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Allegro Hack Day - May 2007
Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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An Allegro Hack Day is tentatively scheduled for May 12th. (Otherwise it might be the 5th, but that is probably unlikely.)

If you plan on attending the IRC session, add your name, preferred time, and any topics you wish to discuss to the wiki (the above link). Note that these are only intended for the people who are serious about improving Allegro in some way.

BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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Kinda OT, but what is the status on the new demo game? Did anything ever get done with the ones that were made?

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

The skater demo is in SVN in a separate dir, and does still work. Mimix also made it work with AllegroGL some time ago. I think we could use it for 4.3 as official demo instead of the current one.

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"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

Milan Mimica
Member #3,877
September 2003
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It's a waste that such a good demo game is not yet made available to the public. And it uses 4.2 API, thus it doesn't really fit into 4.3, unless someone rewrites it. We should at least put it to Depot page or something.

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

True. Maybe add it to the depot, and then also link to its depot page from the alleg.sf.net download page (the one where you can get demo.dat and so on).

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

ImLeftFooted
Member #3,935
October 2003
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Hows it going to work exactly? Do we just code some random section of allegro or will there be some kind of facilitator telling us what we're going to be coding?

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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It's not literally a "hack day" in the sense that we sit around and program. It's really more of a developer's meeting to help keep people motivated to work. (Setting a monthly milestone is better than just waiting around for tomorrow man to do it.)

People discuss issues, improvements, status updates, etc. No one tells anyone what to do, but obviously if you are looking for something to do, I'm sure someone can come up with something useful for you to do. The development of Allegro is pretty much do what ever you feel like doing, and if you can persuade others that it belongs, it gets added... (Of course there is a new API that has been designed for 4.3. So it's not entirely chaotic. ;))

For example, I think the build system for MSVC is dumb. But attending the IRC session and just saying that is pointless. There's no task team that I can command to do my wishes. So if I want it done, I have to do it myself. (And I am.)

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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For now the "Hack Day"s are just meetings. Once we have some solid plans, the real Hackathons can start.

I think though that I'll attempt to finish my fshook stuff this next meeting. Theres really not much left to do in the main library, but I do need to make some tests and examples for the new api, as well as split out the old pack_ and datafile stuff into separate addon libs.

And before anyone asks and gets mad, no the pack and datafile stuff is not going away, it'll just be in its own library, distributed allong with allegro, and will use the new fshook stuff to do its thing. By default though, I'm probably just going to have the plain old stdio driver be the default one. A person can choose the old pack_ functions or something fancier like a PhysFS extension if one gets made (I don't doubt it will).

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

gnolam
Member #2,030
March 2002
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Since there still doesn't seem to be any proper roadmap, API plan, or, well, any kind of written documentation whatsoever, I'm out.

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Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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This is what these days are for. Did you read what was said? Right now we are fleshing out the plan and documenting it.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

Matt Smith
Member #783
November 2000

Glorious Leader said:

There's no task team that I can command to do my wishes.

Count me in. I have just hack/generated an asmlock.asm (attached) which was the sticking point when I tried to make an allegro .dsw. It isn't quite working yet, and I need to re-insert all the comments, but it is happening.

The key to this was gas2masm which is in the Quake1 GPL source. Unfortunately, I started with allegro 3.9.38 source (silly me didn't check) so if the BITMAP struct has changed since then this will need redoing.

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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We just committed patches to enable a C-only version of Allegro. I've got a MSVC 6 project file nearly done. I just have to add the examples and a few scripts to do things like generate plugins.h.

orz had mentioned that "a [c-only] dll would not be binary compatible with the existing dlls, due to the calling conventions used in the asm window locking code." So an ASM version may still be handy. Although, I haven't noticed any incompatibilities yet.

Richard Phipps
Member #1,632
November 2001
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I know Kris Asick has been working on his own keyboard and mouse input code for Windows to fix some Allegro issues. Since there don't seem to be any other active Windows devs, could this be looked at as a possible replacement?

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
avatar

Quote:

Since there still doesn't seem to be any proper roadmap, API plan, or, well, any kind of written documentation whatsoever, I'm out.

API and documentation is on the wiki. For example: http://wiki.allegro.cc/Display

It's still disorganized, but it's getting better.

Quote:

I know Kris Asick has been working on his own keyboard and mouse input code for Windows to fix some Allegro issues. Since there don't seem to be any other active Windows devs, could this be looked at as a possible replacement?

One problem is that issues are reported but without any solid test cases. If something is happening to him, but it cannot be duplicated, the devs will be less likely to just accept a re-write as-is. It may fix his problems while breaking others.

I'm just talking about the general case because I don't know the details of his problems and solutions. If he can show that there is a problem and that he has a solution, while being willing to work as an Allegro developer, no one will stop him.

Matt Smith
Member #783
November 2000

Quote:

Although, I haven't noticed any incompatibilities yet.

What about that test you did the other day? The person who tested it said the screen wasn't updating correctly with the C-only version. I can't find the thread now :P

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/591252

I've seen that problem on the ASM version too. Also, the msvc+msvc combination failed to update, which couldn't be attributed to a compatibility issue.

Matt Smith
Member #783
November 2000

Well I've made an asmlock.asm complete with symbols and comments (attached) but then when I tried to build I discovered that VC6 by itself does not recognise asm as a normal source file. you need to D/L and install masm seperately which kind of defeats the object of a VC-native build. EDIT: vc6 does have masm installed by default, it's just the IDE which doesn't treat asm as a default source file. A custom build rule for the file will fix :)

The only nice solution I can see to this is to wrap all the asm funcs in asm{} in C files. This will simplify things considerably in other ways too so I'll go this way (e.g. the asm will have easy access to the C struct offsets that are currently hacked into obj/*/asmdef.inc by the build process)

gnolam
Member #2,030
March 2002
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Matthew Leverton said:

Of course there is a new API that has been designed for 4.3.

I said:

Since there still doesn't seem to be any proper roadmap, API plan, or, well, any kind of written documentation whatsoever, I'm out.

Thomas Fjellstrom said:

This is what these days are for. Did you read what was said? Right now we are fleshing out the plan and documenting it.

I still say there is no API plan.

Matthew Leverton said:

API and documentation is on the wiki. For example: http://wiki.allegro.cc/Display

It's still disorganized, but it's getting better.

Earlier, I chose an entry at random and found... nothing. I've now checked out all of them, and discovered that the rest don't seem to be any better. As far as I can tell, the "Display" link is actually the only page there I would call worthy of an API plan - the rest... well, they either consist of nothing at all or completely arbitrary function lists.

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Milan Mimica
Member #3,877
September 2003
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Thi is not nothing. Sound API proposal is there, you can download two (more or less) working implementation of the API, with an example app. It just doesn't have a nice web page. So ther is an API plan for most of the parts of allegro, but it's still in developer's heads and has to be put on the paper. That is what these days are for.

Matt Smith
Member #783
November 2000

Quote:

completely arbitrary function lists.

That's what an API is :) Sorry for being flippant, but it's basically true.

gnolam
Member #2,030
March 2002
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It's what an API is. It's not not what a fucking API plan is.

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Evert
Member #794
November 2000
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Either help out or stop whining.

gnolam
Member #2,030
March 2002
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Ah. I'll take that as "No, we won't write any proper plans in the future either". Good to know.

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Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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Quit your bitching. Help is needed (with the thing your bitching aobut!). Either help, or shut up.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

gnolam
Member #2,030
March 2002
avatar

Don't worry. I've taken the hint that criticism isn't welcome (at all) and hit the magic "Unsubscribe" button already. :)

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Move to the Democratic People's Republic of Vivendi Universal (formerly known as Sweden) - officially democracy- and privacy-free since 2008-06-18!

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