Re: [Chicken-users] 3D games in Chicken

[felix winkelmann]

On 2/12/06, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
>  Peter Keller wrote:
>  On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 12:23:32AM -0700, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
>[...SDL...OpenGL...Game development...]

Now, I'm not a game developer (and the last game I wrote was a
really bad Donkey Kong clone written in TI Extended Basic, which was
ultimately rejected by a computer magazine, which nearly killed
my computing career... ;-) but I do work in a situation (embedded
application development). where I have to do with the problem of
getting nice snazzy graphics and GUI elements onto constrained
devices.

I really *love* SDL as it handles all the ugly stuff like getting a
window on the screen (even if in fullscreen mode) and letting me
handle events is a simple and sane manner. It is boring drudgery
to get these things to work and it solves portability problems
pretty well. Especially the tight focus on the gaming "infrastructure"
(if one can call it that) like event-handling and window-management
makes it so good: it doesn't try to take over my graphics pipeline,
and it doesn't throw stuff at me that I don't need (and what I need
I can get via SDL_ttf, SDL_image, and so on).
It's portability is excellent and the API is so simple that I seldom use
the SDL egg: easyffi and a few `define-foreign-record's is more
than enough to get going, if one doesn't mind using a procedural
C-like API inside ones Scheme code.
I don't know enough about licensing issues: LGPL *may* be a problem
for some people.
I also think that portability is still important. Brandon seems to have
the opinion "Only Windows pays off - so I don't bother with the rest",
to which he has every right. On the other hand the Mac is an interesting
platform, since there is practically very little competition, and I still
use Linux a lot and somehow still believe in open source... :-)
And don't forget the commercial aspect of Linux: I have heard of at least
one case where our company was approached by a customer who does
game systems (like the one you'll find in gaming arcades) on a Linux basis.
Why shouldn't the gaming console of tomorrow use Linux and standard
APIs and tools?


cheers,
felix