[crack-attack-devel] Re: Crack Attack!

[Andrew Sayman]

Daniel Aarno wrote:
> Most of what is available for linux is also avaliable for os x. However
> most OS X users expect a bit more than that from software. Using SDL for
> sound would work fine as long as it can be compiled in staticly.

I'm sure this is doable. You'd be handling the build on Mac OS X. I have a
feeling that Mac OS X should be treated in a similar way as Windows because
they're mostly binary-only platforms. ie, you decide what should be compiled in,
do it, and then tell peole to download SDL if they need it.

> Doing
> the GUI in GTK is not a good idea for mac os x since most users expect
> the native aqua interface. However a GTK target could still be included
> for the UNIXish mac user. 

Including your Aqua GUI would be a good test to see if I set up the code for
handling new GUIs correctly. Essentially, I should be able to support any amount
of different GUI targets that will be handled by defines. Right now, GTK is
turned on and off by WANT_GTK in the build system. It would be easy to put your
Aqua work in a directory and activate it by defining WANT_AQUA.

> Also aufotools are available but not very
> practical for building the mac specific parts. 

That's fine. autotools is just the best for the job on linux.

> Now that you talk about
> gfx I also have implemented experimental fullscreen support. I have
> booth linux and mac machines so I can do cross testing.

I remember reading about that, and that you have the aspect ratio problem. When
I was first playing with resolutions I'd toyed with a fullscreen option, but the
aspect ratio thing turned me off on the matter.

> The mac os x GUI
> is written in Objective-C++ but that is no problem since it cooperates
> nice with normal C++. One thing to note about mac users is that they
> will never ever want to launch the program from a command line and that
> they expect a clear GUI.

We're moving more and more away from spawning things by the command line for
normal users. Essentially, the frontends that we write will call crack-attack
with the correct options, but it will no longer be necessary for you to manually
use them anymore.

> Other than that I have gotten great feadback
> from a large userbase of crack-attack for mac.

Awesome.