines, see if there is one with the required capabilities and adapt it to the special needs of the project.

Maybe you're right, but then please do tell my why so many people abandon nice projects because they take too much of their time?

Because calculator programming is not the major priority in their lives? Projects can die just as well if there are more people working on them. And just because the lone developer loses interest, it doesn’t imply that the project could have sustained more than one person at a time.

Vera is a nice example of that: we had an idea for a big project, gathered some people, but couldn't communicate or work together properly.

There was no actual project there, we were just discussing ideas, and we haven’t even reached consensus. It’s a pity that the most valuable ‘result’, the discussions are gone.

I agree with you on the API part. But if the community were more open, there'd be more people interested in the concept, who in turn would contribute to it.

That’s why you’ll have to turn into an evangelist and spread your ideas Linus-style, if you want that kind of change.

You're probably right, but I think it's a huge waste to see the good projects die, and if they were open others would've picked them up soon enough. I guess you can imagine which projects I'm thinking off

What’s the problem now?

But maybe it's just not the Maxcoderz style... The people on this forum have always been more of a group of individuals who show each other what they're working on than a group of people making software together.

That’s not just Maxcoderz, but virtually the whole ‘community’, whose existence I always doubted.

[GuillaumeH]

Hmm, my new philosophy is "release early, release often". A big problem with our little community seems to be that nobody ever finishes anything. So just work on a project untill you get bored by it (which is usually within the first week), and release the most fancy demo binary you have with source code. Licence it somehow (GPL) and give it to an escrow-like service (ticalc.org for example; somewhere that puts a date on it and that is reliable). That way people can't just steal it and pretend it's theirs, but others can pick it up and finish where you left off.

Releasing does not, I repeat: NOT, mean that you can't work on it anymore, like everyone here seems to think. I think we're just pressuring each other too much with all the expectations of a first release. We're not the gaming industry. First releases don't have to be perfect. In fact, they don't even have to do anything but prove a concept. If we'd all take that stance not a single project would have to die. It could just be incomplete, but that's still much better than dead.

With all the projects going on here, you'd think we'd have an incredible pile of code floating around for others to learn from, get inspiration from, improve on... But since everyone is too damned afraid to release anything we're not improving on anything anymore. We're all just inventing the same wheel in our own time on our own projects.

I so agree with this. It's annoying when you want to look into the source code of a nice program, but the author hasn't released it. It's not even a matter of reusing, but to be able to find nice ideas, or suggest improvements to the author. This last reason is terribly underrated in this community. Blame on some semi-god authors who try to makes us believe that the norm should be releasing the perfect program in one shot with the help of nobody

[coelurus]

I don't like the idea of releasing things early, it tops off software quality. Work hard, finish it, polish it and release it with full source code and perhaps even some documentation about the project. During development, talk to a small group of people if you need to, it helps burst motivation and you can get some inspiration from the outside on how to improve things.

If you can't cope with large projects, do small _complete_ ones. Think about how big the project really is, it's not very hard to do a rough estimate.
I did release a couple of tech demos, but they were designed to be tech demos from the start, not games that I wanted to make but stopped working on. Some people tried to spur me into making games, but that didn't go too well (Like the quake-thingie, Calvin wanted an FPS and I made him an algo for it, and that's that. And all the other titles were just ideas that I tried to work out, but they were pretty much impossible to realize.)

And APIs on the calc is of no use imho. The reason is similar to what CoBB said, you need to integrate and superoptimize code for the calc. No time for interface overhead, nope. I hope there's a sort of "code archive" or "algorithm designs archive" somewhere with tips on how to do certain tricky things in asm?

Where's the spirit for actually making something utterly super-cool on the calc and make people happy about it? It was all over the place when I started and a short time after that, but I haven't seen a lot of interesting work recently. Nothing for the casual user anyway.

[Halifax]

Sorry I was reading a topic about ROL3 concurrently with writing that post above and I meant to say AOD3 which is in fact tifreak's game.

[Jim e]

Where's the spirit for actually making something utterly super-cool on the calc and make people happy about it?

And besides, how many forms of tilemapping are there..? Smile

Smooth scrolling makes a difference, tile size, number of tiles, possibility of animation etc. You can’t make it so generic without losing a lot of performance.

You guys need to go to revsoft more...That's basically all I do there, making tech demos and free code, all anyone has to do is ask for the code.

TileMappers, Parallax mappers, Sound Routines, Line Clipping, Line Drawing, Grayscale, Sprite Clipping, Big Masked Sprite Clipping, Bitmap Zooming, z80 Scale2x, Circle drawing, Bitmap swaying, and Mode7.

"RevSoft, in everyone's blindspot."

The picking up where someone else left off? Well, one example I recall is GPP -> RGP. There are probably a few others.

Technically, I didn't use any of his code. I just modified my code to share his standard. Also wrote optimized forms of his libs. It actually came in handy when kv83 wrote Slippy.

Vera is a nice example of that: we had an idea for a big project, gathered some people, but couldn't communicate or work together properly.

There was no actual project there, we were just discussing ideas, and we haven’t even reached consensus. It’s a pity that the most valuable ‘result’, the discussions are gone.

*shivers*...I can't believe that concept of a kernel escaped almost everyone. Even more so, why the font was such a concern.

[coelurus]

Tech demos aren't super cool. They are inspiring and show possibilities. You get super cool when you actually make something worthwhile out of it.

And just who made true mode7 first, eh? Not somebody from revsoft, that's for sure

[Halifax]

Well coelurus you should still check out revsoft because there are some cool projects there and some cool open-source PC projects.

Stick Soliders is one example of a great project, Zelda, Wabbitemu, SPASM, should I go on?

[coelurus]

No need, I already know about them. And I haven't been to revsoft for some time... Going there now