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[mcc]

This game looks really really neat but I don't have Windows, I only have a mac.

I was wondering if you were planning on releasing Mac or Linux versions of Dwarf Fortress, or whether you would be willing to let a third party create a port.

[Toady One]

I know that on Linux it runs for somebody under...  Cedega/Wine, however that's spelled.  I do not know if there's a similar environment for Macs, perhaps the computer would have a moral reaction.

As for proper ports, I don't know anybody I can/would send the code to, and I don't know how to do it myself.

[mcc]

Hm, OK.

Wine would be able to run it fine on Mac OS X for Intel. Unfortunately, though, the older PPC macintoshes can't run wine, so in order to run it on one of the old macintoshes (like I have) it would have to be ported or at least recompiled.

I would be willing to try to port/compile the code to Mac if you would be comfortable with that. (I have some experience with macintosh development.)

[Mechanoid]

XCOM: UFO Defense used to go so fast on this computer it'd skip 5 geoscape years every other second, but Dosdox is a DOS emulator and was capable of running XCOM at the proper speed... Thus solving my issue.

Yours is similar. All you need to do is find and setup a windows emulator. Then you can play Dwarf Fort perfectly.  

[Gezol]

I would love to see an OS X version. I have an ancient laptop running Windows 98 I can play it on, but my standard computer is a Mac.

I wonder if the extended ASCII characters might be a problem in porting it, though. On the other hand, if I'm remembering right that the ASCII in this game is actually graphics simulating text, it shouldn't be a problem. Toad could say more, I'm sure...

[Toady One]

Yeah, all it would take is OpenGL support, I think, and a few tweaks for timer stuff, the main loop, and the FMOD sound library (which has Mac/Linux version, if I remember).  And other stuff I've forgotten, but nothing nightmarish.  Somebody has successfully ported one of my smaller graphics games to Linux before, and all of the OS dependent things are the same in Dwarves.  A Mac has never been tried, but the ASCII display is faked, so it won't be an issue.

However, I am quite leary about sending the full source code for my largest projects around.  This is my meal ticket after all (pfft)...  even though the site is in the red if you count the hosting fees from Dec 2000 (although I've only been taking donations since June, with Dwarves being the only release after that).  If my job were more stable and I had the time I have now, it wouldn't be a problem, but since I dropped my research duties to concentrate on games, my income is going to terminate in 10 months.  I'll might be able to land a lecturing position for next year, but nothing is for sure right now, and that is full-time -- 4 classes, or something equivalent.  I start teaching again on the 28th, incidentally.  2 classes, a bit of a time drain, but not a killer.  I'm lucky they kept me on at all.

If there's a free way to compile for Mac/Linux on my Windows system, somebody could port a gutted Dwarves-like for me and I could use that to attempt a full Dwarves port.  I don't know what's possible.  It's very inconvient, I know, but I'm not open-sourcing the game while I still maintain my little pipe-dream of actually being a game developer.  It would be cool though, all of it.

[mcc]

I totally understand about not wanting to send a random guy on the internet your code, yeah.

The idea of having someone port a gutted engine and then just crosscompiling from there sounds very doable, though. Let me look into this.

What do you use for your build process? I mean, are you doing this all as a Visual Studio project or what?

Thanks!

[bbb]

read an article about running windows stuff on macs a few days ago.. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/technology/10basics.html?ex=1312862400&en=c37fd706b9e68911&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

does it help any?... don't know if vpc cost anything.. but shelling out for parallel doesn't help if it's just for this

that's assuming they work with this

[Toady One]

Yeah, it's all a project in MSVC 6 right now.  The one that lets you do things like "for(int a=0; a<10; a++)", and the "a" scopes outside the "for" block.  Not that I'm doing that...  any more.

[ToxicFrog]

Porting it from MSVC to ANSI might be a pain, too, since VC6 lets you do a bunch of things that you shouldn't be able, doesn't let you do a lot more that you should be able to, and has some heinious bugs as well (such as the for loop behaviour mentioned).
That said...given a stripped down DF game engine, I'd be willing to at least take a look at it and see what would need to be done. I can't help as far as setting up a cross-compilation environment goes, though - I do all my development on Linux directly, and use MinGW and Cygwin for Windows builds.

[ August 22, 2006: Message edited by: ToxicFrog ]

[Toady One]

I think I've got somebody who's basically done a linux conversion (last I heard anyway).  Right now I'm interested in cross-compilation for linux, and a mac conversion + cross-compilation, if cross-compilation is possible.

[Frobozz]

quote:Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>I think I've got somebody who's basically done a linux conversion (last I heard anyway).  Right now I'm interested in cross-compilation for linux, and a mac conversion + cross-compilation, if cross-compilation is possible.</STRONG>

Might also want to consider switching over to cross-platform libraries like SDL which handles video, basic sound, input, etc as well as interfacing with OpenGL. Cool advantage is that SDL exists for some bizarre platforms like the PSP.  

In the meantime, you might want to check out a virtual machine to run the games under. Don't think you'd want to generate under it, but you could probably play with it.

[ August 22, 2006: Message edited by: Frobozz ]

[ToxicFrog]

quote:I think I've got somebody who's basically done a linux conversion (last I heard anyway).

Awesome!
And if Frobozz's suggestion about switching to SDL (which I have used - it kicks vast amounts of ass) gets implemented as well, porting it to pretty much everything else on the face of the planet shouldn't be overly hard.

quote:Right now I'm interested in cross-compilation for linux, and a mac conversion + cross-compilation, if cross-compilation is possible.

I'm fairly sure it's possible (there's been some traffic on the Cygwin mailing list about windows->linux cross compilation, if nothing else) but I'm afraid I don't know how; the vast majority of resources seem to be about Linux->Windows cross compilation, presumably because Linux actually comes with decent development tools and thus it's relatively easy to set such things up.
I am, however, certain you won't be able to do that (neither for OSX nor for Linux) with MSDEV; the best option would probably be something MinGW-based. But, as I said, don't take my word for this.

My personal preferred approach would simply be to set up a Linux machine - old 486s, P1s and P2s can easily and cheaply be scavenged for this purpose - network it, and run the builds on that, but if you don't have random piles of obsolete hardware lying around this is less practical.
I could also lend you an account on one of my linux systems until something more permanent is set up, but since I'm root on that box this would require trusting me not to do nefarious things with your code.

[GDorn]

quote:Originally posted by Frobozz:
<STRONG>
In the meantime, you might want to check out a virtual machine to run the games under. Don't think you'd want to generate under it, but you could probably play with it.
</STRONG>

On a powerbook G4 running virtualPC running windows 98, it was marginally playable.  World generation was actually tolerable (about twice the time as on a comparable PC).  Unfortunately, anything that involved drawing to the screen was pretty slow and got increasingly slow the longer it was played (presumable due to increased memory usage).  Eventually, it'd just crash.  Under VPC running WindowsXP, it was just far too slow.

There's probably a ton of code optimization that could improve this (like not using opengl to draw ASCII), but a natively compiled app would be much faster and more stable, anyway.

[ August 22, 2006: Message edited by: GDorn ]

[alex_n]

I got it to work under Wine and Cedega just fine (might need "-opengl" switch for wine).  Although sound doesn't work very well (I'm sure it's a config issue, however).

Like I've said before, it's better to have more features/fixes/bloats than a direct port at this point.

Keep up the good work!