Korovev wrote:(which seems to fail currently)
It does again ? Guess I'll have to put more time into Drizzle in the near future. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime. (I'm also planning to make a proper Drizzle33 that works for both DI and offline "At Some Point"(c), haven't gotten around to it yet.)
Korovev wrote:if the conversion were to import those ages, wouldn’t it compete with the UAM channel? On the other hand, it could mean they wouldn’t need a separate release for PotS.
Very good question, I haven't thought seriously about this until now. The answer is UAM, 100%.
Drizzle's conversion tool is a marvel of its time and works great on "frozen" games, but to be honest ? It's absolutely not robust to change. It also operates only on PRPs, Python/SDL scripts still have to be redistributed through the Offline-KI and converted manually.
Now, of course I'll keep updating Drizzle as long as I can to support conversion of MOULa Ages, because it's required for a bunch of reasons (mostly working around copyright infringements). As a byproduct, this means manually converting any PRP in the advanced tab will keep working. But keeping the conversion working on a quickly-changing game is a tedious process, so fan Ages are best left out of the mix.
UAM on the other hand is tried and true, and has several benefits - such as keeping older versions available and being available 100% of the time. It's also fairly easy for authors to export a PotS version of their Age. It's better to entrust this to them than me
(or whoever maintains Drizzle, really)
(...Drizzle is one of the last surviving softwares from the early Uru days, actually, and was mostly written by a single person. And that shows in the code. The UAM part works flawlessly, but the converter itself relies on an old, undocumented and outdated PRP library. It's also riddled with PRP-specific fixes, and is mutually dependent with the Offline-KI. We can't really get rid of it either. But well, so far it works and upgrading it is still a possibility.
And it even has a few neat features not available anywhere else, such as the distiller ! ...)