Jason Mc Donald wrote: > > Thanks for the input Dave, it has given me an idea or two. I do relize that > Tk and perl are not exactly designed for writeing the next block buster FPS, > I was thinking more along the lines of Scorched Earth or Decker by Shawn > Overcash. I don't think I could code things like raycasters in any language > never mind perl, I'm just not that good yet. My goal really was to write a > small fun game that was protable and could be played with other people, > either turnbased or real time. and hay if it turns out to be sucsesfull all > the beter.
I've done a little bit of work on some Tk modules themselves. (take a look at the latest Tk::Text and Tk::TextUndo) Speed is definitely not Tk's strong point. ease-of-use, however, IS. It was only because Tk was written in perl that I (a lowly hardware engineer) was able ot modify Text.pm and TextUndo.pm to support a bunch of higher level functionality. TextUndo can now support "Undo/Redo" and a bare-bones rectangle copy/cut/paste function because it was written in perl and I could understand it. The widget demo for Tk includes a text editor I created using TextUndo that does paren highlighting. type "widget" and look for the "gedi" demo. if you want to learn game programming, I'd say learn it in perl. Once you grok its deeper meaning, mayhap you'll want to move onto C for some of the speed intensive parts. (Tk is a mix of C and Perl depending on whether speed or readability is more important) (not to mention, in another year or so, Dan will have perl 6 ready, and you'll be able to compile down to C if you really need it. Right, Dan?? ;) ) Perl 5 should be able ot handle board games like SimCity style games. (never heard of Scorched Earth, but I was guessing it was a strategy game like Civilization, or Axis and Allies, don't know if I'm right.) When I finished my TextUndo work, I was contemplating making a BoardGame.pm kind of module that would handle the nitty-gritty of drawing the board and pieces, handling multiple players, etc. but I got distracted by other endeavors. Maybe one even exists, I don't know. Learning seemed to be your main emphasis though, and I think Perl/Tk would suffice at least for learning how to write strategy games. if you do, get on the Tk mailing list. when I was doing Tk work and learning Tk, the Tk list was a friggin lifesaver. there are some things deep in Tk that will drive you nutty . Greg
