Re: RobotChase, Java edition
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On Sat, 17 May 2008, Andrew Thompson wrote:
On May 18, 7:27?am, "John B. Matthews" <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
...
Students of Java may want to look at a new Java version of the
classic RobotChase game:
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/robotchase>
hmmm. OK - 'nice effort'. But when I go to check if there is a
webstart launch, I only find a download. In those downloads, there is a
Mac specific bundle, and a 'Platform Independent' tar.gz file.
What program on Windows will deal with tar files?
Pretty much any archiving program. WinZip, for instance.
Since Java specialises in using ZIP style archives, and the SDK provides
tools to work with them, why would people* distribute Java projects as a
'tar'?
* You are not alone there, it is quite common.
Is it because SourceForge does it automatically? Tarballs are the standard
mode of distribution in the unix world, so i wouldn't be surprised if SF
had built-in support for packaging files in this way.
For non-SF projects, i think it just reflects a brain stuck in the
orthodox open source mindset. Tarballs and makefiles all round!
As an aside, I had never heard of 'RobotChase' before now, though I have
seen variants on that theme.
I've never come across that name before, although the suppplied listing
does suggest that that's the original name. I've always known it as
Daleks, after the version we had on the Mac when i was a kid. Those were
the days - Daleks, Macinooga Choo Choo, Captain Magneto, Crystal Quest ...
Ahem. Anyway, 'robots' seems to be the generic name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_%28computer_game%29
The GNOME version is very good (ie hard!), with all sorts of different
types of robots.
Anyway, i'm off to download Crystal Quest ...
tom
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1 p4WN 3v3Ry+h1n G!!!
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