I am familiar with your port and found it unplayable on the XO laptop (although I commend you on your apparently painful task of making it run in the first place!).
While I appreciate your thoughts on the OLPC, I am more interested in Alan's thoughts on Sugar.
It's great meeting you, and wonderful getting some honest feedback from somebody who's used it. Thank you! I also hope Alan has a chance to answer your question, and my four.
Could you please tell me more specifically about what made it unplayable for you? What was the nature of the problem? Did you remember to disable disasters? ;)
Please don't blame it on Sugar -- the user interface was based on a 1993 version of TCL/Tk, so it looks pretty klunky since it was designed to emulate Motif, whose widget design (according to Steve Strassman) is from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport [1].
Here's a demo of SimCity running on the OLPC [2] -- does that show any of the problems you had that made it unplayable?
Once it passed EA's QA regime, I didn't put any more effort into the TCL/Tk user interface, instead refactoring it to remove TCL/Tk and plug in other GUIs. Have you given the pure GTK/Cairo interface a try?
What was totally unplayable was the X11 based multi player feature [3], which I removed from the OLPC version, since no child should be forced to wrangle xauth permissions on the command line, and David Chapman's MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 tutorial isn't suitable for children [1]. I also disabled the Frob-O-Matic Dynamic Zone Finder [3 @ 3:35], since that was a prank I played as a tribute to Ben Shneiderman [4].
Again, thanks for the feedback, which I appreciate!
I am familiar with your port and found it unplayable on the XO laptop (although I commend you on your apparently painful task of making it run in the first place!).
While I appreciate your thoughts on the OLPC, I am more interested in Alan's thoughts on Sugar.
Nice to meet you.
Sebastian