ProtoCiv: porting Freeciv to Python CANNED

[Eternal Vigilance]

Congradulations.  You finally discovered that people will not do your work for
you
 for Free.   Open Source projects produce 99% garbage and thats for the projects

that already have a good working 'product'.

If you want it done right, do it yourself.  (Either that or get alot better at
talking the
right people into doing the work and then manage them without interfering too
much)


"Brandon J. Van Every" wrote:

> "Brandon J. Van Every" <try_vanevery_at_mycompanyname at yahoo.com> wrote in
> message news:bsd101$c1oj1$1 at ID-207230.news.uni-berlin.de...
> > I am
> >
> > - *TENTATIVELY* -
> >
> > (operative word) undertaking the project of porting the GPL open source
> game
> > "Freeciv" to Python.  Freeciv is, in essence, an almost straight clone of
> > Sid Meier's Civilization II, albeit with better cross-platform and
> > multiplayer support.  www.freeciv.org
>
> Here's a postmortem.  Short version: I've canned the project.  Many of you
> will say "I told you so," but at least I almost have a VS .NET 2003 build to
> show for it.
>
> First I decided to tackle the subgoal of freeing Freeciv from the UNIX
> Cygwin / MinGW crud.  As I write this, I have it compiling and running on VS
> .NET 2003, and that isn't a small accomplishment.  But, the game hangs
> shortly after the server starts.  I'm probably within spitting distance of
> completing this subgoal, but it has taken too long and has been really
> really boring.  If there isn't some major lurking horror I'll get it working
> eventually, but I've put it on the backburner.  Personal projects have to be
> personally rewarding, and this isn't it.
>
> Looking at the Freeciv C code in more detail, I've realized that there's way
> too much code to consider "generally" rewriting stuff in Python.  Rather,
> I'd have to embed Python and add / rework game functionality piecemeal.
> This is a lot of work, there's a whole lot of boring "wrapper code" to cough
> up.  Between performing this kind of labor on a GPL project, and performing
> it for Ocean Mars, I've decided that the former is not rational.  And more
> importantly, it doesn't make me happy.
>
> I've also become extremely disillusioned with Open Source developers.
> Basically, for a commercially minded developer such as myself, I don't think
> they're any value add at all.  Ergo, all public projects I might conceive of
> are fundamentally DOA.
>
> For 6 months I've experimented with how Open Source development might fit my
> commercial goals.  What I've found is that I can't rely on people, only
> their coding artifacts.  Every Open Source game developer I've met in the
> past 6 months has been, at a basic level, a hobbyist.  Hobbyists simply
> don't manage projects according to the demands of commercial development.
> This implies that if I'm in charge, they won't like my style; and when
> they're in charge, it drives me fucking nuts.  I've now accepted that the
> Open Source talent pool is what it is.  It is capable of being fun for
> programmer geeks.  But with few exceptions, such as perhaps
> http://nebula.sourceforge.net, it cannot achieve the kinds of projects I
> have in mind.
>
> I'm also starting to downright despise Linuxers.  If I see another project
> that's "cross-platform, so long as your platform is Linux," I'm going to cut
> someone's head off.  Linuxers have this completely broken piece of shit
> build management mentality about them.  They think that because on *their*
> OS all these libraries are preinstalled, and everyone's compiling things all
> the time, that they don't have to do anything to maintain consistent builds
> on other platforms.  Rather, it's always the induhvidual's responsibility to
> download and install all the needed component libraries.  Of course these
> are usually UNIX-centric libraries, often not readily compiled on Windows.
> Or requiring Cygwin or MinGW, which real Windows developers don't want to
> use.  Versioning becomes a nightmare, is it the Cygwin or MinGW version?
> It's just not the way mainstream Windows developers do things.
>
> Whether my Freeciv VS .NET 2003 build makes it into the official Freeciv
> source pool remains to be seen.  The Freeciv people are, after all, a bunch
> of Linuxers.  They don't have a single .NET developer among them, and I'm
> not about to become their .NET buildmaster.  When I say things like "Windows
> people want to link libpng and zlib against MSVCRT71.dll," they say, "we
> don't want to bloat our source tree with needed libraries."  Maybe in time I
> will get them to accept a separate package of underlying libraries for
> Windows folk.
>
> --
> Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
> Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA
>
> "Desperation is the motherfucker of Invention." - Robert Prestridge