Stripped-Down Wesnoth?
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Stripped-Down Wesnoth?
This is probably a question more intended for developers than anyone else, but everyone feel free to chime in if you care to. It's also TL;DR inducing and completely unimportant.
Wesnoth's size and sophistication has grown steadily over the course of its development. If you look at the early releases, at a glance you might think you're seeing a different game.
What I'd like to know is, is most of the size difference due purely to better graphics, or has the underlying code also gotten steadily bigger, and if so, is it (coincidentally or otherwise) proportional to the growth of the graphics?
The reason I ask is that to me, Wesnoth, being a sort of throwback to games from the '80s and '90s, should be able to run on really old computers. (I don't mean a 6502 or an 80286 or anything like that). But let's say I replaced all the sprites or textures with super tiny, low-low-detail ones, disabled idle animations and effects, swapped out sound files with super-compressed ones (heck, just boops and beeps for all I care), and had scenarios and campaigns that only utilized what was included in the game (no expansions, no alternate sets or mods or anything), would I wind up with a game that could be played on, say, a P-90 with a Trident PCI graphics card? Or maybe even a 486?
It'd be really cool to have versions of Wesnoth that could run on lots of different hardware. Maybe someone could hack a version into a smart watch, even.
Is there any kind of hacking being done to the game to try to make it run on old stuff, or on smart appliances or whatever, just to show it can be done? I've seen people do it with other games, so maybe Wesnoth would be a good candidate.
Wesnoth's size and sophistication has grown steadily over the course of its development. If you look at the early releases, at a glance you might think you're seeing a different game.
What I'd like to know is, is most of the size difference due purely to better graphics, or has the underlying code also gotten steadily bigger, and if so, is it (coincidentally or otherwise) proportional to the growth of the graphics?
The reason I ask is that to me, Wesnoth, being a sort of throwback to games from the '80s and '90s, should be able to run on really old computers. (I don't mean a 6502 or an 80286 or anything like that). But let's say I replaced all the sprites or textures with super tiny, low-low-detail ones, disabled idle animations and effects, swapped out sound files with super-compressed ones (heck, just boops and beeps for all I care), and had scenarios and campaigns that only utilized what was included in the game (no expansions, no alternate sets or mods or anything), would I wind up with a game that could be played on, say, a P-90 with a Trident PCI graphics card? Or maybe even a 486?
It'd be really cool to have versions of Wesnoth that could run on lots of different hardware. Maybe someone could hack a version into a smart watch, even.
Is there any kind of hacking being done to the game to try to make it run on old stuff, or on smart appliances or whatever, just to show it can be done? I've seen people do it with other games, so maybe Wesnoth would be a good candidate.
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Stripped-Down Wesnoth?
If you mean just by raw size, then the art/music/sounds have increased quite a bit more than the code. Otherwise I'd guess it mostly depends on whether all Wesnoth's build dependencies are possible to meet on whatever ancient system you're envisioning.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs
take one down, patch it around
-2,147,483,648 little bugs in the code
take one down, patch it around
-2,147,483,648 little bugs in the code