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[Ñuño Martínez]

Also we shouldn't have to install anything other than your game it's self to be able to play it. This last part is so that it's fair for the judges who have to play 10 or 20+ games and don't have a huge mess on our systems at the end of it. Doesn't hurt to keep the judges happy with a friendly installer or simple zip file either.

This makes me think.

Actually I decided to work in Windows so I'm sure the judges will be able to play my game (even Linux and MacOS can run Windows applications using WineHQ, and Allegro does work using Wine with almost no problems). So my package will include the DLL file used by Allegro, no problem about this.

But what about Linux systems? POSIX systems "needs" to install and configure the libraries to make them available for applications. Allegro includes optimizations for a lot of different system configurations so the best is to compile and install it instead of just copy some "dot s o files".

It isn't a real question, just a comment.

[Stoney]

But what about Linux systems? POSIX systems "needs" to install and configure the libraries to make them available for applications. Allegro includes optimizations for a lot of different system configurations so the best is to compile and install it instead of just copy some "dot s o files".

Since I'm the only judge with a Linux partition: I actually don't mind compiling a few libraries or compiling your game on Linux if needs be. (But there should be some kind of makefile or build script.)
If you decide to package an additional Linux version I'll definitely try to run your game and "compiling something" won't be an obstacle.

[WILL]

But what about Linux systems?

I do not have Linux installed so you wouldn't get any points from me if you make it Linux only unfortunately.

This is also part of the problem I've found with Linux, it's not very user friendly despite the Ubuntu team's best efforts it's still just a very polished version of an OS designed for programmers and network geeks. Most people will not use Linux even today because of this and I've lost interest in it since I've come to discover how nice Mac OS X is. I'm not saying that Linux is bad, just that I have no personal interest in it because of it's design issues.

[code_glitch]

Ah. Hem. This is a problem: what if your game used to run on windows but now runs on anything except windows?

A latest code hack in the engine to do with threading and arrays has had no effect on the breed of nix based operating systems Mac OS, Ubuntu etc. However windows seems to manage memory in a more illogical way and now refuses to run - gdb says nothing is wrong except for the 400 odd runtime and memory access violations per second. The worst part being GDB is anything but helpful in diagnosing anything...

[Traveler]

Ehh, that is a rhetorical question right?

[WILL]

Could always just install Lazarus on a Windows machine. That's what I'm practically forced to do with the poor state of Object Pascal development on the Mac.

[code_glitch]

Wait a sec there will, you do know that the largest (historically speaking) user of pascal and longest time supporter is Apple right? I mean, object pascal was their main implementation language for one very long time indeed.

[WILL]

Yeah well look that Apple has done for Object Pascal lately?

I agree that Apple was the mecca of all Pascal coding back in the early 80s, but things have changed. Now it's a royal pain. I'm hoping that with the announcement from Embarcadero's next Delphi version and the efforts of the Lazarus team this changes drastically in the next year or so.