Umbra

[jice]

there's a balance between 'playGame()' and 'mov $1, %eax', and the hard part is finding it.

Hahaha that's so true. That's quote-list class

Umbra doesn't restrict any freedom. It just removes the boring stuff from your code. As for TCOD, I'm having a lot of fun trying to code it. I hope it'll be as fun when it's playable. I'd rather not release it than release something half as good as expected. Even in that case, it would still be a success since it triggered the creation of libtcod and all this 'new vague' of roguelikes.

But be assured that I have no intention to give up on tcod.

[jonoerik]

And jice? I want to play TCOD some day. =p

Are you joking?  I want to play it now!

Also: Good work on Umbra so far.

[mingos]

Also: Good work on Umbra so far.

Why thank you, good man
The bare basics are mostly coded already, so I think we might officially say that Umbra is a full featured module loader-like engine, capable of powering computer games. Right now we're focusing on additional features, such as out of the box video transitions, ease of use issues and general configurability. We want Umbra to be highly costomiseable. This requires some interesting design solutions. For instance, creating a set of preset keybindings is easy. Making them customiseable is also rather easy. What is not as easy is allowing the user to also add an unlimited number of keybindings, each one of them triggering its own custom code. Inventing the current callbacks system took us several days

I think I'll start writing a demo minigame to showcase some Umbra possibilities.

[mingos]

Hi guys, I'd like to draw your attention to some cool Umbra news, regarding a feature that might be interesting to game developers: http://umbrarumregnum.110mb.com/?q=node/196

[mingos]

FEEDBACK REQUESTED!!!
I'm writing Umbra documentation. I have uploaded the current version so that anyone can see it. It is very incomplete, but it's so boring and painstaking to write that I simply can't force myself to do it any faster (not to mention Jice, who's already maintaining an extensive doc and knows perfectly well what a pain in the arse it is).

I'd like to know what you think about its structure. Is it clear enough for you? Should I add something? I'll appreciate any info, especially at this stage, while there isn't too much to modify yet.

The doc can be found at http://umbrarumregnum.110mb.com/readme.html

Thanks!

[Scautura]

Personally (and I'm out of the dev loop at the moment), I think it's perfectly readable apart from a few spelling/grammatical errors. Nothing a proofreader wouldn't catch, but when you're typing info like this, it's easy to do.

[mingos]

Arf, I'm not a native speaker, so I guess I'll always commit errors from time to time. I'll try to be more careful though and revise already written text.
I'm glad you find it readable though. It's easy to make a L337 manual for people who have already written a thesis on advanced programming techniques (they say OpenGL documentation is written this way), but a comprehensive manual/API reference is hard to get by. Thanks for your time, mate, I appreciate your comment.

[Scautura]

If you're not a native speaker, would it help to have someone read through to make corrections for you?

Honestly, as a native speaker, I wouldn't have said the mistakes I noticed were those of a non-native speaker, but someone who was typing quickly and just missed a key here and there, or hit an unintentional key here or there. I have seen books in print (technical, fiction, and otherwise) that have typographical errors of that type, so I must commend you on your English.

[jice]

Arf, I'm not a native speaker, so I guess I'll always commit errors from time to time.

Not even speaking of my mistakes. I'm probably accounting for 90% of all bad english in the doc... Sorry for that...

[mingos]

@Jice:
But I've written 95% of the doc

@Scautura:
I'm Polish; I'm rather fluent in English, but I can't compare myself with a native speaker. I studied English for quite a few years, but I started using it a *lot* only recently, at work. Before that, I used to live in Spain, where I mostly spoke Galician...

It would be great to have the doc read through by a native speaker, it would surely let us produce something really "professional". Am I correct assuming you're volunteering?

[jice]

@Jice:
But I've written 95% of the doc

That means 90% of the mistakes are in 5% of the doc 

[jonoerik]

Am from Australia myself, so I could give you some help with any mistakes in the docs as well.  The minor differences between australian/english/american shouldn't occur too much in software documentation.  Don't stress too much about not getting this stuff right first time around; your spelling can still be considered infinitely better than the "lolz, u r craezy" all too often spoken by native speakers on the internet.

[george]

As someone in the US the docs are looking good to me (nice TiddlyWiki by the way  ).

So can we now expect the Python Umbra? Penumbra? 

[Scautura]

@Scautura:
I'm Polish; I'm rather fluent in English, but I can't compare myself with a native speaker. I studied English for quite a few years, but I started using it a *lot* only recently, at work. Before that, I used to live in Spain, where I mostly spoke Galician...

It would be great to have the doc read through by a native speaker, it would surely let us produce something really "professional". Am I correct assuming you're volunteering?

One thing I will say is that a lot of "foreign" people speak and write English better than the natives (I work in a school in the UK, so I get to see how the "youth of today" speak and "write") these days. I used to be able to speak French and German, but I haven't used them in so long that they're fairly rusty and trying to speak the languages would probably cause some very funny looks!

And you are correct in assuming I'm volunteering. Even if I'm not actively developing at the moment, I'm always happy to return something to the community. Just specify American/British English, as being British, I lean towards the latter, but having an American wife means I deal with both on a regular basis.

[jice]

And you are correct in assuming I'm volunteering.

Am from Australia myself, so I could give you some help with any mistakes in the docs as well.

Ok so how would we handle this ? I could give you write access on umbra's svn repository but tiddly wicky doesn't handle very well svn merges so we'd have to communicate so that 2 persons don't work on the readme at the same time. The most pragmatic way might be to use this thread. Someone take the readme, update it and post it back here and so on...
I'm open to suggestions...