But now you get into the realm of implementations. It might make sense for you to port your code over to irrlicht (there's no perl bindings yet right?) because you're working on a 3d game that would benefit from an API meant for 3d. Where as, I think of sdlperl in terms of 2d. I honestly think sdlperl is "the right tool for the right job" for things like word games (word whomp on pogo.com type things) and simple puzzle games (another pogo reference, pop it). I also see SDLperl as an excellent GUI toolkit if someone writes a few classes to handle that. And even so, it'd be simple to write one.
The only real draw back that keeps me from using sdlperl right now, is the friendliness to the end user. As it stands now, if I want to distrube an sdlperl app into the 'main stream', I have to compile with indigo's compiler (3MB exe off the bat) then I have to package a meg's worth of dll's that my program is not even using. To top it off, there is no stable windows release, I don't know know a word of XS code. I never even heard of it until joining this mailing list :)
Despite sdlperl's shortcomings, I still think it could be a great, and very effective library, but first all of the kinks need to be ironed out. Like david said, he'd rather see apps being made instead of API changes. I'm all for that and would love to, but first I'd need something that I can work with comfortabley.
Moin,
some of you may remember my attempts to build a game (and beneth it a game logic library) with SDL called SDL::App::FPS.
Now, there were always quite low level problems with SDL (like versioning, David's disapperance, the constant exporting, and last but not least the new version crashes somewhere in the NVidia driver on my system). While I worked slowly around these time consuming distraction, after a while it occured to me that the problem is much deeper: SDL gives you a very very low-level support, anything beyond that has to be build by yourself. And that is a lot of work. Read: Much more time spend building low-level support blocks instead of working on the design of my game. So:
Enter Irrlicht: http://irrlicht.sf.net
While I found some 3D engines in the past, most of them were obscure, windows only, not good documented or all of them :) Irrlicht is a bit different, works on Linux, Windows, has an active community, etc etc. The best of it is the feature set, you can load .bsp files, XML, .x files, textures etc very easily, even from compressed zip files etc. There are Python bindings (I know nobody here needs them :) and some third-party projects going. The only missing thing were Perl bindings.
So I started porting my game library over to it. The foundations are now:
Games::Irrlicht - irrlicht engine interface Games::3D - game object system
(I will likely use Audiere for audio, but that will probably require Perl bindings, too. Sound::Audiere?)
The rest (SDL::App::FPS, Games::3D::Model etc) will be phasd out since I no longer need them.
You can find first versions of my stuff at http://search.cpan.org and http://bloodgate.com/perl/packages/games/
I would like to get testreports and feedback (in private email because it probably does not belong to this list). Especially Windows tests would be very good.
The conversion from SDL to Irrlicht is not yet complete, but I am working on
that. However, with a little bit of work I will save myself re-inventing
the wheel regarding support for a lot of file-formats and basics like
rendering. I already got it to load a BSP level from Perl - thats about
three lines of code. Oh joy!
I hope this was interesting. In the future I will probably not find any more
time for working with SDL-perl. Sorry about that.
Best wishes,
Tels
- -- Signed on Sun Mar 14 21:29:25 2004 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.
"Yeah. Whatever."
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) Comment: When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.
iQEVAwUBQFTDvncLPEOTuEwVAQFqKgf9GGW4d676ASP/mEh7xffdphp3lTIJYLzg q9a7tanHhmCA85k5cHHPb81sFgbCgvV6Y/wxrQstaaVE9jdYfYcuCpNZlM+632VQ bMzttq3+XvYnqUoGv3PPV54+7v/5KzJQyPPBEyPpqLGgMn0iYDB69x2ya941ZWbA vPtZIvq1mK7dB+MbP5F0pB/dcEucIOje9pFxUUGZ7sHdhk4Ngjqm9Vu2nsQ9KCkk raFB601YI8dtPQx8MJczvCgf+FNGhObkQl2MfncuuC3x0zEQa9zer4lvs+Awcdkw 7yw3PV5Aaol8fQ+VYlJgXtqNNZPXre+h3LP5Z8NdJyE4F6Lqq+xThA== =m1Yu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_________________________________________________________________
One-click access to Hotmail from any Web page � download MSN Toolbar now! http://clk.atdmt.com/AVE/go/onm00200413ave/direct/01/
