Am 23.11.2011 17:16, schrieb deadalnix:
Hi,
I want to suggest a project to the community. Doom3 source code has just
been released, and I think we may want to do a port in D. Here are the
reasons :
1/ I think D is suitable and pertinent for video games.
2/ This would make a solid code base to promote D.
3/ Id software is very popular, and porting one of their engine is free
advertisement for D.
4/ The build system for doom engine is scons, and it support D too.
5/ The code base is an high quality one. (for exemple, the _t suffix is
used to differenciate what we call struct and classes in D - and that
has no difference in C++ except in the usage you make of it).
6/ It's an interesting project.
7/ Many people in the D community are interested in video game projects.
8/ Doom's story take place on mars, phobos and deimos (well and on
earth, but who care ?).
In addition, this is a good occasion to produce some code for deimos and
can enlight us on D future evolutions backed with solid fact. On my
knowledge, such a big project (big in size, but also in technicity)
don't exist in D yet.
Anyway, don't expect this to be easy. We are talking here about 500 000
lines of C++ (not including headers). And the code is performance critical.
We may have 2 approachs : a complete port or a binding (so translation
of doom's headers in D + some glue code between D and C++ - which isn't
as easy as it seems).
This is definitively not a one man job, but I'm sure we have some
skilled dev here and we all want to promote D. If some of you do think
that it's a good idea and want to spend some time on it (this is
definitively a critical point).
I'm definitively in. And you ?
I don't think porting any game to D is a good idea right now. I've did
some major game developement on D. Half my code uses manual memory
management and still the D garbage collector is a major performance
issue. Unless you want to do all of the memory management yourself,
which pretty much results in not using phobos and most of the cool
features in D I wouldn't recommend porting a bigger game to D.
--
Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut
