Hey everybody!
Hope you guys are all well and enjoying 2016 so far!
Last year has been a busy one for me, where I haven't written a single line of code (outside of work). So I finally decided to officially announce end of development on the Adonthell website. Turns out that this itself wasn't in a good shape, as SSI were no longer functioning. So I checked for the next best thing and replaced them with JS and Document.Write calls. Which led to warnings due to the table-based layout. So I went the extra mile and converted everything to a more modern CSS-based layout. And here it is: (hopefully) unchanged on the outside, but fresh and valid XHMTL 1.0 strict on the inside:
http://adonthell.nongnu.org/Please let me know if you detect anything out of the ordinary. It's tested with latest Firefox, Safari 9, IE 8 and 11, as well as a number of mobile browsers (iOS 5, Android 4.2 and Blackberry OS 10.3).
Speaking of mobile, I tried my best to make the site work nicely, but given the fixed-width content column, there's only so much to be done without spending more time than necessary.
Anyway, as already discussed a year ago, Adonthell has served it's purpose, and given the availability of high-quality, native Linux RPGs, there is no longer a gap to fill. I listed a number of current and upcoming, story-based RPGs on the website, but there are two in particular that I'd like to point out here as well:
[*] Pier Solar was initially released in 2010 for the Sega Genesis, but there's a more recent "HD" remake available for PC and current consoles. It's the only one from the list that has the 16bit era look and feel that we tried to convey with Adonthell. Haven't played it myself yet, but I'll definitely give it a try.
[*] Project Resurgence is a classic western RPG with a vibe similar to Arcanum: Of Steamwork and Magick Obscura, currently live on Kickstarter. Since a lot of the games with Linux support were originally crowdfunded, it seems only fair to give back a little. So consider helping them out if that's the kind of game that interests you.
See
http://adonthell.nongnu.org/news/ for those and more. Let me know if there are glaring omissions on the list. I only added recent, high-quality, story-based games I have at least a little knowledge about.
Finally, there's the matter of preserving the work that we've spent on various parts of Adonthell. With the overhaul, the website should be fine for the years to come, and all the design stuff on the Wiki should also be around in the future. What I plan to do is check on Waste's Edge and make sure that the code compiles on modern systems and with current libs. Maybe release 0.3.6, if changes are necessary. Since I am on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, that will probably have to wait until after the release of 16.04, as that'll be more modern than what I currently have.
Aside from keeping the source compiling, following the SDL mailing list, it appears that official SDL 1.2 no longer works (or has issues) on newest OSX. So I plan to verify that and update our binary with an SDL build from source. Maybe I even manage to properly sign the package, if that is at all possible without an developer account. If anyone here runs OSX 10.10 or 10.11, would be nice to give Waste's Edge a try. Our Macbbok Pro is still on 10.9 and I am quite reluctant to upgrade.
I would also like to finally provide a 64bit binary for Windows. Though since I upgraded my PC last year, I got completely rid of it. So I may have to look into cross-compiling stuff. Testing might be possible in the office then, although my own work laptop is only 32bit. Shouldn't be too hard to find some lucky test subject, though.
As always, any help with the preservation phase is appreciated. If you run up-to-date Linux and can check compilation of v0.3, or test the OSX binary on El Capitan sooner than I can manage that would be great. But I should be getting around to it eventually. Or if you find other bits that have rotten, that I am not even thinking about, let me know as well.
Best regards,
Kai