nident on 7/11/2007 at 11:46

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If "calling a whole bunch of subroutines" is a way "to do things so quickly that they APPEAR to be happening simultaneously", ZB is the most pleasant and knowledgeable poster on this forum.

Edit: Anyway, this whole thread should stick to the topic of OPDE - even though it was amusing to find out that ZB is willing to make bold statements even when he has zero factual knowledge.

nident on 7/11/2007 at 12:17

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If you read the discussion, you notice that ZB claims that it is harder or impossible to reverse-engineer the Dark Engine because subroutines execute "simultaneously" or "effectively simultaneously" (or whatever), which is obviously not the case. How users perceive the game - obviously - doesn't matter at all. If anything, subroutines can make it slightly easier to reverse-engineer. Now, ZB is not the first programmer that I encounter that believes that placing instructions in subroutines somehow magically makes them execute in a different manner than they would if they instead were placed one after another in an (admittedly messy) main loop. There are plenty of programmers that don't really know what their code actually does even though they get the desired results. But all this has been sufficiently covered in the discussion that took place in the first few pages of this thread and anybody that is still interested and doesn't understand all of it, is better of reading a book on programming. So let's get back on topic.

Volca is doing a fantastic job and hopefully version 1.0 of OPDE will eventually see the light of day.

OrbWeaver on 7/11/2007 at 13:20

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I think it's the part where nident reads something into ZB's comment that was never said, specifically this:



The point was that simultaneous behaviour can be simulated by rapidly interleaving small tasks, which it can. Whether these tasks are contained within subroutines or as blocks of code in a huge main loop has nothing to do with it, and I see no evidence that ZB suggested otherwise.

Kerrle on 10/11/2007 at 02:04

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Actually, while I totally support your work and look forward to this as a Linux user, Thief I & II can already be run under a few VMs. Parallels and VMWare Fusion can already run them, and Parallels at least will be updating their code base so that all their platforms (Mac, Linux, and Windows) will all be able to shortly. Really, for any DX8.1 or lower game, virtualization is quite possible. It's when you get into games with shader support that it becomes problematic.

Kerrle on 10/11/2007 at 07:30

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Sure, and I'm glad for the native support. I was just commenting on the state of virtualization.

I think a lot of people don't realize the strides it's made recently, with processor extensions that allow for almost full speed virtual machines, and several groups pursuing 3D support in virtual environments. Already there is virtualized openGL support for Linux good enough to allow guest OSs to play UT2003 at very reasonable speeds, and several commercial entities have working Direct3D virtualization, even when the host OS doesn't support Direct3D.

The seamless desktop is cool, too - already in Linux, using only free software, I can virtualize a Vista install and have Vista and Linux windows on the same desktop: (http://conan.shackspace.com/Ubuntu-Vista.png)

Sorry to turn the thread off into another direction, even with virtualization, native apps are best, and I'm still very interested in OpenDarkEngine...I just didn't want to see virtualization dismissed unnecessarily.