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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 t
by mattbee 6y 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 6y agoFurther 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 6y agoName dropping Ryan Gordon sold me on taking this for a spin.
- wukerplank 6y agoSeems 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 6y agoFor 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