Re: gnustep-using game available as public beta

[Fred Kiefer]

On 16.11.2011 03:55, Julian Mayer wrote:
> hey gnusteppers
>
> the reason why i've been filing gnustep bugs like a madman the past few weeks 
> is that i've been porting a game from the mac to linux.
>
> i want to thank everyone involved for your great fixes and help getting my app 
> running (and deployed).
>
> despite the encountered bugs, the experience has been much better than i expected, 
> thanks to your phenomenal support. i can personally confirm that SVN trunk is now 
> exactly 1000% percent better for porting cocoa code than just a few weeks ago. i 
> would also like to remark that porting a modern cocoa codebase would not have been 
> possible without david's work on libobjc2/clang&  blocks support. thanks.
>
> if any of you wants to have a look at what i've been building, i've been 
> porting the game CoreBreach:
>
> http://corebreach.corecode.at/
>
> here is a binary package of the first linux beta with a bundled patched gnustep 
> trunk version (32&  64 bit):
>
> http://corebreach.corecode.at/CoreBreach-1.1-beta-linux.tar.bz2
>
> if it doesn't run look at the readme for the dependencies. if there are bugs in 
> the package, i'd be happy to hear about them ;-)
>
> FYI, the main game "launcher" interface is using gnustep, then the actual 
> gameplay uses a fullscreen SDL/OpenGL context, only using gnustep-base (and blocks for 
> animation). after the game finishes the results/highscores are again displayed using 
> gnustep/gui.
>
> i'd be happy to make the full version available to you once it is finished. 
> just contact me privately. BTW, there is definite hope for getting the game 
> code open sourced later on (about 10kloc game, 10kloc engine), if it ever 
> breaks even.
>
> bye, julian
>
> p.s. sorry the beta 1 has severely degraded texture quality. final version will 
> look exactly 4 times as good.

Thank you for offering us this free beta. Although I am not a race game 
person I tried to play with it and horribly failed. Should I try to hid 
these gadgets on the track or avoid them? How do I not bump in the walls 
all the time? (or fall of the track if there aren't any walls?)
But the game in it self is quite nice.

On my machine there wasn't any sound, most likely I am missing on of the 
required. And I sometimes (when I managed to accelerate a bit) had black 
streaks in the display. Most likely my main graphics card, a Radeon HD 
3200, isn't able to process that much data. I have a more powerful 
secondary graphics card but up to now I only managed to get it working 
on Windows (and Windows now only works with that making it really hard 
to switch between the two systems. If anybody knows a solution to that 
problem...)

I also got a few messages from the application and finally a breakdown 
after finishing the track three times:

2011-11-16 09:31:41.718 CoreBreach64[5006] Notice: enabling FSAA: 4
2011-11-16 09:35:45.683 CoreBreach64[5006] autorelease called without 
pool for object (0x7f1d6c000918) of class NSDoubleNumber in thread 
<NSThread: 0x7f1d6c001d68>
2011-11-16 09:44:28.773 CoreBreach64[5006] autorelease called without 
pool for object (0x7f1d6c000e98) of class NSDoubleNumber in thread 
<NSThread: 0x7f1d6c001d68>
WARNING thread 0x8653e38 terminated without calling +exit!
2011-11-16 09:49:46.244 CoreBreach64[5006] autorelease called without 
pool for object (0x3814228) of class NSDoubleNumber in thread <NSThread: 
0x7f1d6c001d68>
WARNING thread 0x6b40418 terminated without calling +exit!
2011-11-16 09:53:10.759 CoreBreach64[5006] autorelease called without 
pool for object (0x8390968) of class NSDoubleNumber in thread <NSThread: 
0x7f1d6c001d68>
WARNING thread 0x99bae88 terminated without calling +exit!
Assertion 'pa_atomic_load(&e->pool->stat.exported_size) >= (int) 
b->length' failed at pulsecore/memblock.c:1106, function 
pa_memexport_process_release(). Aborting.
                                Abgebrochen

And from the colour selection I get the message:
Loading two versions of GSColorSliderCell.  The class that will be used 
is undefined

Which is definitely my fault. I keep on ignoring it as only David's 
runtime complains about this issue.

The start up interface looks surprisingly well for GNUstep. How did you 
do the gradients in the buttons? Is this already in the Silver theme?
And for the first time I was annoyed to see the small windows we use to 
determine the window border sizes when starting the first GNUstep 
application in a session. We really need to do better than that.

Are you aware that when clicking on the icon in the about window you get 
the GNUstep memory panel? You may (or may not) want to disable that 
feature in the release product.

One small hint, It would be better if the beta already started up with 
playable settings. Now you get all these messages that in the beta you 
are not allowed to use this and that setting. Let the user experience 
these later on when they are already hooked to the game.

Hope this feedback helps you a bit. You helped us a lot with your bug 
reports.

Fred