Was: Blitting / event handling with multiple threads

Ok, I didn’t want to start a controversial discussion like that,
but there are about 5-10 clones of Dune II, most of them with
original graphics, even copied from screenshots made in the
game, and far more succesful / well-known than my project, which
isn’t even complete. There are hundreds of mods for the game that
alter some of the resources in the dune.pak file and being distributed freely
over the web. There are many people who asked for permission / support
before, without getting an answer at all. I wanted to write the game mainly
to increase my coding skills, and that was the most succesful part! :slight_smile:

I do not distribute the game resources, each user has to own
them / get them from some place in order to play my clone,
there is even a statement somewhere in the package that states
that you have to own the original game in order to play my clone.

I do not want to make money off this game, as I like the idea of open
source and GPL’ed software!

I live in Germany, where you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars just to
actually talk to a lawyer, and there are two lawyers among my near
relatives, so I don’t share your pessimistic point of view.

I think the need for packing game graphics in proprietary formats like
.pak (which is only the container for many other formats in this case),
arose from the need to put a fairly complicated game on one or two
floppy disks. At least at the time where Dune II was written. There is
a format in the .pak that puts approx. 700 16x16 bitmaps in a 53K file
(the graphics would take about 179K without packing), each with
its own palette.

It was just a challenge for me to decode those formats, it’s another challenge
to write a whole game engine, and I thought the SDL developer list would be
the right place to find enthusiastic developers like me. :slight_smile:

-Christian