Steve,
My advice is: have a lot of fun with this. Simple games are often written directly to window (or screen) without a traditional GUI framework, because the GUI framework adds size, complexity, and indirection to your control of the screen. Many games will just implement their own minimalist (or fake) GUI as needed for game menus. But you can do a full GUI in a game, if you want. To answer some of your questions: lots of languages are well setup for games, you may want to try a few and decide which you prefer. On a browser, if that is a requirement, will narrow your field down quite a bit. OpenGL is great but you only need it if you intend to do 3D, which is a bigger undertaking than 2D. I have gone to great lengths to make Unicon suitable for game programming, but as for how well it competes that is for you to say. In addition to Graphics Programming in Icon, and the 3D facilities in the Unicon Technical Report and the Unicon Book, folks interested in game programming in Unicon may want to look at http://www2.cs.uidaho.edu/~jeffery/courses/328/ub-game.pdf which is unfinished but pretty extensive. Lastly, regarding eval(), we do not have a direct native eval() function and one is not in the immediate offing. Multiple "eval" clones have been built for Icon and/or Unicon in the past, the most detailed perhaps was Bill Mitchell's. Last night I debugged an issue raised by the latest eval() experiment (Brian's, I think), the code for which is being reviewed for sanity. His approach is to write the code to be evaluated to a .icn file, compile it, load it in with load(), and execute it. It will probably be a bit faster and more interactive that way than previous eval() efforts. Cheers, Clint ________________________________ From: Steve Graham <jsgraha...@yahoo.com> Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2016 8:12:10 PM To: Unicon Group Subject: [Unicon-group] Creating a maze game I would like to create a game for some grandsons: Something that would include typical maze elements (walls, barriers, traps, jumping platforms, etc) and would allow them to enter in "code" to create or modify some of the elements. It would be hosted on a Windows 7+ platform (platform-agnostic would be better for me) and would be coded in a lisp-family language (CL, Scheme, Racket, Arc, Logo, etc), Unicon and/or JavaScript. I have been learning CL and Scheme, know a bit of Arc and Logo and a bit more of Unicon and JavaScript. While I have been a medical information systems programmer for most of my career, it has been focused on CRUD (create/retrieve/update/delete) applications and interfacing (HL7 and proprietary). I have virtually no experience with GUI and audio applications. Here are some questions that have occurred to me: 1. Which languages would be best? 2. Which toolkits would help? OpenGL? 3. Can this be done on a browser? 4. How does one control scrolling in different directions? Do you create the screen in memory and then instruct the system to scroll in the direction of the newly created portion? 5. Could you interface with one of the available free game engines? Obviously this would not have to be world-class. Just something a 10 and 12 year old might like and perhaps from which they could learn how to do some elementary coding. Regarding Unicon, I would like the ability to put in code during the play of the game -- like eval() in other languages -- and wonder if that is even possible in Unicon. I would appreciate your input. Thanks, Steve
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