Game Programming Experiments
February 9th, 2007 by proj
Although I’ve been plenty busy at work lately I’ve still had some time to play with various game programming experiments on my Mac. XNA stuff is shelved for the time being until I get my laptop back online.
I’ll list them in order of what I thought was the coolest:
My first introduction to D was via japanese indie developer Kena “Saba” Cho aka ABA Games. This guy turns out some really neat shooters using OpenGL and the D language. He puts the code out for all his games so you can get a very good idea on how the language is used. I threw together a small game engine framework in D the other night and I’m really impressed. I really need to do a whole post on all the cool things that are available to you in D. It’s a natively compiled imperitive programming language that lets you write code with templates, interfaces and garbage collection. I haven’t gotten a good debugger hooked up yet for it, stock GDB doesn’t seem to interoperate correctly.
This program is a dream. I had kept all my UML diagrams to pen and paper because I hated visio so much but this program makes diagramming fun. The diagrams look great and are simple to work with. I’ve known of OMNI before but this program in mind really puts them on the top shelf of program design. I’ll post an engine design diagram I did later.
SWIG makes it really easy to generate script wrappers for your code. Next time I need to integrate a scripting system for an engine this is likely what I’ll use. No more of this error-prone manual script wrapper writing. Writing script wrappers is about as entertaining as writing serialization routines but more error prone.
If it weren’t for the crappy performance of the PyObjC wrappers to throw up a window I would rank this higher. I’m sure it’s awesome on windows or linux but it seriously sucks to have to wait 5 seconds on a dual G5 just for a window to show up. Also there is a hack required to init to even get it to work reliably on OSX. Also writing an entire game in python has it’s problems, not my cup-o-joe. I like writing code in D much better.
Related posts:
I remember reading over the D language a few years ago when I played Saba’s games. I’ll probably have to give it another look, it has some cool features.
Also, I looked into SWIG before starting Empyreal Nocturne but I didnt’ use it because it doesn’t work with Lua.
-Reed