1. Re: Euphoria To C: alpha-3 & euAllegro Status
Hi Rob,
>I've made a minor correction to the DJGPP version
>of the Translator. I removed the dependency on the Allegro
>library. (-lalleg). I got a little ahead of myself there.
>The next version for DJGPP will need Allegro for graphics.
>I might also have a non-graphics version that avoids the
>need for Allegro.
What are your plans for Allegro?
Will it only be used in the Translator?
Do you have plans on merging any Allegro support into the standard
runtime version? If so on which platforms?
The optimistic view:
How much of Allegro will be supported?
Just enough to allow current Euphoria programs to run?
Or the complete Allegro package?
Allegro is I *think* a really good choice for Euphoria to support natively
as it has ports for DOS, Windows and Linux and has no licensing problems.
euAllegro can support the Windows platform, and *should* be able to
support Linux, but I have no idea how to link it with DOS ... which is why
I'm very interested about your allegro comment!
The pessimistic view:
I hope I haven't wasted the last month (probably 100 hours or more!)
implementing a wrapper for Allegro that you intend to merge with *all*
versions of Euphoria!
---------------------
Just a quick update on euAllegro progress:
I still have about 10 out of the 33 *major* groups of functions to wrap ...
that probably translates to 200-300 routines.
Plus any *tricky* routines I have left out for now, eg, routines with
callbacks or complex pointer usage haven't been wrapped. These will be
wrapped as required ... or after everything else.
I have completed the Mappy (Map Editor) wrapper and first simple demo.
I have wrapped JGMOD (a mod / s3m /etc ... ) player and converted the demo
programs. At this stage JGMOD is still beta quality for win32 and
can't play all files. (it played more than half of the ones I tested
though ... but not *.it files).
I have wrapped a small library called ppcol for Pixel Perfect COLision
detection and have written a test program to test the routines.
(This is a really nice/small/easy to use library ... I'm impressed with it)
Things on my to-do list: (in order of priority)
* Complete wrappers for rest of Allegro,
* lots of testing and doco ... I'm not sure how I'm going to do the doco
as it comes from many different sources in many different formats, and all
of it is related to the C implementations of the libraries.
* Convert as many of the samples to Euphoria as possible.
(Including Mappy which comes with a tutorial game which is pretty
impressive and JGMOD that comes with a mod simple player)
* More demos / games (actually I'll do these on and off when I get sick
of writing wrappers)
* wrap a network communications library (I am looking at libnet but other
than downloading it haven't done anything else)
* Linux Support
* Complete any routines not wrapped previously.
My aim is for a general release after the doco/testing phase with the rest
to be released as they are implemented.
A release in itself is a big job as Allegro and Mappy come with exe tools
for doing a number of things. These tools also need to be in the
distribution along with there documentation.
All the libraries I have used have relaxed licenses meaning they can be
used for any purpose, including commercial.
I *think* they all suggets I little comment in the about screen or doco
would be appreciated ... euAllegro will have a similiar license.
Any questions / comments?
Ray Smith
