Timothy McDowell wrote:
Hey, I haven't worked with shoes in awhile, and now I have come back around to it for the purpose of hopefully avoiding PHP.
Use Merb to avoid PHP, for blue-sky projects. For greenfield projects, use Ruby on Rails. > Can Shoes be
used to create an online, browser-based game/rpg,
No. Think of Shoes as a thin DSL over non-retained, optimized, device-dependant computer graphics. The primitives are brushstrokes, like your hardware graphics chips use.
The web works with retained, high-level, device-independent, object-oriented graphics, like SVG or Flash.
> sort of like
kingdomofloathing.com <http://kingdomofloathing.com> and urbandead.com <http://urbandead.com>? If not being able to put online, would it still be possible to create just a single-player offline one?
Technically yes. But you will still be at the bottom of the food chain. If you want to author games, you should not author and write the engine at the same time! The standard answer to the FAQ "how should I break into game design?" is "get a level editor and start designing". If you _reeeally_ like futzing with quaternions and dot products, then Shoes will reward your efforts with blazing Cairo speed.
Next, video games need object oriented graphics, and I still haven't figured out how to drag-and-drop an object in Shoes. Maybe I overlooked the obvious. Yet that's what non-retained graphics give you; blazing speed over programmer friendliness.
Now look at TankSpank!! -- Phlip
