Re: Guile Game Library

[Panicz Maciej Godek <godek.maciek@gmail.com>]

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2013/5/29 David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu>

> I'll give SLAYER a try before judging it, but my initial impression is
> that it's not a good fit for me. Our goals seem to be different, and it
> seems that you have your sights aimed much higher. Emacs is my development
> environment and I'm not looking for a specialized development environment
> to build games in using SLAYER or any other library.
>
>
Well, currently I also use Emacs. However, I see that in the process of
game development it is very important to be able to make editors for
certain features.
SLAYER is a very general (or generic) environment, and the idea is just to
build various libraries around the core, which is responsible for input
handling and audiovisuals.
I hope that one day I manage to transpose the idea of REPL onto the world
of GUI somehow, but it's just a distant vision.
However, having an in-game code editor is just something that I need for
the game that I'm developing.

I do really like that SLAYER can operate with software rendering OR OpenGL
> rendering. That is quite the nice feature.
>
> Perhaps I should explain my position more. My focus is on 2D game
> development (but that's not to say that I want a library that is limited to
> only 2D), which means I want a library with features like sprites, sprite
> batching, tiling, animation, a 2D scene graph, event scripting, etc.
>

I know of no library for Guile that would provide those features out of the
box. I believe it should be fairly easy to provide animation framework for
SLAYER. When it comes to some other features, honestly, I haven't
considered the code performance issues yet (I've rather been concerned with
the performance of the development process), so I'm unfamiliar with
features like sprite batching nor efficient tiling. The sprites themselves
are supported, whether they are loaded from external files, or generated as
a two-dimensional array (there are array->image and image->array functions
that allow for an easy conversion)

I follow David Knuth's advice and act as if "premature optimization was the
root of all evil" -- I believe it is more important to have a working game
ASAP and optimize only when I know which optimizations are needed than to
worry a priori.

Best regards,
M.

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