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by icarito
3652 days ago
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That's not one question, that's four. I am familiar with your port and found it unplayable on the XO laptop (although I commend you on your apparently painful task of making it run in the first place!). While I appreciate your thoughts on the OLPC, I am more interested in Alan's thoughts on Sugar. Nice to meet you. Sebastian |
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Could you please tell me more specifically about what made it unplayable for you? What was the nature of the problem? Did you remember to disable disasters? ;)
Please don't blame it on Sugar -- the user interface was based on a 1993 version of TCL/Tk, so it looks pretty klunky since it was designed to emulate Motif, whose widget design (according to Steve Strassman) is from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport [1].
Here's a demo of SimCity running on the OLPC [2] -- does that show any of the problems you had that made it unplayable?
Once it passed EA's QA regime, I didn't put any more effort into the TCL/Tk user interface, instead refactoring it to remove TCL/Tk and plug in other GUIs. Have you given the pure GTK/Cairo interface a try?
What was totally unplayable was the X11 based multi player feature [3], which I removed from the OLPC version, since no child should be forced to wrangle xauth permissions on the command line, and David Chapman's MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 tutorial isn't suitable for children [1]. I also disabled the Frob-O-Matic Dynamic Zone Finder [3 @ 3:35], since that was a prank I played as a tribute to Ben Shneiderman [4].
Again, thanks for the feedback, which I appreciate!
[1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKhh10K-j0
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X8XY9430fM