Thanks George and Paul for replying. You both certainly have your
good points and reasons for doing it the way you do.
Regarding my suggestion of looking at the source code of CSBWin: I
was not suggesting to grab code off CSBWin and put it into RTC. My
point is that some of the game mechanics code could be worked out more
easily if you were looking at the code to figure out
how it's done in
the original game. But having the challenge of creating a game
from scratch that feels as genuine as possible is definitely worth
not looking at the original game after all -- you have your point here.
BTW the source code of CSBWin isn't exactly fun to look at -- my
eyes started bleeding after about 5 minutes
. This is not Paul's fault,
after all what he's done was converting 68k assembler into C++ without
having the original commented source code of the game.
One of my other suggestions hinted at using the published game
mechanics like weapon/armor stats, skill weights etc., which were
extracted using editors and reasong and not through any source analysis.
I think it would be fine and dandy to use this information, instead of
trial and error. After all, it
is your intention to give an experience
as close as possible to the original, and there you've got the stats you
need in order to achieve this. You wouldn't even use the numbers
verbatim (this is probably not even possible as your algorithms will
differ a lot from the original) -- but problems like the
Stone Club
being too strong will simply not appear, as the stats already give a good
picture of relative strength of items.
About open sourcing: I myself have not much experience in collaborating
programming efforts, so it's not my intention to smart-ass others into
that concept. It's definitely a whole new way of working on large projects
but a lot has been written about it already by others, so probably we
shouldn't start a lengthy discussion about that here. I think it will work
if the project leader can maintain the big picture and if there is proper
patch management, version control and discipline by the people working
on the project. Looking at how devoted the people around here are to
the game, I think it would probably work in your case.
That you are using proprietary code you're not ready to open up creates
a whole new problem of its own, of course...
Thanks again to both of you for your great efforts. I certainly admire
that, mind you.
Greetings,
Sigi