In Downloads, many of the demos are compiled only for one platform.

It would be useful to know which platforms each demo supported before downloading and extracting them.

-Crissa

Uh, that doesn't mean this isn't a good, and sane, request.

Because it is, and we will be doing it. And by "we", overkill, I mean you me.

I agree with both arguments, and I also agree that a platform/OS field would be a good thing to have. However, I really can't add this myself since I have lots of school work due in a short period of time. It certainly wouldn't be too hard to implement, but I can't afford to lose time that should be spent trying to pass my courses in order to finish my education.

Such things won't be hard, really. The hard part is finding time.

I've said that before. I don't know why Verge even bothers to keep the vsp and chr formats around. It seems like it'd be 100 times more sane to load them directly from Verge rather than have to chuck them through an external program, especially in light of the fact that the VC's are compiled at runtime.

Forgive the nieve question. But why on Earth aren't compiled verge games cross platform? Shouldn't a verge data file be able to be read by any platform's verge runtime exe?

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That's what I thought you'd say. It's really fairly easy to fix endian issues in verge's situation. You'd need two routines, one that checks for which endian bias a processor has, and one that reverses end if the processor is different from expected. Heck, I can program, maybe I'll add that into verge. It might be a little tricky in that I dont think verge loads everything into memory all at once but it still should be fairly straightforward. Everywhere that a compiled vergec file is loaded a fixup routine would need to be called.

At any rate, I do think that it would be worthwhile to make verge games crossplatform.

Yes, what you are referring to is being potentially able to install the verge engine to a common directory and then install various games to their own seperate directories. The games just call the verge engine from it's common location and it runs them from their directory. This allows one to have one copy of the verge runtime installed instead of one copy for each game. That is what you mean right? That's a good idea.

Vecna,

Thanks for the reply!

#1: That's cool. It's what I'd expect and luckily what I'd get. ;-)

#2: Yes, it would happen in a lot of places in a compiler but if there is a precompiled XVC file then what is stopping a routine from wholesale converting all numbers from one format to another? Precompiled code should be able to be switched back and forth before the verge runtime really gets going. Endian issues don't effect the size of the code or the size of integers, etc. So a simple swap of the bytes should be all that is needed. What am I missing that would make it harder than I am expecting?

#3: That does sound like a problem. Also, in order to do a conversion from one endian format to another there'd need to be an endian designator in the XVC file. Currently there isn't one and so that in itself would break binary compatibility with older versions.

I dont see why the source could not be loaded from a packfile. I dont know if verge supports it currently but I think it would be easy enough to do.

I still think that all os's will be able to use the same XVC file. Endian issues really aren't as hard as people make them out to be. Also, all (new) macs are going to be on intel within the next year or two. That will make most all platforms little endian.