Any Mac developers?
Alex
30 Jul 2011, 19:47Does anybody want to help getting a Quest Player to work on the Mac? Freak/ralphmerridew??
I've been doing some experimenting, and it seems that IASL and WorldModel run fine under Mono, which is a good start. The UI would need reimplementing though - Mono's take on WinForms appears to be a big bag of fail. But for the Player at least, the UI can be ridiculously simple, as it can be just an output textbox and an input textbox.
Ideally we'd have HTML output, and the inventory, places/objects and compass panes would be nice for consistency with the Windows version, but even an initial version without them would be better than nothing.
I hacked together a quick prototype using Gtk# with MonoDevelop on the Mac, and I got some game output to appear, which was nice. You need to use the latest MonoDevelop beta, as it's the only one that supports .net 4.0 at the moment. My app crashed when I resized the window though, hmmmm.
I'll probably check in a console app soon, which will be an example of the simplest possible Player. Then that can be used as the basis for a Gtk# app (or even better, MonoMac, though it's not clear what the status of that is right now).
I should probably save any significant effort on this until after the 5.0 release (should be by the end of August), but it's either this or fixing bugs or writing documentation right now - so this is what it looks like when I'm procrastinating!
I've been doing some experimenting, and it seems that IASL and WorldModel run fine under Mono, which is a good start. The UI would need reimplementing though - Mono's take on WinForms appears to be a big bag of fail. But for the Player at least, the UI can be ridiculously simple, as it can be just an output textbox and an input textbox.
Ideally we'd have HTML output, and the inventory, places/objects and compass panes would be nice for consistency with the Windows version, but even an initial version without them would be better than nothing.
I hacked together a quick prototype using Gtk# with MonoDevelop on the Mac, and I got some game output to appear, which was nice. You need to use the latest MonoDevelop beta, as it's the only one that supports .net 4.0 at the moment. My app crashed when I resized the window though, hmmmm.
I'll probably check in a console app soon, which will be an example of the simplest possible Player. Then that can be used as the basis for a Gtk# app (or even better, MonoMac, though it's not clear what the status of that is right now).
I should probably save any significant effort on this until after the 5.0 release (should be by the end of August), but it's either this or fixing bugs or writing documentation right now - so this is what it looks like when I'm procrastinating!
Alex
31 Jul 2011, 13:17I've now pushed a new project "QuestConsole" to the CodePlex repository. It's a very basic command-line runner for all Quest games. It could be used as the basis for creating other UIs e.g. Gtk#, or you could just look at the code as an example showing how to wire things up.
Alex
31 Jul 2011, 17:00I've updated QuestConsole so it now supports all UI functionality - timers, asking questions, showing menus etc. I've also checked in a bug fix to WorldModel which means that QuestConsole can now be used to play Quest games on the Mac. Pretty basic as you can only run games from the Terminal, but it does work!
You'll have to build using Visual Studio on Windows though, as for some reason the current beta of MonoDevelop can't compile LegacyASL.
You'll have to build using Visual Studio on Windows though, as for some reason the current beta of MonoDevelop can't compile LegacyASL.
Alex
01 Sept 2011, 10:30Just to prove that Quest can run on a Mac - albeit not pretty at all...
Alex
01 Sept 2011, 15:18More progress, legacy .asl and .cas files work in QuestConsole under Mono on the Mac now too - there were a few weird errors with file encodings.
