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Thread: Prometheus - Mission Statement R2

  1. #1
    PGD Staff code_glitch's Avatar
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    Prometheus - Mission Statement R2

    Very quiet lately, and thats not all bad although to be frank it is a mix albeit one on the good side of things.

    Since the beginning it has been the sole aim of Prometheus to bring ease of use, speed, flexibility and reliability into one package for everyone out there. I still intend to achieve that.

    However, development of Prometheus within single unit compilations leads to a bloated, slow and ineffective end product that fundamentally fails the above statement. I have, since early on, been made aware of the importance of documentation and I am ashamed to say it has taken months and hundreds of lines of sloppy code to finally hit home

    This is not a closure but rather a remake, a remodel and a makeover which takes on board what was not so good and replaces it by what was better. The new prometheus units are modularized units, you include only the functionality you want to have for your application, each of those are self initializing - simplicity at its lower levels. Further there will be NO THIRD PARTY DEPENDENCIES. No need to install SDL for resource loading, no libpng or libjpeg etc.

    This is brought about by simply using a single resource format wherever possible, the Prometheus data format that can be packaged into encrypted, compressed, archived or simple files with a few clicks at a lazarus GUI. And for instances where that is not possible, loaders written from scratch let you import those BMPs, JPEGs, PNGs, and TGAs...

    As for documentation, it will be written in step with prometheus, for every feature written so will the documentation in real time and posted on the sourceforge.net pages and the doc/ folder in the SVN. This new approach simplifies life for the end user (no RTL) and for the coder (no worrying about formats) while retainign optimum reliability and performance.

    As for event and window handling it too will be re-written for X11 and the WINAPI from scratch (more research into the Mac side is being done...).

    AFK for a few mins...

    Meh, listen to the above (ambitious salesman me ) - and I joke around not, LD showed me a lot of things, not least how important a solid set of base code in your library is, functionality will increase in hand with performance and reliability and I will be rolling out some tutorials and documents too in the next few weeks/months for prometheus so stay tuned.

    Oh, and in the usual fashion if you have any thoughts, comments, questions etc... Do post!

    Note to self: Now that thats the PR side of things done, back to the Data management system *SIGH*...
    I once tried to change the world. But they wouldn't give me the source code. Damned evil cunning.

  2. #2
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    A lot of people fear the idea of having to start over and rewrite much of their code. Interestingly enough, in most cases this will often improve on what you wrote the first time. So kudos to you for the decision on a rewrite!
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  3. #3
    PGD Staff code_glitch's Avatar
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    Its a lot of work though - I now understand the evils that sdl window management save you from etc... Sorry for the long read - big overhaul.
    I once tried to change the world. But they wouldn't give me the source code. Damned evil cunning.

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