4 ms·

I love perl, and I don't want to see it be dead, but there aren't enough libraries relating to my interests (games).

rtward 16y ago
You should really check out the SDL bindings for Perl. It's getting to the point where the dev versions are almost comparable to PyGame. There's some really cool stuff going on.
- someone_here 16y ago
  I had checked them out about a year ago and they couldn't even draw a line on the screen :\
  - wazoox 16y ago
    Weird, considering that the very well-known free game Frozen Bubble is written in SDL/Perl...
    - phaylon 16y ago
      It's now also on CPAN by the way at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Games-FrozenBubble/ http://search.cpan.org/dist/Games-FrozenBubble/ I'm not really a game developer or have any idea about SDL, but from the Perl feeds I read (I think this instance was from Planet Iron Man) I gather that the SDL development was recently revitalized. They have their website at http://sdl.perl.org/ http://sdl.perl.org/ and since the Latest News entry at this time is from the end of August, it seems up-to-date.
      - Luyt 16y ago
        YouTube is full of Frozen Bubble movies. See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nUkly7AkFs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nUkly7AkFs , someone completing level 70.
    - someone_here 16y ago
      It didn't have to draw any lines. Everything was bitmaps.
phaylon 16y ago
There's the Ogre bindings, but they are unfortunately incomplete. I think the problem here is that of critical mass. For real nice game development, you don't simply want OpenGL or even an engine like Ogre. You want to extend the engine to include physics and collision detection. So, there would need to be either a large enough crowd able to maintain the bindings for the engines and their extensions, or we need a more generic approach to C++ foreign library access. Since there are people working on better C and C++ FFI's, I'm hoping for the latter. But that's probably mostly because I'm no good at C++, and such a layer would be my only way to use external libraries without available bindings.

You should really check out the SDL bindings for Perl. It's getting to the point where the dev versions are almost comparable to PyGame. There's some really cool stuff going on.

someone_here 16y ago
I had checked them out about a year ago and they couldn't even draw a line on the screen :\
- wazoox 16y ago
  Weird, considering that the very well-known free game Frozen Bubble is written in SDL/Perl...
  - phaylon 16y ago
    It's now also on CPAN by the way at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Games-FrozenBubble/ http://search.cpan.org/dist/Games-FrozenBubble/ I'm not really a game developer or have any idea about SDL, but from the Perl feeds I read (I think this instance was from Planet Iron Man) I gather that the SDL development was recently revitalized. They have their website at http://sdl.perl.org/ http://sdl.perl.org/ and since the Latest News entry at this time is from the end of August, it seems up-to-date.
    - Luyt 16y ago
      YouTube is full of Frozen Bubble movies. See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nUkly7AkFs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nUkly7AkFs , someone completing level 70.
  - someone_here 16y ago
    It didn't have to draw any lines. Everything was bitmaps.

phaylon 16y ago

There's the Ogre bindings, but they are unfortunately incomplete. I think the problem here is that of critical mass. For real nice game development, you don't simply want OpenGL or even an engine like Ogre. You want to extend the engine to include physics and collision detection. So, there would need to be either a large enough crowd able to maintain the bindings for the engines and their extensions, or we need a more generic approach to C++ foreign library access. Since there are people working on better C and C++ FFI's, I'm hoping for the latter. But that's probably mostly because I'm no good at C++, and such a layer would be my only way to use external libraries without available bindings.