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README - Frozen-Bubble

Copyright © 2000-2010 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.

L<http://www.frozen-bubble.org/>

The following is an historic explanation of Frozen-Bubble, written in 2002:

This game began when I, as a packager for Mandrakesoft L<http://mandrakesoft.com/> and
amateur of the Perl language (which I discovered reading the
source code of Mandrake's graphical installer, DrakX L<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 L<http://libsdl.org/>
for the Perl language, `sdlpl' L<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 L<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 L<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
