RE: Windows Installer for Xconq

[Hans Ronne <hronne at comhem dot se>]

>Whatever the power of those tools, Xconq is not really middleware.  If
>it were, a collection of rather different games would be running on "the
>Xconq engine."  Maybe that sounds like a chicken-and-egg pronouncement,
>but nothing is middleware until it's demonstrably in the middle of
>something.  Middleware, for instance, would carry the connotation that
>your code is very much intended to be used for non-Xconq games, that
>development revolves around providing general purpose game engine
>features.  I doubt that's the case, am I mistaken?

I'm not arguing that Xconq is middleware either. But I think we may be
trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. There is nothing out there,
to my knowledge, that resembles Xconq in that what you call modding (and
the Xconq manual calls game design) is the primary purpose, rather than
something you do to modify an existing game. That's why I call it a game
design tool.

If your question is: has anybody who intended to write a completely new
game ended up using Xconq to implement it, the anwser is yes. Check out the
Castiron Life project:

http://castironlife.sourceforge.net

and its implementation as an Xconq game module:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=868548&forum_id=198668

Also see the many posts by Elijah Meeks (the main CIL developer) earlier
this year on the Xconq list.

>Regarding the label "Hacker" for the source code stuff, I think that is
>both a confusing label and a very negative one.

Hacker certainly is a word with negative connotations for many people
today. The wording is Stan's, not mine. He even wrote a manual "Hacking
Xconq". But that was back in the days before Sobig.F :-/.

Hans