15 ms·

Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

234 points by amirrajan 5y ago

monkmartinez 5y ago
Lets say I am not a Ruby dev, what would compel me to learn this over Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this? I remember Ruby Motion was a thing, then it wasn't... then it was again? I started learning web dev with RoR and quickly moved to Python as the ecosystem was so much bigger. I could transfer my Python knowledge into so many different domains. I remember at the time, I really wanted a "Ruby Motion" for Python... still do actually. I have come full circle and now think JS is eating the world and I am playing in that garden... we'll see where that ends up I suppose. In any case, GOOD LUCK... I hope for the best!
- tomlin 5y ago
  Agree. I don't know if the Ruby interpreter is what I'd look to for performance in a game.
  - pansa2 5y ago
    It doesn’t use the standard Ruby interpreter (MRI), but a custom implementation that includes a compiler. I don’t know if it’s AOT compilation or JIT.
  - amirrajan 5y ago
    Unity’s implementation of C# is subpar to say the least. Watch the YouTube video, it demonstrates DragonRuby’s speed vs Unity. We can render twice as many sprites and are 1/8th the size. We also expose C Extensions to the end user if they what blinding fast performance for critical paths.
    - wokwokwok 5y ago
      Hm... I'm more concerned about running user-land scripts and shaders than sprites. If I wanted raw pixel-blits per second I could just use SDL. Do you have any concrete numbers on compute (ie. scripts)? Do you support shaders? eg. How would you do this in DragonRuby? --> https://github.com/keijiro/StableFluids https://github.com/keijiro/StableFluids Ie. a compute buffer that renders a fluid simulation in real time?
      - amirrajan 5y ago
        There’s quite a few samples of people doing crazy things with Cuda. Not sure if you can access this demonstration: https://discord.com/channels/608064116111966245/674410581326823446/828899164812607499 https://discord.com/channels/608064116111966245/674410581326... These are other demonstrations of DRGTK’s performance capabilities: - https://twitter.com/Groteskly/status/1373668110482427906 https://twitter.com/Groteskly/status/1373668110482427906 - https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1361640855589842951 https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1361640855589842951 - https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1339575630187425792 https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1339575630187425792
    - Impossible 5y ago
      Huh, number of sprites per frame has little to do with the speed of C# in Unity. If anything it shows that Unity's default sprite renderer is inefficient.
    - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
      You have any data to back up that claim? Unity C# is very fast; especially, if compiled to IL2CPP. Your video doesn’t prove anything. Make a lot of moving transform hierarchies and see how they compare. Unity sucks at this, but I bet it will still outperform In your tests.
    - dosshell 5y ago
      Unity does also support C extensions... But due to cross platform mess it is not so popular (i guess). > double the amount of sprites It sounds a bit low? My experience is that with instancing and 2d array textures (2d games usally uses spritesheets) can be much much faster then 2x. I would guess 20x-200x faster than unity.
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      Unity rendering sprites has nothing to do with C#. A big portion of their engine and rendering stack are implemented in C/C++.
  - jchw 5y ago
    The irony is that Ruby was actually designed for this kind of thing. And in fact, RPG Maker XP’s Ruby Game Scripting System, a commercial usage of Ruby as an embedded scripting language for game dev, was released at least a few months prior to the first Ruby on Rails release if memory serves correct.
    - kamranjon 5y ago
      Do you have a source for the claim that ruby was designed for game development? I'm not saying it's wrong, I just have never heard that before.
      - jchw 5y ago
        Not necessarily game dev, but rather as an embeddable scripting language. There’s also mruby which is even more portable and designed to be more embeddable. My understanding is that in Japan, Ruby is often used as an embedded scripting language the way people might use Lua. (I don’t have an exact source for this, it’s something that seems to come up periodically when talking about Ruby. Matz mentions it briefly when introducing mruby. I also don’t necessarily think it was conceived for this reason, but rather that over time, it fell into the niche and became influenced by it. But I’m not sure about that, either.)
        castwide 5y ago
        I can vouch for Ruby's practicality as an embedded scripting language. The first time I used it was in a game engine (which, IIRC, also predated Rails) with a C++ core. Writing the high-level game logic in Ruby was pleasant, and hooking into C++ functions that did the heavy lifting kept it performant.
  - mega-tux 5y ago
    This is mRuby, not Ruby. Different things. Think in mRuby as Lua and MRI Ruby as Python
- amirrajan 5y ago
  > Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this? So far so good. We’ve been in business for nearly a decade now (with the game engine going onto year 3). > Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? Well our ability to deploy to console eliminates most engines as competitors/options. Unreal is a fantastic engine for 3D games. Unity is... well... not that great to be honest. Other differentiators are on the site.
  - tomlin 5y ago
    Wait, you're suggesting Ruby is better than Unity? This has to be a joke.
    - amirrajan 5y ago
      Nope. Not a joke. We’re faster too: https://youtu.be/UuY7CWdvyWM https://youtu.be/UuY7CWdvyWM
      - TylerE 5y ago
        Press F to doubt. On some tiny synthetic benchmark maybe. Come back when your engine can handle something even 1% as complex, as say, Dyson Sphere Program.
        phaedryx 5y ago
        I suspect that DragonRuby is faster as a 2D game engine and doesn't make sense for a complex 3D game.
        TylerE 5y ago
        I don't believe that either. Unity works just fine for Cuphead, which is a pretty graphically intense game. Plenty of other graphical complicated 2d games too.
        5y ago
- kfischer_okarin 5y ago
  Putting the purely technical aspects aside for a moment. From my experience so far one big point in favor of DragonRuby is that its philosophy focuses on developer productivity, for example - an iterative immediate feedback style of development using hot reloading - (in the latest version) direct source code editing and updating via a HTTP Developer interface (think updating your smartphone game at runtime without re-deploying) - Producing builds for all Desktop platforms in usually less than a minute (mobile and consoles probably take longer considering the surrounding tasks of signing apps, registering in stores etc) - offering a centralized interface for persistent game state which is automatically dumped for error analysis in case of failure and able to be recorded/replayed/rewinded out of the box during dev - Abstracting away File Systems/Storage mechanisms out of the box so you don't have to care about where you save on a Switch, PC or iPhone and probably lots of other stuff I'm not quite aware of atm. Another big plus point is the lively and encouraging Discord community
  - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
    Godot, unity, and unreal do all that too. I’m not seeing the advantage other than it’s ruby. Seems like a niche product.
    - kfischer_okarin 5y ago
      I can only speak for Unity until versions till maybe 2019 - and I never developed a full commercial title with it - just a few game jam games - so maybe I'm not the best authority on that... But I think it's quite far away in many of those features Sure you can try out your game immediately in the editor, by pressing the play button - but can you edit Source code and it will be immediately applied without restarting and without losing the current game state? You can edit and adjust scene objects in the inspector during play mode but those changes are usually thrown away after quitting play mode. I never did serious mobile dev with unity but I same as above... updating and editing your game source persistently at runtime during playing doesn't seem possible, since it's completely compiling everything into an Android package right? Building for all desktop platforms under a minute - this is 100% not true..... Almost all of the last hours of game jams where I used unity where spent in worry waiting for a long build process not being sure everything works all right afterwards - and that was always for just _one_ platform at a time...... DragonRuby builds your games into fully functional Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5 and FWIW Raspberry Pi builds in under a minute in total for all those platforms. I don't know of any other Engine (except maybe LÖVE2D which is interpreted in its basic nature and doesn't need building) which can do anything close to that speed Persistent flexibly modifiable game state? - maybe there's something in the asset store - but out of the box? Cross-platform File storage is the only thing where I can see that that is probably a well solved problem in Unity.... I cannot speak for the other game engines. But in general it would be nice if you back up your claims.....
- neolog 5y ago
  EVE Online is written in Python
  - hu3 5y ago
    This post tells me the heavy lifting is done in C++ including 3D rendering, network communication and input handling: https://forums.eveonline.com/t/how-is-the-eve-online-client-written/60555/5 https://forums.eveonline.com/t/how-is-the-eve-online-client-...
    - neolog 5y ago
      The quote is > As far as we know, the EVE client is written in C++ and Python. C++ handles all the low-level stuff like 3D rendering, network communication, input handling and such. (Stackless) Python is used for everything else, which includes the user interface and even the management of graphic resources (you can see this in the debug window by pressing ctrl+alt+shift+m). This technology mix is quite unique, so I’d suggest CCP implemented the EVE GUI in-house, not using a (open source) widget library. I’ve been playing EVE for many years now, and the GUI has evolved a lot since the days I first tried EVE (around 2005). This also strongly suggests that the code was written by CCP.
      - hu3 5y ago
        Yep, C++ where performance matters.
        neolog 5y ago
        Surprising they'd go C++ for networking. Python's had top-notch async for nearly 20 years.
        kevingadd 5y ago
        EVE has a history of incredibly bad performance issues, in part due to their extensive use of python for networking, simulation, etc. They seem to struggle with it on an ongoing basis, so it makes sense that in some cases they would move logic from python to C++. Their networking stack was at least at one point heavily Python. Some engagements in EVE will literally involve thousands of players in the same system all interacting with each other in big groups, so it becomes extremely important to be able to push a truckload of packets and events and process them with low latencies.
- gfxgirl 5y ago
  I had this discussion with a AAA game studio recently. They have a hit game will millions of players and it's been a hit for many years. It uses a custom engine. They've been releasing new games. Those new games are in both Unity and Unreal. You can see all the reasons 1. Their custom engine doesn't have all the features of either of those other engines. Their artists in particular are pushing to switch to get those features. 2. Their custom engine doesn't have have amount of tooling those other engines have (likely no blueprints, no shader graph, no state machine editor, no animation editor, etc..., etc..., etc...) 3. Their custom engine doesn't have tens of thousands of potential hires that already have experience with them. 4. Their custom engine doesn't have 1/1000th the amount of docs, tutorials, youtube videos, etc on how to use it so the team that maintains that engine has to provide that knowledge to every new hire The result of the above is it limits their growth. If they want to start a new team for a new game, if they stuck with their custom engine they'd basically have to take a significant number of people off the existing game and move them to the new game otherwise no one on the new game would have any easy way to know how to use it.
  - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    The needs of AAA game studios and solo/small-team indie devs are very, very different.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    The target for this is not AAA studios, but indie developers. For my part, I don't have enough spare time to learn one of the big engines. They're too complex, and this is a hobby. DragonRuby on the other hand is simple enough that you can start doing stuff immediately if you know even basic Ruby. That is the appeal to me. Whether or not it would work for a large team is totally irrelevant for that kind of use, because I have no interest in starting a studio. It seems a lot of the people criticizing DragonRuby in this thread forgets that game dev spans from hobby development by individuals who might toy with it a few hours a week to multi year projects by major companies, and they have different needs and interests. E.g. I value having fun over ever completing a publishable game. DragonRuby is fun. That I could release something with it is a bonus, but to me even that is secondary.
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  > Lets say I am not a Ruby dev, what would compel me to learn this over Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? A good reason would be that RoR is still a competitive advantage for indie web devs and small startup teams working on non performance-constrained domains. It's amazing how many successes In see in the IH world using Ruby despite far larger numbers of people building everything in JS or maybe Python. Dev experience matters and there are some durable advantages the Ruby ecosystem has maintained despite others growing more quickly in popularity. Building DSLs is one.
- ksec 5y ago
  > and now think JS is eating the world It will via asm.js, except no one will be coding in JS anymore since everything will compile to asm, and you will have asm compiler in your kernel.
- nrjames 5y ago
  Unity is a giant download and very complicated. Something like DragonRuby, Renpy, Python Arcade, or LOVE2D are far smaller and suitable for many small games. Even Godot is significantly smaller and offers many of the features of Unity.
phaedryx 5y ago
I don't see this mentioned on the website, but, if I remember correctly, they also have materials for teaching kids how to code. I was thinking about running something at my son's school last year before Covid shut everything down. The "hotloading" is really nice and the community on Discord is excellent.
- lloeki 5y ago
  Instead of DR, I think I'll use Ruby2D as a very first step: it's incredibly limited, having only basic primitives, but it's also much more approachable, in a BASIC/LOGO-like way. Coincidentally because of that use case I just remembered yesterday that I had a PR open on Ruby2D...
- jonnydubowsky 5y ago
  I think this is what you mean? https://wndx.school/p/dragon-ruby-game-toolkit-tutorial https://wndx.school/p/dragon-ruby-game-toolkit-tutorial Looks like a great resource.
mwcampbell 5y ago
At the risk of hijacking the thread, are you still doing any work on RubyMotion? I always thought RubyMotion was interesting because of how it provided seamless access to the host platform APIs and was even built atop the host platforms' object models. I might have even used it for a product about 5 years ago, if it had supported Windows as a target platform (though I'm not sure how that would have worked).
- phaedryx 5y ago
  As I understand it, work on DragonRuby is foundational for converting RubyMotion into a better, cross-platform mobile toolkit. http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/04/19/plans-for-rubymotion.html http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/04/19/plans-for-rubymoti...
Pfhreak 5y ago
> This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it). > DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon. This feels like a liability for the long term. The community is now depending on Ryan to maintain this custom Ruby implementation, if I'm reading correctly.
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  I’m guessing it’s native extensions rather than a custom ruby implementation.
  - pansa2 5y ago
    It seems to be a custom implementation based on mruby and LLVM. See “What is DragonRuby?” at http://docs.dragonruby.org/ http://docs.dragonruby.org/.
    - adamnemecek 5y ago
      Huh, ok. When they mean Scadia do they mean Stadia.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- amirrajan 5y ago
  Details about the runtime are here if you’re interested: http://docs.dragonruby.org/#----what-is-dragonruby http://docs.dragonruby.org/#----what-is-dragonruby?
- offtop5 5y ago
  In general I don't think I'd be comfortable using any type of engine or framework which is solely developed by one person. Let's say he goes crazy tomorrow and decides to camp on the beaches of Jamaica. No matter what you do, particularly with a closed source engine, you're stuck. With unity if one programmer decides to quit, we still have a game engine that gets updated. With Godot if both of the paid maintainers quit and the project collapses, you can just fork it and keep going.
burlesona 5y ago
Very cool! Would love to see this get traction :)
xixixao 5y ago
The devx looks amazing. Would be so cool to have this for different languages.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  Would be really cool if it wasn't Ruby.
  - alekq 5y ago
    What is wrong Ruby? Which language would be "cool" choice?
    - VectorLock 5y ago
      In my opinion Python provides a better syntax in almost all areas. Ruby has been a language in decline for quite some time.
      - adenozine 5y ago
        Pygame recently hit 2.0, incorporating libsdl-2.0.0 after a long wait. Have you tried that? I think you're a bit off in describing Ruby as a language in decline. Rails startups are being built every single day, Hotwire is threatening yet another Rails renaissance as Ruby moves towards reactive web app technology, mruby is pushing forward into smaller areas, and TruffleRuby is moving forward into exceptionally performant Ruby code. This is all on top of 3.0, which brings all manner of improvements, most notably type annotations. I love Python as much as anybody, but I think they are equally respectable and equally popular in their own niches. Syntax is only a preference, there is much more to Ruby as a language than just the syntactic departures from Python code. It's a different model and encourages a different style of problem solving.
      - amirrajan 5y ago
        > Python provides a better syntax in almost all areas Examples?
bredren 5y ago
Looks interesting and the developer demo was succinct. Feedback is to include some links or video to some demo or even rough playable games. Would be neat to have something to quickly go wow over.
stolen_biscuit 5y ago
Why would I choose this over a FOSS 2D game engine like Godot that offers almost everything this engine offers without the price tag? Not trying to shit on the project, I just don't see a compelling argument put forth on the website as to why I should pay $50 or $98 a year for an engine that I can only see has been used to port one open source game to Switch and a bunch of tech demos. What's the hook? Why should this be my game engine of choice?
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  What's the hook? The hook is you like to program in Ruby, so here is a game engine where you can use Ruby.
  - stolen_biscuit 5y ago
    Fair enough, but for that price I'd expect more than a language I like. It's got some interesting features, but like I said many other game engines have similar features with no cost, what's the stand-out reason to make me spend $50 once on it or $98 a year. Is this just being marketed to language enthusiasts?
    - vidarh 5y ago
      To me, if it saves me even one hour of battling a language I don't like, it has paid for itself.
  - grawprog 5y ago
    What makes ruby worth using for a game that makes this worth paying for over any other free, oss or commercial game engine with more flexibility in language and capability? No offense to ruby programmers but, Ruby's not necessarily the ideal language for game programming even when it comes to scripting languages. And...if you know ruby well enough to make a game, you could learn one of the many other languages better suited to game dev fairly easily. What makes this worth paying for?
    - 5y ago
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
This looks like a fantastic dev experience and it's great to see this team building something like this. Indie game dev is near and dear to my heart. Unfortunately, HN tends to be full of haters. On the behalf of the rest of us, thanks for sharing DragonRuby!
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  I wanted to second this, so thank you for being positive. Even though I'm not a rubyist, I do appreciate having options. A hard yet important lesson in life is to learn to do things in spite of haters hating. For example, I'm writing a programming language, and I can almost guarantee that people will hate it... and that's ok.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    I feel like if you can't generate haters, you're too bland. What you want is for the correct people to hate it, because it's not there to serve them, and makes no concessions to 'em about it.
- dang 5y ago
  > HN tends to be full of haters I'll stick up for the community: I don't think that's true. This submission has been heavily upvoted, after all. You may be running into the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20object%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vidarh 5y ago
    HN can definitively be brutally dismissive of things that doesn't match current perceived wisdom of what is the right way of doing things, much beyond the initial few comments. But I don't think there's a way around that while maintaining open discussion. At least here the disagreements are mostly civil. Part of what makes announcements like this tricky on HN, and what I think triggered the comment you replied to, is that while part of HN values "cool hacks" and simplicity greatly, part of HN evaluates everything based on whether it's useful at scale, as a product, right now, and can grow big (there's certainly a big overlap, and I'm oversimplifying), and an announcement relating to a commercial project that aims for the former crowd unsurprisingly strokes some of the latter crowd entirely the wrong way as a weird niche project seemingly massively lacking in the features they think are essential. I think that with DragonRuby that is particularly unavoidable. What makes some of us find it awesome is an inherently alien way of thinking to a lot of people in a way that look backwards to many.
bobuk 5y ago
Checked the video and wow! Haven't seen FTE editor for years, is it still alive?
- amirrajan 5y ago
  Ryan has a custom compilation of it actually. That editor will go to the grave with him :-P
ptato 5y ago
Will it ever support making 3D games?
- jamdudek 5y ago
  I don't think it will be supported at the engine level but the community tinkers with 3d proof of concepts. Both with pure Ruby and with backing maths in C extensions for even better performance. EDIT: a 3d example > https://canicvs.itch.io/wireframe-sample https://canicvs.itch.io/wireframe-sample
  - ptato 5y ago
    thank you
robotmay 5y ago
Lots of typical anti-ruby grumbling in this so I'll just say; this looks awesome and I'm excited to give it a try. I still love programming in Ruby, and there's no reason at all why a game written in Ruby couldn't be performant. Great to see a good use of mRuby too. I've had ideas for games in the past but I know that having to learn an entirely new language, framework, and concept of development will mean that I never finish it. Having an option in my favourite language removes one of those barriers to entry.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  Yeah, I mean, modern machines with multi cores that are standard now can simultaneously run multiple databases, IDEs, OS itself, bunch of containers, browser with zillion tabs, but can't run 2d ruby game because ruby is slow ? Riigggght.... I bet it could run performant in LOLCAT language nowdays.
lillesvin 5y ago
Always love me some Ruby but what really catches my eye here are the alternatives to paying hard cash for the engine. Great initiative!
mysterydip 5y ago
This looks really good. Are there any plans for 3D if things stay successful?
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
If I understand correctly (from a quick browse of the docs) this is Ruby _without_ anything remotely like Rails. That makes it interesting. I did a Rails job once. I kept thinking that I liked the language as a kind of modern OO language in the spirit of Python (and also Lua a bit) but I really disliked the ecosystem around Rails. For instance, the project I worked on had to maintain two separate versions of Ruby because different gems worked with different Ruby versions (it's been a while so I don't remember details). Another thing that bothered me is that everytime I searched online for help to do something slightly more advanced in Ruby my search results were inundated with "hello world" style posts from aspiring Rails devs eager to advertise their passionf or Rails. I could never find the information I wanted, so I had to do everything the hard way. Overall I had a horrible experience with Rails though I'm sure it's far from that bad for most. Anyway it's refreshing to see a cool use of Ruby without the Rails.
- unixhero 5y ago
  A friend of mine sat me down and showed me how to work with rails. We ended up programming the entire weekend and worked our way through a few cases of beer in the same time. Working in rails was incredible and the productivity was unlike anything I have ever seen.
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    I still can't believe how productive Rails is either. One can literally recreate the most popular CRUD apps in a weekend I've been learning React and played around with a Rails API backend and separate React front-end and I forget just how much work Rails takes out
    - cashewchoo 5y ago
      I've had good results with the react-rails gem, basically letting me plop bits of react into a rails view. It's not like, the best the in the world from a pure design standpoint? But it does a really, really good job of not having react step on the toes of all the super nice things that Rails will do for you.
rookderby 5y ago
I'm a Dragon Rider, if you will. I have bought the pro license and have used the toolkit to make some demos/experiments. I'm excited by how quickly I can produce a game that works on multiple targets. It's been great as a recreational coder. I have aspirations of figuring out the right game loop and eventually selling it. It's a lot of fun and fits my desired approach. Thanks to everyone working on it!
mattbee 5y ago
20 years ago, I shipped a Ruby/SDL powered quiz game to a network of Windows NT4-powered games cabinets in pubs. They had 64MB RAM and the jerky animation due to garbage collection pauses ATE ME ALIVE for about 6 months. What's changed in Ruby since then to make smooth animation possible?
- leetrout 5y ago
  Further down on the page: > Optimized for size and speed. This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it). > DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon. He is one of the core maintainers of libSDL
  - endemic 5y ago
    Name dropping Ryan Gordon sold me on taking this for a spin.
- wukerplank 5y ago
  Seems like this game engine is built on top of RubyMotion which compiles to byte code - no (slow) Ruby VM. This probably also allows them to bundle the game for many platforms. For hobbyists Gosu (https://www.libgosu.org/ruby.html https://www.libgosu.org/ruby.html) should be good enough, but is not very convenient to bundle and distribute.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  For a start, most computers have more than 64 MB of memory these days. The GC has changed a lot in the past 20 years too. Here's a great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcQ-hIfiljA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcQ-hIfiljA
transfire 5y ago
Very impressive!!! One question. Is DragonRuby, in essence, a mRuby compiler? Or is it an implementation of an mRuby interpretor that calls on a low-level API for fast game functionality?
- amirrajan 5y ago
  The FAQ covers this in detail under the "What is DragonRuby?": http://docs.dragonruby.org/#--frequently-asked-questions,-comments,-and-concerns http://docs.dragonruby.org/#--frequently-asked-questions,-co...
bondant 5y ago
Does it provide some local or online multiplayer functionalities?
amirrajan 5y ago
Decided to do a flash sale given all the visibility the engine has gotten recently. You can get the Standard License free for the next 24 hours: https://itch.io/s/48411/dragonruby-game-toolkit-hacker-news-celebration https://itch.io/s/48411/dragonruby-game-toolkit-hacker-news-...
eggy 5y ago
I was in search of a bare bones engine like Love that could deploy to many platforms. I didn't need a full-blown game dev environment, and I was leaning towards a coding heavy interface - no blueprints, drag-and-drop gui, etc. I found Defold, and I have been using it for about three months. I wonder how DragonRuby compares other than the Lua or Ruby choice as the scripting language. Defold does have more of an IDE/GUI to it, but you can stick to just coding. I program in many languages, so learning Ruby is not a big deal. I actually tried Ruby back in 2001. I liked the syntax. I'll have to try DragonRuby out, but I am afraid I'll wind up buying the Pro version to develop on Android. I don't like the yearly subscription model. I prefer buying a permanent license, and upgrade as I need it. The fact that DragonRuby costs money and is a subscription may just keep me on Defold. I will not know until I try it. I may surprise myself by falling in love with Ruby!
otachack 5y ago
I jumped into DragonRuby myself and considering my current work involves Rails it was extremely easy to dive into DR and code in two game jams solo. Love it at minimum as a hobbyist tool and I see the potential for shipping to all platforms with the Pro license. Thank you!

234 points by amirrajan 5y ago

Lets say I am not a Ruby dev, what would compel me to learn this over Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this? I remember Ruby Motion was a thing, then it wasn't... then it was again? I started learning web dev with RoR and quickly moved to Python as the ecosystem was so much bigger. I could transfer my Python knowledge into so many different domains. I remember at the time, I really wanted a "Ruby Motion" for Python... still do actually. I have come full circle and now think JS is eating the world and I am playing in that garden... we'll see where that ends up I suppose. In any case, GOOD LUCK... I hope for the best!

tomlin 5y ago
Agree. I don't know if the Ruby interpreter is what I'd look to for performance in a game.
- pansa2 5y ago
  It doesn’t use the standard Ruby interpreter (MRI), but a custom implementation that includes a compiler. I don’t know if it’s AOT compilation or JIT.
- amirrajan 5y ago
  Unity’s implementation of C# is subpar to say the least. Watch the YouTube video, it demonstrates DragonRuby’s speed vs Unity. We can render twice as many sprites and are 1/8th the size. We also expose C Extensions to the end user if they what blinding fast performance for critical paths.
  - wokwokwok 5y ago
    Hm... I'm more concerned about running user-land scripts and shaders than sprites. If I wanted raw pixel-blits per second I could just use SDL. Do you have any concrete numbers on compute (ie. scripts)? Do you support shaders? eg. How would you do this in DragonRuby? --> https://github.com/keijiro/StableFluids https://github.com/keijiro/StableFluids Ie. a compute buffer that renders a fluid simulation in real time?
    - amirrajan 5y ago
      There’s quite a few samples of people doing crazy things with Cuda. Not sure if you can access this demonstration: https://discord.com/channels/608064116111966245/674410581326823446/828899164812607499 https://discord.com/channels/608064116111966245/674410581326... These are other demonstrations of DRGTK’s performance capabilities: - https://twitter.com/Groteskly/status/1373668110482427906 https://twitter.com/Groteskly/status/1373668110482427906 - https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1361640855589842951 https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1361640855589842951 - https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1339575630187425792 https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1339575630187425792
  - Impossible 5y ago
    Huh, number of sprites per frame has little to do with the speed of C# in Unity. If anything it shows that Unity's default sprite renderer is inefficient.
  - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
    You have any data to back up that claim? Unity C# is very fast; especially, if compiled to IL2CPP. Your video doesn’t prove anything. Make a lot of moving transform hierarchies and see how they compare. Unity sucks at this, but I bet it will still outperform In your tests.
  - dosshell 5y ago
    Unity does also support C extensions... But due to cross platform mess it is not so popular (i guess). > double the amount of sprites It sounds a bit low? My experience is that with instancing and 2d array textures (2d games usally uses spritesheets) can be much much faster then 2x. I would guess 20x-200x faster than unity.
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    Unity rendering sprites has nothing to do with C#. A big portion of their engine and rendering stack are implemented in C/C++.
- jchw 5y ago
  The irony is that Ruby was actually designed for this kind of thing. And in fact, RPG Maker XP’s Ruby Game Scripting System, a commercial usage of Ruby as an embedded scripting language for game dev, was released at least a few months prior to the first Ruby on Rails release if memory serves correct.
  - kamranjon 5y ago
    Do you have a source for the claim that ruby was designed for game development? I'm not saying it's wrong, I just have never heard that before.
    - jchw 5y ago
      Not necessarily game dev, but rather as an embeddable scripting language. There’s also mruby which is even more portable and designed to be more embeddable. My understanding is that in Japan, Ruby is often used as an embedded scripting language the way people might use Lua. (I don’t have an exact source for this, it’s something that seems to come up periodically when talking about Ruby. Matz mentions it briefly when introducing mruby. I also don’t necessarily think it was conceived for this reason, but rather that over time, it fell into the niche and became influenced by it. But I’m not sure about that, either.)
      - castwide 5y ago
        I can vouch for Ruby's practicality as an embedded scripting language. The first time I used it was in a game engine (which, IIRC, also predated Rails) with a C++ core. Writing the high-level game logic in Ruby was pleasant, and hooking into C++ functions that did the heavy lifting kept it performant.
- mega-tux 5y ago
  This is mRuby, not Ruby. Different things. Think in mRuby as Lua and MRI Ruby as Python
amirrajan 5y ago
> Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this? So far so good. We’ve been in business for nearly a decade now (with the game engine going onto year 3). > Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? Well our ability to deploy to console eliminates most engines as competitors/options. Unreal is a fantastic engine for 3D games. Unity is... well... not that great to be honest. Other differentiators are on the site.
- tomlin 5y ago
  Wait, you're suggesting Ruby is better than Unity? This has to be a joke.
  - amirrajan 5y ago
    Nope. Not a joke. We’re faster too: https://youtu.be/UuY7CWdvyWM https://youtu.be/UuY7CWdvyWM
    - TylerE 5y ago
      Press F to doubt. On some tiny synthetic benchmark maybe. Come back when your engine can handle something even 1% as complex, as say, Dyson Sphere Program.
      - phaedryx 5y ago
        I suspect that DragonRuby is faster as a 2D game engine and doesn't make sense for a complex 3D game.
        TylerE 5y ago
        I don't believe that either. Unity works just fine for Cuphead, which is a pretty graphically intense game. Plenty of other graphical complicated 2d games too.
        5y ago
kfischer_okarin 5y ago
Putting the purely technical aspects aside for a moment. From my experience so far one big point in favor of DragonRuby is that its philosophy focuses on developer productivity, for example - an iterative immediate feedback style of development using hot reloading - (in the latest version) direct source code editing and updating via a HTTP Developer interface (think updating your smartphone game at runtime without re-deploying) - Producing builds for all Desktop platforms in usually less than a minute (mobile and consoles probably take longer considering the surrounding tasks of signing apps, registering in stores etc) - offering a centralized interface for persistent game state which is automatically dumped for error analysis in case of failure and able to be recorded/replayed/rewinded out of the box during dev - Abstracting away File Systems/Storage mechanisms out of the box so you don't have to care about where you save on a Switch, PC or iPhone and probably lots of other stuff I'm not quite aware of atm. Another big plus point is the lively and encouraging Discord community
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  Godot, unity, and unreal do all that too. I’m not seeing the advantage other than it’s ruby. Seems like a niche product.
  - kfischer_okarin 5y ago
    I can only speak for Unity until versions till maybe 2019 - and I never developed a full commercial title with it - just a few game jam games - so maybe I'm not the best authority on that... But I think it's quite far away in many of those features Sure you can try out your game immediately in the editor, by pressing the play button - but can you edit Source code and it will be immediately applied without restarting and without losing the current game state? You can edit and adjust scene objects in the inspector during play mode but those changes are usually thrown away after quitting play mode. I never did serious mobile dev with unity but I same as above... updating and editing your game source persistently at runtime during playing doesn't seem possible, since it's completely compiling everything into an Android package right? Building for all desktop platforms under a minute - this is 100% not true..... Almost all of the last hours of game jams where I used unity where spent in worry waiting for a long build process not being sure everything works all right afterwards - and that was always for just _one_ platform at a time...... DragonRuby builds your games into fully functional Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5 and FWIW Raspberry Pi builds in under a minute in total for all those platforms. I don't know of any other Engine (except maybe LÖVE2D which is interpreted in its basic nature and doesn't need building) which can do anything close to that speed Persistent flexibly modifiable game state? - maybe there's something in the asset store - but out of the box? Cross-platform File storage is the only thing where I can see that that is probably a well solved problem in Unity.... I cannot speak for the other game engines. But in general it would be nice if you back up your claims.....
neolog 5y ago
EVE Online is written in Python
- hu3 5y ago
  This post tells me the heavy lifting is done in C++ including 3D rendering, network communication and input handling: https://forums.eveonline.com/t/how-is-the-eve-online-client-written/60555/5 https://forums.eveonline.com/t/how-is-the-eve-online-client-...
  - neolog 5y ago
    The quote is > As far as we know, the EVE client is written in C++ and Python. C++ handles all the low-level stuff like 3D rendering, network communication, input handling and such. (Stackless) Python is used for everything else, which includes the user interface and even the management of graphic resources (you can see this in the debug window by pressing ctrl+alt+shift+m). This technology mix is quite unique, so I’d suggest CCP implemented the EVE GUI in-house, not using a (open source) widget library. I’ve been playing EVE for many years now, and the GUI has evolved a lot since the days I first tried EVE (around 2005). This also strongly suggests that the code was written by CCP.
    - hu3 5y ago
      Yep, C++ where performance matters.
      - neolog 5y ago
        Surprising they'd go C++ for networking. Python's had top-notch async for nearly 20 years.
        kevingadd 5y ago
        EVE has a history of incredibly bad performance issues, in part due to their extensive use of python for networking, simulation, etc. They seem to struggle with it on an ongoing basis, so it makes sense that in some cases they would move logic from python to C++. Their networking stack was at least at one point heavily Python. Some engagements in EVE will literally involve thousands of players in the same system all interacting with each other in big groups, so it becomes extremely important to be able to push a truckload of packets and events and process them with low latencies.
gfxgirl 5y ago
I had this discussion with a AAA game studio recently. They have a hit game will millions of players and it's been a hit for many years. It uses a custom engine. They've been releasing new games. Those new games are in both Unity and Unreal. You can see all the reasons 1. Their custom engine doesn't have all the features of either of those other engines. Their artists in particular are pushing to switch to get those features. 2. Their custom engine doesn't have have amount of tooling those other engines have (likely no blueprints, no shader graph, no state machine editor, no animation editor, etc..., etc..., etc...) 3. Their custom engine doesn't have tens of thousands of potential hires that already have experience with them. 4. Their custom engine doesn't have 1/1000th the amount of docs, tutorials, youtube videos, etc on how to use it so the team that maintains that engine has to provide that knowledge to every new hire The result of the above is it limits their growth. If they want to start a new team for a new game, if they stuck with their custom engine they'd basically have to take a significant number of people off the existing game and move them to the new game otherwise no one on the new game would have any easy way to know how to use it.
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  The needs of AAA game studios and solo/small-team indie devs are very, very different.
- vidarh 5y ago
  The target for this is not AAA studios, but indie developers. For my part, I don't have enough spare time to learn one of the big engines. They're too complex, and this is a hobby. DragonRuby on the other hand is simple enough that you can start doing stuff immediately if you know even basic Ruby. That is the appeal to me. Whether or not it would work for a large team is totally irrelevant for that kind of use, because I have no interest in starting a studio. It seems a lot of the people criticizing DragonRuby in this thread forgets that game dev spans from hobby development by individuals who might toy with it a few hours a week to multi year projects by major companies, and they have different needs and interests. E.g. I value having fun over ever completing a publishable game. DragonRuby is fun. That I could release something with it is a bonus, but to me even that is secondary.
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
> Lets say I am not a Ruby dev, what would compel me to learn this over Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? A good reason would be that RoR is still a competitive advantage for indie web devs and small startup teams working on non performance-constrained domains. It's amazing how many successes In see in the IH world using Ruby despite far larger numbers of people building everything in JS or maybe Python. Dev experience matters and there are some durable advantages the Ruby ecosystem has maintained despite others growing more quickly in popularity. Building DSLs is one.
ksec 5y ago
> and now think JS is eating the world It will via asm.js, except no one will be coding in JS anymore since everything will compile to asm, and you will have asm compiler in your kernel.
nrjames 5y ago
Unity is a giant download and very complicated. Something like DragonRuby, Renpy, Python Arcade, or LOVE2D are far smaller and suitable for many small games. Even Godot is significantly smaller and offers many of the features of Unity.

phaedryx 5y ago

I don't see this mentioned on the website, but, if I remember correctly, they also have materials for teaching kids how to code. I was thinking about running something at my son's school last year before Covid shut everything down. The "hotloading" is really nice and the community on Discord is excellent.

lloeki 5y ago
Instead of DR, I think I'll use Ruby2D as a very first step: it's incredibly limited, having only basic primitives, but it's also much more approachable, in a BASIC/LOGO-like way. Coincidentally because of that use case I just remembered yesterday that I had a PR open on Ruby2D...
jonnydubowsky 5y ago
I think this is what you mean? https://wndx.school/p/dragon-ruby-game-toolkit-tutorial https://wndx.school/p/dragon-ruby-game-toolkit-tutorial Looks like a great resource.

mwcampbell 5y ago

At the risk of hijacking the thread, are you still doing any work on RubyMotion? I always thought RubyMotion was interesting because of how it provided seamless access to the host platform APIs and was even built atop the host platforms' object models. I might have even used it for a product about 5 years ago, if it had supported Windows as a target platform (though I'm not sure how that would have worked).

phaedryx 5y ago
As I understand it, work on DragonRuby is foundational for converting RubyMotion into a better, cross-platform mobile toolkit. http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/04/19/plans-for-rubymotion.html http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/04/19/plans-for-rubymoti...

Pfhreak 5y ago

> This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it). > DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon. This feels like a liability for the long term. The community is now depending on Ryan to maintain this custom Ruby implementation, if I'm reading correctly.

adamnemecek 5y ago
I’m guessing it’s native extensions rather than a custom ruby implementation.
- pansa2 5y ago
  It seems to be a custom implementation based on mruby and LLVM. See “What is DragonRuby?” at http://docs.dragonruby.org/ http://docs.dragonruby.org/.
  - adamnemecek 5y ago
    Huh, ok. When they mean Scadia do they mean Stadia.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
amirrajan 5y ago
Details about the runtime are here if you’re interested: http://docs.dragonruby.org/#----what-is-dragonruby http://docs.dragonruby.org/#----what-is-dragonruby?
offtop5 5y ago
In general I don't think I'd be comfortable using any type of engine or framework which is solely developed by one person. Let's say he goes crazy tomorrow and decides to camp on the beaches of Jamaica. No matter what you do, particularly with a closed source engine, you're stuck. With unity if one programmer decides to quit, we still have a game engine that gets updated. With Godot if both of the paid maintainers quit and the project collapses, you can just fork it and keep going.

burlesona 5y ago

Very cool! Would love to see this get traction :)

xixixao 5y ago

The devx looks amazing. Would be so cool to have this for different languages.

VectorLock 5y ago
Would be really cool if it wasn't Ruby.
- alekq 5y ago
  What is wrong Ruby? Which language would be "cool" choice?
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    In my opinion Python provides a better syntax in almost all areas. Ruby has been a language in decline for quite some time.
    - adenozine 5y ago
      Pygame recently hit 2.0, incorporating libsdl-2.0.0 after a long wait. Have you tried that? I think you're a bit off in describing Ruby as a language in decline. Rails startups are being built every single day, Hotwire is threatening yet another Rails renaissance as Ruby moves towards reactive web app technology, mruby is pushing forward into smaller areas, and TruffleRuby is moving forward into exceptionally performant Ruby code. This is all on top of 3.0, which brings all manner of improvements, most notably type annotations. I love Python as much as anybody, but I think they are equally respectable and equally popular in their own niches. Syntax is only a preference, there is much more to Ruby as a language than just the syntactic departures from Python code. It's a different model and encourages a different style of problem solving.
    - amirrajan 5y ago
      > Python provides a better syntax in almost all areas Examples?

bredren 5y ago

Looks interesting and the developer demo was succinct. Feedback is to include some links or video to some demo or even rough playable games. Would be neat to have something to quickly go wow over.

stolen_biscuit 5y ago

Why would I choose this over a FOSS 2D game engine like Godot that offers almost everything this engine offers without the price tag? Not trying to shit on the project, I just don't see a compelling argument put forth on the website as to why I should pay $50 or $98 a year for an engine that I can only see has been used to port one open source game to Switch and a bunch of tech demos. What's the hook? Why should this be my game engine of choice?

WillPostForFood 5y ago
What's the hook? The hook is you like to program in Ruby, so here is a game engine where you can use Ruby.
- stolen_biscuit 5y ago
  Fair enough, but for that price I'd expect more than a language I like. It's got some interesting features, but like I said many other game engines have similar features with no cost, what's the stand-out reason to make me spend $50 once on it or $98 a year. Is this just being marketed to language enthusiasts?
  - vidarh 5y ago
    To me, if it saves me even one hour of battling a language I don't like, it has paid for itself.
- grawprog 5y ago
  What makes ruby worth using for a game that makes this worth paying for over any other free, oss or commercial game engine with more flexibility in language and capability? No offense to ruby programmers but, Ruby's not necessarily the ideal language for game programming even when it comes to scripting languages. And...if you know ruby well enough to make a game, you could learn one of the many other languages better suited to game dev fairly easily. What makes this worth paying for?
  - 5y ago

AlchemistCamp 5y ago

This looks like a fantastic dev experience and it's great to see this team building something like this. Indie game dev is near and dear to my heart. Unfortunately, HN tends to be full of haters. On the behalf of the rest of us, thanks for sharing DragonRuby!

mathgladiator 5y ago
I wanted to second this, so thank you for being positive. Even though I'm not a rubyist, I do appreciate having options. A hard yet important lesson in life is to learn to do things in spite of haters hating. For example, I'm writing a programming language, and I can almost guarantee that people will hate it... and that's ok.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I feel like if you can't generate haters, you're too bland. What you want is for the correct people to hate it, because it's not there to serve them, and makes no concessions to 'em about it.
dang 5y ago
> HN tends to be full of haters I'll stick up for the community: I don't think that's true. This submission has been heavily upvoted, after all. You may be running into the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20object%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 5y ago
  HN can definitively be brutally dismissive of things that doesn't match current perceived wisdom of what is the right way of doing things, much beyond the initial few comments. But I don't think there's a way around that while maintaining open discussion. At least here the disagreements are mostly civil. Part of what makes announcements like this tricky on HN, and what I think triggered the comment you replied to, is that while part of HN values "cool hacks" and simplicity greatly, part of HN evaluates everything based on whether it's useful at scale, as a product, right now, and can grow big (there's certainly a big overlap, and I'm oversimplifying), and an announcement relating to a commercial project that aims for the former crowd unsurprisingly strokes some of the latter crowd entirely the wrong way as a weird niche project seemingly massively lacking in the features they think are essential. I think that with DragonRuby that is particularly unavoidable. What makes some of us find it awesome is an inherently alien way of thinking to a lot of people in a way that look backwards to many.

bobuk 5y ago

Checked the video and wow! Haven't seen FTE editor for years, is it still alive?

amirrajan 5y ago
Ryan has a custom compilation of it actually. That editor will go to the grave with him :-P

ptato 5y ago

Will it ever support making 3D games?

jamdudek 5y ago
I don't think it will be supported at the engine level but the community tinkers with 3d proof of concepts. Both with pure Ruby and with backing maths in C extensions for even better performance. EDIT: a 3d example > https://canicvs.itch.io/wireframe-sample https://canicvs.itch.io/wireframe-sample
- ptato 5y ago
  thank you

robotmay 5y ago

Lots of typical anti-ruby grumbling in this so I'll just say; this looks awesome and I'm excited to give it a try. I still love programming in Ruby, and there's no reason at all why a game written in Ruby couldn't be performant. Great to see a good use of mRuby too. I've had ideas for games in the past but I know that having to learn an entirely new language, framework, and concept of development will mean that I never finish it. Having an option in my favourite language removes one of those barriers to entry.

majkinetor 5y ago
Yeah, I mean, modern machines with multi cores that are standard now can simultaneously run multiple databases, IDEs, OS itself, bunch of containers, browser with zillion tabs, but can't run 2d ruby game because ruby is slow ? Riigggght.... I bet it could run performant in LOLCAT language nowdays.

lillesvin 5y ago

Always love me some Ruby but what really catches my eye here are the alternatives to paying hard cash for the engine. Great initiative!

mysterydip 5y ago

This looks really good. Are there any plans for 3D if things stay successful?

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

If I understand correctly (from a quick browse of the docs) this is Ruby _without_ anything remotely like Rails. That makes it interesting. I did a Rails job once. I kept thinking that I liked the language as a kind of modern OO language in the spirit of Python (and also Lua a bit) but I really disliked the ecosystem around Rails. For instance, the project I worked on had to maintain two separate versions of Ruby because different gems worked with different Ruby versions (it's been a while so I don't remember details). Another thing that bothered me is that everytime I searched online for help to do something slightly more advanced in Ruby my search results were inundated with "hello world" style posts from aspiring Rails devs eager to advertise their passionf or Rails. I could never find the information I wanted, so I had to do everything the hard way. Overall I had a horrible experience with Rails though I'm sure it's far from that bad for most. Anyway it's refreshing to see a cool use of Ruby without the Rails.

unixhero 5y ago
A friend of mine sat me down and showed me how to work with rails. We ended up programming the entire weekend and worked our way through a few cases of beer in the same time. Working in rails was incredible and the productivity was unlike anything I have ever seen.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  I still can't believe how productive Rails is either. One can literally recreate the most popular CRUD apps in a weekend I've been learning React and played around with a Rails API backend and separate React front-end and I forget just how much work Rails takes out
  - cashewchoo 5y ago
    I've had good results with the react-rails gem, basically letting me plop bits of react into a rails view. It's not like, the best the in the world from a pure design standpoint? But it does a really, really good job of not having react step on the toes of all the super nice things that Rails will do for you.

rookderby 5y ago

I'm a Dragon Rider, if you will. I have bought the pro license and have used the toolkit to make some demos/experiments. I'm excited by how quickly I can produce a game that works on multiple targets. It's been great as a recreational coder. I have aspirations of figuring out the right game loop and eventually selling it. It's a lot of fun and fits my desired approach. Thanks to everyone working on it!

mattbee 5y ago

20 years ago, I shipped a Ruby/SDL powered quiz game to a network of Windows NT4-powered games cabinets in pubs. They had 64MB RAM and the jerky animation due to garbage collection pauses ATE ME ALIVE for about 6 months. What's changed in Ruby since then to make smooth animation possible?

leetrout 5y ago
Further down on the page: > Optimized for size and speed. This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it). > DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon. He is one of the core maintainers of libSDL
- endemic 5y ago
  Name dropping Ryan Gordon sold me on taking this for a spin.
wukerplank 5y ago
Seems like this game engine is built on top of RubyMotion which compiles to byte code - no (slow) Ruby VM. This probably also allows them to bundle the game for many platforms. For hobbyists Gosu (https://www.libgosu.org/ruby.html https://www.libgosu.org/ruby.html) should be good enough, but is not very convenient to bundle and distribute.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
For a start, most computers have more than 64 MB of memory these days. The GC has changed a lot in the past 20 years too. Here's a great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcQ-hIfiljA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcQ-hIfiljA

transfire 5y ago

Very impressive!!! One question. Is DragonRuby, in essence, a mRuby compiler? Or is it an implementation of an mRuby interpretor that calls on a low-level API for fast game functionality?

amirrajan 5y ago
The FAQ covers this in detail under the "What is DragonRuby?": http://docs.dragonruby.org/#--frequently-asked-questions,-comments,-and-concerns http://docs.dragonruby.org/#--frequently-asked-questions,-co...

bondant 5y ago

Does it provide some local or online multiplayer functionalities?

amirrajan 5y ago

Decided to do a flash sale given all the visibility the engine has gotten recently. You can get the Standard License free for the next 24 hours: https://itch.io/s/48411/dragonruby-game-toolkit-hacker-news-celebration https://itch.io/s/48411/dragonruby-game-toolkit-hacker-news-...

eggy 5y ago

I was in search of a bare bones engine like Love that could deploy to many platforms. I didn't need a full-blown game dev environment, and I was leaning towards a coding heavy interface - no blueprints, drag-and-drop gui, etc. I found Defold, and I have been using it for about three months. I wonder how DragonRuby compares other than the Lua or Ruby choice as the scripting language. Defold does have more of an IDE/GUI to it, but you can stick to just coding. I program in many languages, so learning Ruby is not a big deal. I actually tried Ruby back in 2001. I liked the syntax. I'll have to try DragonRuby out, but I am afraid I'll wind up buying the Pro version to develop on Android. I don't like the yearly subscription model. I prefer buying a permanent license, and upgrade as I need it. The fact that DragonRuby costs money and is a subscription may just keep me on Defold. I will not know until I try it. I may surprise myself by falling in love with Ruby!

otachack 5y ago

I jumped into DragonRuby myself and considering my current work involves Rails it was extremely easy to dive into DR and code in two game jams solo. Love it at minimum as a hobbyist tool and I see the potential for shipping to all platforms with the Pro license. Thank you!