So maybe v1.13 isn’t quite dead after all. There is some discussion going on about SMP which is short for Stable Modding Platform. While 1.13 features everything anyone has ever come up with (including the kitchen sink) SMP is supposed to be a more serious attempt to make JA2 moddable.
Although the idea of developing a SMP has been around for quite a while now, it hasn’t really kicked off yet. But at least there is some activity in the public forums and I hope the same is true for the private ones. One thing that caught my attention is the plan to use the Stracciatella project as a foundation to base SMP upon.
Compared to v1.13, Stracciatella has evolved in parallel but largely unnoticed. The average Joe might have never heard of it because it doesn’t feature any fancy modifications like 1.13. Quite contrary, it preserves the vanilla game-play and brings cross-platform support and tons of bug fixes and code refactoring. This makes Stracciatella a perfect starting point for SMP.
Because seriously — where else would you begin with SMP? V1.13 is totally screwed up. Because it sucks so much, there is a demand for another stable modding platform in the first place. Which leaves Vanilla JA2 and Stracciatella of which the latter performs considerably well. Because it is portable. Has fixed lots of bugs. Uses SDL. Replaced those weird assembly blitters. Etc. etc.
The only thing to take into account is Visual Studio’s lack of support for C99 which could give our Windows developers a hard time with Stracciatella. But don’t let that stop you. Frankly, I don’t see SMP getting started anytime soon but I really wish people start caring. Please, take it seriously this time and don’t turn it into v1.13 – 2.0.
July 5, 2009 at 4:37 |
I think you have a few wires crossed there. There is a big difference between the SMProject and 1.13. 1.13 has taken it’s own course and will continue its development in parallel with SMP and eventually a lot of the good stuff from 1.13 will get ported over to SMP in a plugin or addon mod structure.
Saying that 1.13 sucks and is crap is just your opinion, don’t try to alter others opinions using that as a bludgeon. There are so many things that would never have been implemented without 1.13 and now it looks like we can have our cake and eat it with the evolution of the SMP using Stracciatella as a baseline for it (bypassing the bad bits of 1.13).
Biased blogs like this one can hurt mods quite badly, so I ask you to think about what you type a little more next time.