Cross-platform?

Ghengis · Mon Jun 12, 2006 6:53 pm

George,

I'm sure this has been asked before, but exactly how Windows-specific is the Transcendence code? Would it ever run in Linux? I'm specifically thinking of how amazingly awesome it would be as PSP (Playstation Portable) homebrew. I've seen several large open-source projects get ported (notably, Quake) and my mind instantly snapped to my favorite PC game. Obviously, this would be substantially post-1.0, but...

Thoughts?

Mon Jun 12, 2006 7:25 pm

Good question--and thanks for the interest.

I think it would not be too difficult to port. I do not use DirectX for anything except bltting to the screen. Most of the graphics code just writes to a 16BPP buffer.

That said, I would not expect anything any time soon. Substantially post-1.0 is a good statement.

Guest · Thu Jun 15, 2006 12:34 am

Not to bug, but do you have any kind of general ETA for the next version? I can wait, but it hurts.

Thu Jun 15, 2006 3:28 am

Anonymous wrote:Not to bug, but do you have any kind of general ETA for the next version? I can wait, but it hurts.

I wish I had a good answer. It will take longer than a week. It will NOT take longer than six months. Other than that, I don't know. Sorry about that.

BlackPheonix · Thu Jun 15, 2006 4:16 am

George...did you know that after 3 months of a new version coming out, time freezes and we are forced to painfully endure each not passing moment a new version is not out?

until a new version is released and time resumes...

Ghengis · Thu Jun 15, 2006 11:59 am

I had another thought while on the subject: if you "plan" for a port to e.g. PSP, once the hard part of getting it ported (e.g., abstracting everything to the level where you can use any platform's underlying architecture) is done, you could probably put it on other similar systems, like the DS or PocketPC. Man, as cool as Transcendence on a PSP would be, just think of having it on your PDA! Some of them (like mine

) have a 400 MHz processor or better, and a fair amount of RAM to move around in.

I was even thinking of writing a Transcendence-style game set in the Star Control universe for PSP, but if I'm going to have a chance at that sort of thing, I'll have to finish school first. Almost there!

Petrus · Mon Jun 19, 2006 12:32 am

(Guest was me btw)

Thanks for the info George. I didn't mean to bug, Transcendence is already a great game. Just out of curiosity, did anyone here ever play Ragnarok? That was my previous favorite roguelike game.

Yugi · Mon Jun 19, 2006 6:47 am

I've played the 3D Ragnarok Online, but i've never played a non-online version.

Ghengis · Mon Jun 19, 2006 3:50 pm

I just found the sourceforge page for Ragnarok -- I had never heard of it before. Just curious: why did you like it so much? I mean, what sets it apart from the rest?

OddBob · Mon Jun 19, 2006 6:04 pm

I've played the 3D Ragnarok Online, but i've never played a non-online version.

The two are not related.

Ragnarok has a graphical user interface, which makes it stand out a bit, and it's rooted in Norse mythology. I think. I played it seriously once. I went back to Nethack after that. I may have to dig it out again,,,,

Phaeton · Wed Jun 21, 2006 1:35 am

Transcendence wouldn't run under Wine. It would open, and then shortly after give me an error, but that was over a month ago (.9.12/Ubuntu Breezy).

If I reinstall Ubuntu I'll try it again.

SparcMan · Wed Jun 21, 2006 1:48 am

I haven't tried it personally, but my understanding is that under Wine, Transcendence cannot properly read the resource files. If you extract the files out manually into the game folder using the tool provided below, I think it will work under Wine.

http://www.neurohack.com/transcendence/ ... c.php?t=68

kaibutsu · Fri Jun 23, 2006 12:01 am

SparcMan is correct; the only substantial hitch is that the program he links to has the same problem as the main Transcendence program, and can't access the database to extract the files under Wine. So run it under Windows (if you're the dual-booting type) and then move the files to whatever Linux directory you want to use. Otherwise, drop me a line and I'll send the extracted files along.

-tom

Petrus · Fri Jun 23, 2006 5:47 pm

The main things that set it apart were that it had a cool little story that fit perfectly with a nonlinear roguelike game (gather the tools of the good gods so that they can defeat the evil gods at ragnarok), a handy little icon-based graphical interface (icons instead of ascii characters for the main view, but still with a enhanced-nethack style area map at the top part of the screen with ascii characters representing rooms/monsters if you liked that... which you use a lot because it has a greater view distance), and a great atmosphere. If you strip all that away it's just another nethack clone but I think that those things really added to the experience. Hell, my little sister even liked it and she never plays video games. I'd wake up on a summer morning and start playing to see that she had played through 20 characters the night before, dying of eating too many dead bears or shooting herself in the face with a wand or starving to death in a pit trap.

It was full of cool little norse story elements. You could see every area on your world map to see what areas you hadn't been to yet, and when you went to the very edge of the (flat) "real world" (instead of the more mystical areas like the wasteland or niflhelm) then Jormugand, the serpent that has its coils wrapped around the world, would start chasing you around (at like 10x your speed, and do 20x your health in damage if he caught you).

F50 · Sat Jun 24, 2006 7:41 pm

I have gotten Transcendence to run under wine. All I had to do was to get all of the resource files and put them in a directory "Resources" and then edit the Transcendence XML to make the barricade pictures point to a blank picture.

This was in version .95a