Organizational Issues Fixed news - TSO Restoration

As of right now, Yoshi is working on making the PatchClient compile on Visual Studio.
X-Fi6 is working on a script to make Windows SDK integrate with Visual Studio properly.
I'm waiting for X-Fi6 to fix libFAR (it has some issues...) so I can work on a tool to convert images from BMP to PNG.

Unfortunately it turns out that compressing things with RefPak is a real bitch, so the compression function that was originally in Java wasn't working for us. Therefore I'm going to write a tool to convert images in C++, instead of C#, but I need libFAR to work.

We've formalized how the development process will be followed by each member. I have written a tool called Windows SDK Integrator, that not only integrates the Visual C++ 10.0 compiler (that's the newest compiler by Microsoft) with Visual Studio 2008 (an old version of their programming editor that's not ugly and not slow), but also coordinates the same default compile settings across all the developers for each new project we start.

We've established exactly which technologies we will use. Cross compatibility and efficiency (not just to help with computational speed, but also help save you battery life on a laptop) are extremely important to us. These are the APIs that we will program with (quoting myself from the developer board).

We will establish a small local API of our own for the game, in a way. We're doing the exact same computations, just using different APIs to do it. Therefore, we'd divide our code into 3 folders for each of the 3 platforms and write it with WGL for Windows, glX for Linux, etc. or XAudio2 for Windows, ALSA for Linux, etc. Etc. We're not doing anything low-level and we're not using any special effects unique to one platform. It's like using CreateFile on Windows vs fopen on Linux, just at a bigger scale. Once we have the basic window working with basic graphics, sound, input, etc, it's straightforward. Write the code for Windows to figure out how it works, and then copy and paste them with analogous commands used on the other platforms.

Windows:

• Windowing: Windows API
• OpenGL: WGL
• Audio: XAudio2
• Multithreading: Windows API
• Compiler: TDM GCC or Visual C++ 10.0 (we'll see how the performances compare)

Linux:

• Windowing: GTK+ (See why Qt is a bad idea)
• OpenGL: glX
• Audio: ALSA
• Multithreading: NPTL
• Compiler: GCC

Mac:

• Windowing: Cocoa
• OpenGL: Core OpenGL
• Audio: Core Audio
• Multithreading: NSThread
• Compiler: Clang (GCC will only work when at the archaic version 4.2 or below. Besides, Clang is developed by Apple AND is open source)

All:

• Font rendering: FreeType
• Image loading: libpng, libjpeg, who knows
• Sound loading: libvorbis, libflac, libcelt, libmad, who knows

These are the three main compilers which we hope our code will integrate with.

I've also drawn the layout for the game's installer. It just needs to be written, but it's not a priority yet.

Bob, LinearChaos, and I are working on the game's gameplay engine. Afr0 and Virek are working on the code for the servers. And the rest (Yoshinat0r, MrTickle, Geo, and Folly) are working on the updater utility that runs when you launch the game. We're doing it for Windows only for now, and I'll study the APIs used on Linux when the time comes. We still need a Mac developer to approach us. We will tell you when development begins on the other 2 platforms. Even Android is a possibility, but not until it has been written on all the 3 major desktop OSes, which will have to be after the game's stable (non-beta) release.

(Original updates written by X-Fi6 and Afr0)
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