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README - Frozen-Bubble
Copyright © 2000-2008 The Frozen-Bubble Team.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
Check the AUTHORS file for the full story of who did what.
Notice: the following is an historic explanation of Frozen-Bubble written in 2002 which is kept here for information:
This game began when I, as a packager for Mandrakesoft http://mandrakesoft.com/ and amateur of the Perl language (which I discovered reading the source code of Mandrake's graphical installer, DrakX http://mandrakelinux.com/DrakX/), discovered that a crazy guy (David J. Goehrig) had had the mysterious idea to bind the functions of the C low-level graphical library SDL http://libsdl.org/ for the Perl language, `sdlpl' http://sdlperl.org/.
What an amazing idea, try to make Perl, an interpreted 'scripting' language, (e.g. something considered by most as inherently slow), talk to SDL, a C library considered as the leader gateway to fast multimedia under Linux (among others O.S.), and hope to keep good performance?
Another time, Perl is here to surprise us by its (reasonably) good performance (compared to what it actually computes), and make us realize that what is time-consuming in most multimedia programs is, bingo, multimedia operations such as blitting images and so on.
Of course, if you notice, you will see graphical effects in the game when a new level is displayed. That is CPU-intensive, and is performed through some C code, compiled to be called by Perl. Yet all the rest is done by Perl, and I can use higher-level lists operations, efficient functional-style programming, and other enjoyable things; I could program the whole thing in roughly 15 to 30 days of work; and the whole program is only 1500 lines! And it never segfaults :-)...
I'd like to thank a lot the great guys who made the artistic part of this game possible: Ayo the famous french pinguin designer http://73lab.com/, Amaury the bubbles designer, and Matthias our fine guitarist, who all managed to accept (and enjoy ;p) working under more strict conditions that what they're used to (because this was part of a bigger project, it logically restricted freedom in their art). All http://linuxfr.org/ readers knew that Ayo had a real talent, yet he showed he could do much more than banners and wallpapers. Regarding Matthias, as I'm a fan since 1997 I was confident he could write marvellous songs (I was not disappointed), and I discovered he could give me high quality sound effects as well! It's real great to see that together we could produce a game I'm very proud of.
gc, Sun Jan 27 22:17:10 2002