See Antares’s AUTHORS file. Most of the work was done by Nathan Lamont, who wrote the original game for Mac OS Classic, Ares, and Chris Pickel, who ported it to Mac OS X as Antares.
As soon as multiplayer is (re-)added.
Very near to pixel-perfect. In general, there are three reasons Antares may not be a pixel-perfect match to Ares in a given situation:
Antares currently builds and runs on:
In the future, it may also run on:
There are no plans to port it to Mac OS Classic, or to any mobile platform.
Antares is the common name for α Scorpii. Its name means “anti-Ares”, because although it is a bright red star similar in appearance to Mars (Ares), it is something very different.
Plugins are fully supported. However, the format is different from the format used in Ares. Several plugins are available on the Plugins page.
An Antares plugin is a Zip archive with the extension “.antaresplugin”. It contains text configuration files, along with images and sounds.
Full details on the format are in the plugin documentation.
There are three main ways:
For example, in Ares, the Ishiman Cruiser is the first 318 bytes of ‘bsob’ 500. In Antares, it is the file objects/ish/cruiser.pn.
There is no tool for converting a plugin from one format to another. If a plugin you want to play is not available for Antares, you can send a request for it to be converted manually.
Currently, there are no tools for developing Antares plugins. Since the files are readable text, building a tool is not a priority, but if you are interested in developing one, talk to the developer.
None to speak of at present. When it eventually exists, Antares multiplayer will likely look very different from Ares multiplayer. Some things that will probably change are:
There is no expected timeline for multiplayer support.
Antares is not available for Windows.
However, on Linux, some parts of the game can be compiled with mingw and run under WINE.
There is no expected timeline for Windows support.
The main Antares developer doesn’t have a Windows machine and doesn’t really know anything about developing for Windows. Compiling with mingw was possible without any of that equipment or knowledge.
There’s no real reason it needs to use mingw. As long as Travis can continue to run the tests, it would be fine to compile natively on Windows. However, it’s probably necessary to continue to compile with clang, and to use MSYS2 for that.
A general overview might be:
More specifically, in BUILD.gn, there are a bunch of places that something like the following appears:
if (target_os == "win") {
group -= [ entry ]
}
Any place that appears, it indicates a gap in Windows support.