bedroom programming teams

[mantisspider]

Hi guys,

Now that OS4 is right around the corner.... well the beta of OS4 is right around the corner to being released to A1 owners..... well we have seen OS4 running on A1 machines so we know it exists....

ahem... anyway.....

as i was saying, the birth of the new OS means people will be able to see the potential of this bright new star and begin developing for it.

But just how many people are out there developing from home?
There is the Total Chaos team, the Tales of Tamar team, the Realms of Power team and  Karlos has submited some cool screenshots of a game he was working on.
There are more active serious software development out there too atm, with DET Nicolas , Chris Hodges, (and I dont know but there has got to be more out there but i dont know their names)....

But it seems that the majority of the Amiga community are computer savy programmers and artists (which always seemed to be the way... intelligent people have taste) so will the new fresh blood to the Amiga platform stir the creative juices inside the community to start developing for this great machine once more?

[lempkee]

dont worry we in push have some splendid stuff comming up as soon as os4 is out, oh and yes its fully commercial...

cheers

[mantisspider]

how many people take advantage of the SDK that comes with MorphOS as standard? Will AmigaOS4 do the same u imagine?

[mantisspider]

whats easier to port to AmigaOS? a game's entire source code or the game engine and make a new game from scratch to take advantage of the Amiga custom chips and software?

[TheJackal]

I would think writing from scratch, using the source code as a "pool of knowlege". This way you will get a cleaner implementation and not too much baggage from the platform the source code was targeted for.

Oh, btw, is there an windows-explorer type native program for OS4? If not that might be my port of call, assuming there are services to get file list/attributes/rename/copy etc. Oh and gui elements like multi-column list boxes.

[edit] since explorer is very handy for file management, compared to multiple windows IMHO. [/edit]
PS: Does it matter if my computer is not in the bedroom? :-D

[lempkee]

sdk on morphos?...lol that is still very flawky, its like 01% done , time will heal that i guess but as far as that goes there is no sdk on morphos atleast if u want something professional.

sdk for os4? , nah same as with morhpos, more less just for experienced users or them who have the hw+os installed..

but as far as it goes for helping out, hyperion have been very helpfull there, with morphos i got my questions answered aswell..


and for the "WILL AMIGAOS4 do the same" , no i think not, as i am pretty sure that their SDK will be finished before they release the OS..

cheers manti

[lempkee]

if you are good developer/coder/programmer then u do it all from scratch, porting is as always a pain in the arse but porting your own stuff is easier atleast unless it aint like XX years old

[bhoggett]

Well, I'm developing something and it's done in the best "bedroom programmer" tradition, but it looks unlikely that it will run on AmigaOS4 or MorphOS any time soon (which may not be a problem, as it won't be ready any time soon  :-D ).

It might run on AmigaOne and Pegasos under Linux or MacOS X though.

Seriously though, pretty much all of the development for the Amiga-like platforms will come from bedroom programmers. There isn't enough of a market to support professional teams, unless they subsidise their Amiga work from other platforms, as Hyperion do.

[dammy]

by bhoggett on 2003/12/17 13:28:23

Well, I'm developing something and it's done in the best "bedroom programmer" tradition, but it looks unlikely that it will run on AmigaOS4 or MorphOS any time soon (which may not be a problem, as it won't be ready any time soon  ).

It might run on AmigaOne and Pegasos under Linux or MacOS X though.

Any chances for it to be ported to AROS?  :-D

Dammy

[bhoggett]

@dammy

Any chances for it to be ported to AROS?  :-D

As much chance as there is of porting it to AmigaOS4 or MorphOS, which is to say "it's not up to me".

Put simply, I'm developing it in Python using pygame (the python SDL wrapper) and wxPython (the wxWindows wrapper). All of it is open-source portable technology, so if native versions of each were ported/developed for X operating system, then my game (for that is what it is) will work on that platform. I won't be doing any porting as such. As it stands, the same code works for Windows and Linux x86, and should also work under MacOS X and LinuxPPC, although I have no access to the latter two so cannot speak from experience.  

[dammy]

Perhaps it could one day run on AROS.  Guess there is a ton of tools that need to be added to PyAROS first.

Dammy

>whats easier to port to AmigaOS? a game's entire source code
>or the game engine and make a new game from scratch to take
>advantage of the Amiga custom chips and software?

I'd imagine it's easier to port a whole game than just an engine and make a new game. Why? Most of the work is already done. If you make a new game on an old engine, you still have to design the new game and create it's new parts from scratch, draw new graphics, build new levels, etc. Porting an existing game is less time consuming than designing and creating new parts.

Also, please, people, forget about the custom chips. They are too old and slow to consider for new games of any consequence, and even ports of aging games from the PC are too demanding for them now. Plus, with AmigaOne/Pegasos users wanting support, it'd be silly to make a new game relying on custom chips that the guys spending the most money can't use, because the new hardware uses industry standard components, especially as those are far more advanced than AGA, Paula, etc. You'd be better off with a Voodoo3 and soundblaster via some PCI bridge, and even the now aging earlier Radeon models would beat Voodoo3. And without something like the SharkPPC available, we really can't even make full use of any of these PCI cards due to bandwidth to the motherboard's CPU.

[itix]

The complete SDK for OS4 is probably better than SDK for MOS. This because OS4 team can take advantage of older NDK revisions and simply paste new API calls to the docs. Not to mention all legacy SDKs from OS 1.x/2.x times and RKRMs in AmigaGuide format (and AmigaMail archives etc... they simply have good base compilation to work on).

MOS SDK provides autodocs for MUI 3.9 though. It is worth of reading for all MUI fans out there.

[Karlos]

mantisspider wrote:

But it seems that the majority of the Amiga community are computer savy programmers and artists (which always seemed to be the way... intelligent people have taste) so will the new fresh blood to the Amiga platform stir the creative juices inside the community to start developing for this great machine once more?

Well, OS4 has certianly grabbed my attention from the developer side :-)

[GadgetMaster]

Re: The thread title

Isn't that a bit of an oxymoron

I mean bedroom programmer and team ;-)  :-D