Google "Summer of Code"

[Stefan Dösinger]

Am Mittwoch, 1. Juni 2005 14:59 schrieb Christoph Frick:
> On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 03:11:49PM +0000, Stefan D?singer wrote:
> > Anno 1602
>
> different sources in the net say, that the game works without problems
> and the last time i tried it worked. the places telling it works, say so
> for about 3 years. i guess the game is hardly to buy nowadays and its
> successor is already in the shelfs for about 2 years or so (or even no
> longer in the shelfs). not to mention that as any game made in germany
> there was a big market outside the EU.
Installer issues... The builtin installer works for the base version, the 
extensions installer fails. There's an install shield based installer for 
win2k, which has the usual install shield problems.

> > Most Apps need only minor patches, except the 2 Star Wars games and
> > Warcraft III, which need Installshield to work with builtin dlls.
>
> games in general are hard to make them work out of the box due to the
> copy protections; once the vendor decides to remove the copy protection
> in a patch this is something else - but i doubt, that this three games
> work without a "no cd crack".
For Warcraft III a no cd crack is indeed necessary, but the 2 others don't 
need one. With the base version of Jedi Knight Jedi Academy the single 
player .exe file complains about an debugger, but that chack is removed in 
the 1.01 update :-). Multiplayer works out of the box.(except the installer 
issues).

Half-Life needs a patch which makes it's main window managed, otherwise it's 
neccessary to activate Desktop mode.

So if one doesn't count the install shield problems, these games are nearly 
there. It would be nice to have these 'nearly there' apps working out of the 
box, it simply makes a much better impression to the user.
For example Half-Life: Instally nice, runs better than on Windows*. But if a 
newbe has to create a config file to make the main menu work, than this 
leaves an unnecessary bad impression.

*For me, because there are incompatiblities between the Windows ATI graphics 
driver and the Half-Life engine. Anyone here who blames ATI for not being 
capable of writing good Linux drivers? I also blame them for not being able 
to write good Windows drivers.

Cheers,
Stefan