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Yes. I spent many years doing that for games. AMA.
by oxryly1 9y ago
Yes. I spent many years doing that for games. AMA.
- SwellJoe 9y agoSo, how'd it turn out? Did you ship any games?
- oxryly1 9y agoYes, the "Uncharted" series and "The Last of Us". Our team built a large system in Racket that built all kinds of data for the game. The front end could and often did have many layers of DSLs using Racket syntax macros. Overall it enabled us to do many things that would have required lots of specialized tools. The downsides were things like people ramping up on editing s-expressions in text files and lots of gotchas with hygienic macros.
- SwellJoe 9y agoWell, that wasn't the answer I expected! Super cool, I wouldn't have guessed any AAA titles were using a Lisp/Scheme heavily in their toolchain (but I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the game industry). I'm fascinated by procedural generation and constrained randomness in games, and I'd think something like Racket would be a fun choice for that. Do you reckon you'd make the same choice if you were starting today?
- tudelo 9y agoThat's awesome. Do you think this is still a viable career? I know very little about what sort of DSL you would make for games, what would they even cover? map gen? Also, why Racket?
- oxryly1 9y agoI think it'd be useful to learn, but nobody in the industry will hire you specifically to work in Racket. We used DSLs on top of a data pipeline to create things like particle effects, animations, sound, and scripting. We chose Racket because it seemed to be the best supported open source scheme implementation at the time I started working on this system (back in 2005).