ID:135845
 Jan 27 2004, 7:02 am
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What is an interface? I'm going to Linux soon and I was wondering what the difference is between BYOND for windows and BYOND for Linux it says "The interfaces are text only" I think what does that mean?
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Jan 27 2004, 7:04 am
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Nadrew
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It means the map-interface is text-only as if you were running it in "Text mode" in Windows.
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Not anytime soon. And it's not like Windows now because the graphical map uses a Windows-only drawing routine.
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To add to what Nadrew said, here is what the text-mode interface looks like:
http://mheasley.byond.com/dmopt.gif That's all you get: text and nothing else. The reason we don't have graphics for any version other than Windows is because it's a lot of extra work for little to no extra payoff. The graphics routines would have to be written differently for Unix/X11, Mac OS X, and Windows, all with different associated quirks and bugs. That's a lot of extra work. Since probably 95% or more of gamers use Windows, why spend double or triple the effort to support something that'll be used very little? Now, don't get me wrong. We'd all love to have full graphics/sound support on every platform. I'm certainly one of the biggest proponents of that, since I pretty much loathe having to use Windows, and I'm a big Unix nut. But right now it's all about work vs. payoff. It's interesting to note that the first graphical versions of DUNG (BYOND's predecessor) were Unix only. They ran on SGI and Linux, way back in the day. Then Tom sold out around '96-97 and started building the Windows version. Soon graphics on Unix were forgotten. What I'd personally love to see, after 4.0 is released and stable (don't ask when!), is a move to a cross-platform graphics toolkit. That'll allow us to easily build full graphical versions of BYOND on several operating systems with all the same menus, graphics, etc, using 95% or more identical code. Then the 3 of us who care will rejoice and all will be right with the world. :) It may or may not ever happen. | |
