Fairwell

Folks,

I'm leaving Lisp and going back to Scheme. For detailed reasoning see
my signature.

To summarize, as a single developer shooting to support Windows, Mac
and Linux, I can't afford the 1K euro x 3 fee. In addition, I was
betting on CAPI to give me a major boost but its image processing is
not optimized for what I'm looking to do. I'm going with the Torque
Game Engine and back to Chicken.

    Thank you for your support, Joel

-- 
http://wagerlabs.com/tech

Re: Fairwell

> To summarize, as a single developer shooting to support Windows, Mac
> and Linux, I can't afford the 1K euro x 3 fee. In addition, I was
> betting on CAPI to give me a major boost but its image processing is
> not optimized for what I'm looking to do. I'm going with the Torque
> Game Engine and back to Chicken.

I followed up with Joel on this personally (for some reason gmail's default
reply is to the sender and not the group). Real quick, though:

Joel,

If speed if of the utmost importance with the image files for you, then you
should consider doing what all other game developers do: write a program that
pre-processes the image data and stores it on disk in the format you need. Who
cares if it takes 10s to go from 3 bytes/pixel to 4 bytes/pixel. Just write it
out to disk and be done with it.

As for fonts, there is no reason you can't just create a textured font on disk,
load that, and render quads with the appropriate texture coordinates. This is
all very old-school stuff. I'd just hate to think your dumping LispWorks because
there  isn't a built-in RENDER-OPENGL-TEXT function. LispWorks is a beautiful
product.

Also, Torque is a terrible piece of code. It also is terribly documented. And be
careful with the license (if you hope to distribute your poker game yourself).

However, all that being said, I can understand your money problems. I'm  sure
LispWorks would work with you on purchasing multiple platforms at the same time.
And if not, there is no reason you couldn't develop for just Windows until you
started selling copies, then as money came in and demand was high, purchase the
other 2 compilers, recompile and distribute.

Good luck, though!

Jeff M.

Re: Fairwell

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:37:31 +0000 (UTC), Jeff Massung 
I realized over the past few days that the Lisp vs. Scheme choice is
more an emotional one and thus can't be made logically :-). I'm on the
Lisp side. I also found http://ecls.sourceforge.net/. There's
something to be said for commercial support, though.

I put in a query to LispWorks sales to see if they would be kind
enough to arrange some sort of a financing plan for me. That was
yesterday and I hope to receive an answer soon.

The other bit that I have yet to figure out is how to deliver my code
as a shared library with LispWorks. I need to do this on Unix and I
think it's only possible on Windows.

    Joel

<massung@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> However, all that being said, I can understand your money problems. I'm  sure
> LispWorks would work with you on purchasing multiple platforms at the same time.
> And if not, there is no reason you couldn't develop for just Windows until you
> started selling copies, then as money came in and demand was high, purchase the
> other 2 compilers, recompile and distribute.

-- 
http://wagerlabs.com/tech