(no subject)

Quadra SVGAlib support

Due to popular demand, I had to make a decision about Svgalib support in Quadra. The thing is that Quadra is linked against both Svgalib and Xlib, so that if you want to play (the binary release) in X and don't have Svgalib, you're screwed, which is not very cool.

Now, I made a quadra-svga.so that is linked against Svgalib, and I use dlopen to load it from the main Quadra binary. What a hack, this is horrible, but works remarquably well.

Now, I would only need some Svgalib freaks to test it out, which brings me to...

Quadra

Quadra. It's a good, fun game, and a non-negligible community love it. Here is an excerpt of http://hellfire.darktech.org/quadra.html that talks about Quadra:

Quadra is a recursive Tetris game. This is the thing ordinary Tetris players will have a problem getting used to since it puts many concepts of traditional Tetris stacking upside down - for one thing, Z's should almost always be placed vertically, and greed is actually most of the time the way to win. What it gives, however, is far more than it demands.

There are people who say Quadra suck. These are invariably the people who have never truly given the game a chance, who have maybe played once in a ffa and got slaughtered - the "great TetriNET players" who are too conceited to recognize their own ineptitude in the field and try to do something about it. These are the people who have never felt the sensation of stacking a recursive line-add and sending every other player in the game into oblivion with a 14-liner-add. Does this sound impossible? It is not, it is in some instances not even particularily hard. It just takes practice.

The Great Skills are at Quadra now. You won't find them hanging around in slow, lagged, cheated and bored-to-death regular TetriNET servers. You won't even find them among the speed demons at plibble.com and - dare I say it - hellfire.darktech.org. Make no mistake, though, Quadra can be an incessantly fast game. That's just part of the charm about it. The others are, in no particular order, great design, no noticable bugs, civilized players and furious action. It should be the choice of any newbie entering the pure Tetris scene. Come play and try it out with us, but be warned. After playing it, you will lose all respect for the regular Tetris games.

It has a 5 star rating on the Linux Game Tome and other top ratings everywhere it was reviewed. Bob Zimbinski (the Game Tome dude) said that Quadra "truely is the Best T*ris Game Ever". It's one of the most professional open source game out there (it actually started out as a commercial game).

But I'm tired.

Rem and Dada, who wrote the original game, are almost gone from its development, they have no interest or time for it anymore. I originally "only" did the Linux port (which was harder than it might seem), and I'm now pulling almost all of the development.

I work hard to keep this awesome game alive, with a smallish community, but now I'm getting to a point where I would have to rewrite larger and larger pieces of code to enable new features and help open source hackers contribute more easily.

I really don't want it to die, I want it to strive, because it is truly a good game. I'm proud to have done what I've done, even if you sometimes wouldn't think so looking at the code, and I want it to live.

If anyone wants to help out, e-mail me. Thanks for reading this.