PerlGameDev Annonces, Aftermath YAPC::NA
Hello folks, YAPC::NA 2011 was a blast and I wish more of the PerlGameDev folks were there. Now I hope to think I am a get things done guy. But really I couldn't have done any of the stuff without any of you guys (FROGGS, garu, jtpalmer, kmx and many others!). I have posted my talk and notes at http://yapgh.blogspot.com/ . Apologies to Module Authors and Perl6 for invading your mailing lists but I am hoping some of these projects are interesting to others who want to help with PerlGameDev and the below projects. Before running of to India tomorrow I am just going through my recollections of 'promises'. Also this way I don't forget the stuff I discussed, or if I do forget ppl will remember :p. =head1 PerlGameDev Monthly Aims and Releases =blame chromatic =for kthakore, FROGGS, garu, jtpalmer chromatic has opened my eyes on having a monthly goal that we aim for. In SDL perl5 we have had a progressive chaos. But I think having a progressive chaos that aims to get something done each month (even a few docs) might be a great idea cause we are all busy, and I would hate to lose what we have a year. These will go up on this mailing-list and maybe the wiki (we haven't used both as regularly as we should). Because I consider all of PerlGameDev a single project, I will just be adding them together in an announce end of each month. And you are reading it :D. You might have notice I have actually gotten off my lazy ass and did a good job with this announce. I will be using POD format but subsequent need not be. I have also add 'blame and for' tags so people can understand where ideas are coming from (=blame) and who should maybe perhaps (please oh please) glance at it (=for). So this way ppl can search for their tags/names and ignore the other stuff should they want. =head1 Progressions for July I am gone for most of July so I can't expect anyone to listen to me, and start this so I have already done the first release for July :P. =head2 Announcing Perl6/SDL stuff [RELEASED!] =blame Util =for kthakore RELEASE: http://modules.perl6.org/ (ctrl-f SDL) Util convinced me on the value of having a simple drawing module for Perl6 a lot. So I have decided to add SDL6 'officially' to PerlGameDev. Hopefully in a year or show we can have something interesting. Perl6 is a lot easier to bind C libraries at this point, so that is refreshing. Additionally a discussion with chromatic reminded me that SDL 1.3 is probably the best hope we have for Perl6/SDL (it is a lot cleaner ). Any way I started up the a Perl6 module that does NCI via the NativeCall.pm https://github.com/PerlGameDev/SDL6 (It uses SDL 1.2 for now) It has a test, and NativeCall is finding SDL that is installed. It is in the panda ( the perl6 CPAN I guess ). dukeleto mentioned he took a glance at parrotSDL. I am hoping to focus on SDL6 with SDL 1.3 once I have an Alien::SDL ( getter and installer ) for it. This will prolly take kick up storm in August I think. =head1 Continuing Projects =blame kthakore, chromatic =for kthakore, chromatic, garu =head2 SDL_Manual Book Indexing and Chapter Intentions and Exercises I am hoping to read over Modern Perl source today, and do some of the indexing I talked about. The chapter intentions should be done end of July. That leaves the exercises which I can't really promise cause I am bad at making those (garu would you be interested in this ?). =head1 Progressions for August 2011 =head2 Distribution Network/Server/Client for Perl Games =blame hercynium, Jesse =for kthakore, KMX, FROGGS, Alias I have had an idea of preparing an 'official' way for Perl Game Developers to publish games, while allowing end game users to download and running games. Discussions with hercynium and Jesse Vincent, have opened my eyes towards technologies such as MetaCPAN, Shipwright/Carton, and a wxWidgets front end. This idea needs some feedback so feel free to hammer me. But code will start in Mid/End August. I am hoping to have 'test' this idea on Frozen Bubble, Zumbis, Zombie_Puzzle (a Box2d/SDL game) and Construder. Which brings me to OpenGL. =head2 OpenGL 3.0 =blame kthakore, chromatic =for kthakore, Chris, jtpalmer This comes from the following observations ( feel free to scold/correct me ). =over =item Convergence to OpenGL SDL 1.3 is moving over to OpenGL. Having the ability to do neat things with OpenGL this will help to add more performance, speed and flexibility to the module. =item POGL still uses FreeGLUT POGL albeit great is getting ... old. FreeGLUT is slowing down ( SDL replaces this fine and we have tests to prove it see construder. It is an extra dep. =item OpenGL 3.3 is a fixed target New OpenGL is all the way up to 4.x now. OpenGL 3.3 has been around for a while and is not going to be using. =back Based on this I think we should attempt to help the POGL dev with whatever he needs. I will move it to github at some point. Additionally chip during my talk you mentioned some
Re: PerlGameDev Annonces, Aftermath YAPC::NA
Hi Kartik, great that you got the time to spawn this list of goals, and I'm glad you got the chance to brainstorm so much stuff during the YAPC! Makes me even sadder I wasn't able to make it this year :( =head1 PerlGameDev Monthly Aims and Releases =blame chromatic =for kthakore, FROGGS, garu, jtpalmer chromatic has opened my eyes on having a monthly goal that we aim for. In SDL perl5 we have had a progressive chaos. But I think having a progressive chaos that aims to get something done each month (even a few docs) might be a great idea cause we are all busy, and I would hate to lose what we have a year. These will go up on this mailing-list and maybe the wiki (we haven't used both as regularly as we should). Because I consider all of PerlGameDev a single project, I will just be adding them together in an announce end of each month. And you are reading it :D. You might have notice I have actually gotten off my lazy ass and did a good job with this announce. I will be using POD format but subsequent need not be. I have also add 'blame and for' tags so people can understand where ideas are coming from (=blame) and who should maybe perhaps (please oh please) glance at it (=for). So this way ppl can search for their tags/names and ignore the other stuff should they want. I like the idea, specially since it isn't focused on SDL and Alien::SDL per-se, but on all related projects as well. Having public announcements will definitely increase people's awareness to the project! As for the POD format, my email client doesn't know how to format it (or maybe I'm just too lazy to set it up). We can all parse POD in our heads but a simple list should be enough - even Markdown if you feel like it :) =head1 Continuing Projects =blame kthakore, chromatic =for kthakore, chromatic, garu =head2 SDL_Manual Book Indexing and Chapter Intentions and Exercises I am hoping to read over Modern Perl source today, and do some of the indexing I talked about. The chapter intentions should be done end of July. That leaves the exercises which I can't really promise cause I am bad at making those (garu would you be interested in this ?). Sure, why not. Let's talk this over in irc so I can get a better notion of what you need and what the deadlines are. Now, for my own goals, I'm gonna keep working on Box2D::Simple and the Avenger layer, which hopefully will make it even easier for newcomers to create nice games in Perl. Porting the games we made during the Game Contest onto CPAN was also requested, and next on the list for me. Have a nice trip! breno
Re: PerlGameDev Annonces, Aftermath YAPC::NA
On 7/1/2011 2:26 PM, chromatic wrote: On Friday, July 01, 2011 at 10:58 am, Chip Salzenberg wrote: On 7/1/2011 7:24 AM, Kartik Thakore wrote: chip during my talk you mentioned some technology for doing OpenGL context/display lists better. Can you mention it again chip? I seem to have forgotten it. Hi! I was talking about tcc, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler . It's x86-specific but otherwise it seems like a convenient and really fast way to create structures defined by C. Are you suggesting an approach like Python's Weave or Cinpy? http://scipy.org/Weave http://www.cs.tut.fi/~ask/cinpy/ Yes, quite. The approach I had in mind was to build an XS file full of Perl - C thunks and then use the closure-over-dlfunc-pointer trick of P5NCI to avoid writing (and paying the cost of) hundreds of otherwise-identical XS wrappers. Ah, well, I had perhaps an incomplete understanding of the problem. I thought we needed to create complex data structures for some newer OpenGL calls, so I wanted to ease the difficulty of making complex C data structures from Perl. If, OTOH, the primary problem is exposing a very broad API from C to Perl, then yes, reusing XS wrappers is very good (reduced memory use, better cache coherency, blah blah). This is even one spot where a little AUTOLOAD magic would help memory usage even more. -- c
Re: PerlGameDev Annonces, Aftermath YAPC::NA
Oh this is some great stuff too! This will help me with another problem I have (CUDA and OpenCL), Thanks. On Fri, 2011-07-01 at 16:40 -0700, Reverend Chip wrote: On 7/1/2011 2:26 PM, chromatic wrote: On Friday, July 01, 2011 at 10:58 am, Chip Salzenberg wrote: On 7/1/2011 7:24 AM, Kartik Thakore wrote: chip during my talk you mentioned some technology for doing OpenGL context/display lists better. Can you mention it again chip? I seem to have forgotten it. Hi! I was talking about tcc, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler . It's x86-specific but otherwise it seems like a convenient and really fast way to create structures defined by C. Are you suggesting an approach like Python's Weave or Cinpy? http://scipy.org/Weave http://www.cs.tut.fi/~ask/cinpy/ Yes, quite. The approach I had in mind was to build an XS file full of Perl - C thunks and then use the closure-over-dlfunc-pointer trick of P5NCI to avoid writing (and paying the cost of) hundreds of otherwise-identical XS wrappers. Ah, well, I had perhaps an incomplete understanding of the problem. I thought we needed to create complex data structures for some newer OpenGL calls, so I wanted to ease the difficulty of making complex C data structures from Perl. If, OTOH, the primary problem is exposing a very broad API from C to Perl, then yes, reusing XS wrappers is very good (reduced memory use, better cache coherency, blah blah). This is even one spot where a little AUTOLOAD magic would help memory usage even more. -- c -- Kartik Thakore thakore.kar...@gmail.com
Re: PerlGameDev Annonces, Aftermath YAPC::NA
On Friday, July 01, 2011 at 07:26 pm, Kartik Thakore wrote: What is the closure-over-dlfunc-pointer trick? Can I see an example of this someplace? See load_func() and build_thunk() in: http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/CHROMATIC/P5NCI-0.31/lib/P5NCI.pm ... and generate_function() in: http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/CHROMATIC/P5NCI-0.31/build_lib/P5NCI/GenerateXS.pm In short, P5NCI takes the name of a function in a shared library and its signature. It uses dlfunc to get that function's pointer *and* the pointer to an XS function which can handle that signature. Then it builds a closure which calls the XS function, passing the shared library's function pointer as well as @_. The XS function handles the conversion of the contents of @_, then calls the shared library function, converts any return value, and returns. For an API like most of SDL or especially OpenGL, you pay a much, much smaller cost. -- c
Re: PerlGameDev Annonces, Aftermath YAPC::NA
On 7/1/2011 7:24 AM, Kartik Thakore wrote: chip during my talk you mentioned some technology for doing OpenGL context/display lists better. Can you mention it again chip? I seem to have forgotten it. The hope will be to make a declarative for OpenGL constructs that can be sent straight to the hardware. Adam Kennedy has some work start in this area (OpenGL::List). Hi! I was talking about tcc, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler . It's x86-specific but otherwise it seems like a convenient and really fast way to create structures defined by C.
