[Mono-list] Porting FreeTrain to Mono

[Atsushi Eno]

I agree that FreeTrain had been great, actually to me *the only* 
valuable .NET application for years.

It is intreseting that FreeTrain was being ported to SDL land. Though it 
wouldn't run on non-Windows platform
unless it drops COM dependency such as AxSHDocVw.dll and MSHtmlHost.dll. 
I wonder if they can be
rewritten using WebBrowser control (it is still under heavy development 
though).

DierctAudio dependency is also porting blocker, though I guess it could 
be cut.

Atsushi Eno

> A very similar copy of the following text has been posted to the
> gotmono.com forum:
> http://www.gotmono.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=news;action=display;num=1203656378;start=0
>
> FreeTrain is a game by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, written in C# using
> Microsoft's .NET platform. It is inspired by the A-Train series of
> games which focuses on a combination of train and business simulation.
>
> FreeTrain is the quintessential sandbox game. First of all, you start
> in a literal sandbox: a flat barren piece of land greets you when
> starting a new game. After that, it's completely up to you to create
> your world, including natural features such as mountains or lakes.
>
> Last year Free Gamer got a few guys to translate FreeTrain from
> Japanese (it had been entirely Japanese until then) to English so it
> could be enjoyed by a more global audience.  However it is still
> dependent on Windows and .NET and can not be run on Mono or Linux.
>
> Homepage:
> http://freetrain.sourceforge.net
>
> Screenshots:
> http://freetrain.freeforums.org/freetrain-screenshots-t5.html
> http://www.kohsuke.org/freetrain/screenshots/index.html
> http://homepage1.nifty.com/Ferrari/map/newpage1.htm (this one is huge
> - looks ace)
>
> Forums:
> http://freetrain.freeforums.org/
>
> FreeTrain (original Japanese) homepage:
> http://www.kohsuke.org/freetrain/
>
> Basically the game is no longer developed by it's original Japanese
> author, and the guys who translated the game are not well versed in
> C#/Mono and have struggled to port it:
> http://freetrain.freeforums.org/16aug2007-sdl-screenshot-t88.html
>
> It would be great if somebody from the Mono community who was looking
> to bring over a really great Free Software project from .NET to Mono
> could check it out and give advice or even dig in.  Otherwise I'm
> afraid this amazing game will never get ported to Mono and Linux.
>
> Thanks for your time, please bear in mind (if you respond) that I am
> not subscribed to this list.
>
>  - Charlie
>
>