Yet Another Perl Game Hacker (YAPGH)

SDL2 API stabilization and new work

2013-03-01T16:22:00.003-08:00

SDL2 C library API is stabilized

So near the end of Feburary, Sam announced that the SDL2 API has been stabilized! Hearing I emailed to the sdl-devel mailing list and with that kmx, jtpalmer and Froggs have helped me to get started on the bindings for SDL2 perl.

Alien-SDL2 is not ready yet but you can get kmx's packages and install them on strawberry perl your self. Or for windows compile and install from the source.

http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/sdl/32bit_SDL2_20130301.zip
http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/sdl/64bit_SDL2_20130301.zip

You can see it at:

https://github.com/PerlGameDev/SDL2

I also ran some tiny and completely not to be believed benchmark between the two scripts on my Windows 7 i5 laptop:

perl scripts\benchmark.pl

Rate sdl sdl2

sdl 867/s -- -16%

sdl2 1033/s 19% --

This is just for clearing the screen and drawing some squares. Both are software renders and not using hardware acceleration.

SDL2 Perl Library

2012-10-12T16:49:00.002-07:00

SDL2 Library

If you haven't hear yet, the long awaited SDL2 (or SDL 1.3+ ) library finally got the green light ( relatively stable ) from Sam Lantinga (@slouken). In light of that news I have been working on libsdl2-perl/SDL2 XS bindings for Perl 5.

Github: https://github.com/PerlGameDev/SDL2

0x1 step forward, 0x10 steps back

2012-07-07T13:26:00.002-07:00

So last few days have been a test of my patience. Working on the Avenger bit to hack out a game that doesn't devolve into chaotic code has been hard. Partly the reason has been due to how SDLx::* and Box2D force some horrible design patterns. So after 4 rewrites of a simple Zemming walking across the screen, I decided something different is needed.

Moo and Mithaldu's Idea

That something different may be the act of admitting that some of the design choices made in SDLx::* (SDLx::App) specifically were made for speed and not better game development. Therefore a possible answer could be to refactor out SDL Agnostic code out of SDLx::* and make that in to a well written game development library (Avenger). Mithaldu suggestion, we could base this new fork of 'Moo'.

Anyway Avenger and Zemmings seem a bit further away now ...

YAPC::NA 2012 Aftermath

2012-06-17T10:06:00.001-07:00

YAPC::NA 2012 Done!

After a great week in Madison of meeting people, hearing ideas and hackfesting some! I have stumbled on a great ploy. A dastardly deed, a splendid scheme, a pleasureful ploy!

As many know I have been meaning to rewrite the SDL Manual with a focus on making a game. Start to finish. A to Z . 1 to 0! (or is that ` to = ). But after struggling to make a well written game using SDLx::* I had taken a break.

But after a quickly put together hackfest with garu, awwaiid, scrottie and sartak, I was stuck my the plan.

So..

Over the next year I will be committing about 3-4 hrs a week working on a game. Not just a regular old hackeity game. A complete game. Art work, music and all that. This game will push the envelope for Avenger. I will aim to have the game released on Desura. Then as a bonus I will write the game's documentation as a book. A book that details how to make this game from scratch. A-Z, 1 to 0! and etc .

This I feel will something we haven't seen with open source game frameworks, and will ignite GAME developers to come give Avenger and Perl a chance. .

Garu's presentation on Game Development with SDL and Perl

2012-04-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

Game Development with SDL and Perl

View more presentations from garux

Phoenix PerlMongers: SDL01 - Introducing SDL Perl

2011-10-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

Douglas E. Miles presents "Introducing SDL Perl"

Presented October 6, 2011 at the offices of www.liquidweb.com in Scottsdale, Arizona

Here's a link to the slides:
http://pm.veritablesoftware.com/slides/introducing_sdl_perl/index.html

Doug presents an introduction to SDL Perl, a platform-independent system for rendering graphics.

Perl GameDev: an interview with Construder's author

2011-07-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

For the past several months Perl has gained a lot of momentum in game development. The SDL Perl community now has a complete manual for beginners and nice, sugary layers built on top of a fast and stable API. March's game challenge spawned over 15 new games, and all over the world we've seen mini-courses, talks and even printed magazine articles. But nothing prepared us for Construder: a jaw dropping 3D game created by Perl hacker Robin Redeker, known as "elmex". It features futuristic settings with some nice graphics and an (almost) infinite world for you to build and play with!

Construder is so cool we wanted everyone to know about it, so we made a quick interview with Robin, who is not only a great programmer but also a very nice guy. Check it out!

Can you share a bit about who you are and what's your background?

I'm a 27 year old Informatics student from Karlsruhe, Germany. I work part time as a (Perl) programmer and programming is my main hobby aside from other things like photography and music.

I started programming around 1999 and wrote lots of network related applications since then. Many also found their way to CPAN as Perl modules, such as AnyEvent::IRC, AnyEvent::XMPP and AnyEvent::HTTPD.

Tell us a bit about Construder. What's it about?

Construder is a 3D game that takes place in a completely modifiable world that is built from small cubes. The core of the game is construction of buildings and items from those cubes. The goal is to push up your score points as far as possible.

In order to score you need to build blocks, construct items and finish assignments. For each score milestone you will get a trophy.

The game currently is focused on single player experience, but the architecture has been made to support multiplayer gameplay. As a matter of fact, it's perfectly possible for multiple players to play in the same world at once. (One of the unfinished things is, that you can't see the other players at the moment, only their actions can be observed :-)

How about the technology involved?

I use the CPAN modules SDL and OpenGL for all the graphics stuff in the client (there is some C OpenGL code, to render the volumes, but most of the engine is written in Perl using the OpenGL module). The primary purpose of SDL is to give me keyboard and mouse input, loading images and providing an OpenGL context.

But there are also other modules at work here:

Object::Event my own most favorite module for event based programming
AnyEvent for networking and timer releated stuff
EV as a reliable event loop
Compress::LZF for storing and transmitting the map data
JSON as a generic format for storing data (player files, resource files)

We know Construder is not "finished" yet, but it's pretty complete, playable and fun! How long did it take to get there?

I started with a basic engine prototype on the 19th April 2011. So it took me 3 months of steady development and research to get the game to the current state.

Much research was necessary, as I originally only had basic experience with OpenGL and 3D engines in general. Especially collision detection and finding graphics were noteworthy researches.

On top of that I also looked through many books and articles of game design, which helped me a lot with designing the actual game.

You mentioned MineCraft as an inspiration for Construder. How are they similar? And how are they different?

Minecraft inspired the aspect of a completely modifiable world that is built from small cubes. In this regard Construder is very similar to Minecraft or it's predecessor Infiniminer.

But Minecraft is, or at least it will/wants to be, a survival game, where you have to fend off monsters that come at night or from the darkness.

With Construder I wanted to put focus on the constructive aspect and build a game around that. Construder of course still has survival aspects, as you have to take care not to starve. But thats more a question of resource management and not survival.

Apart from that the generation and design of the world differs completely from Minecraft's medieval theme. Construder has a much is more futuristic world with very artificial structures in it.

How did you get started in game development? Is this your first game?

Construder is the first game I designed and implemented completely by myself.

But around 2005 me and a friend (Marc Lehmann) started to play Crossfire (a 2D (M)MORPG) together. Not long and we started to improve Crossfire and eventually we forked it off into a new project, called "Deliantra". Our main focus was to fix the stability and balancing problems that accumulated in Crossfire over the decades (it's a really old game).

As a side note: Deliantra itself can also be called a "Perl game". The core of the server is driven completely by the Perl modules Coro, IO::AIO and AnyEvent. The client for Deliantra was also rewritten in Perl and only uses a small part of XS for the custom SDL and OpenGL bindings.

What are you proudest of about Construder?

I'm most proud that it is a playable game, which is finished to a certain degree. Next I'm proud that I was able to compile a texture set that does not completely look like the so called "programmer art".

However, I'm not that proud of the code in Construder. When developing a game on your own with limited time you need to make sacrifices and compromises. Those usually don't lead to the most elegant or best code. As a result of that there are many things that can be improved in Construder.

Why did you choose Perl?

As I write 80-90% of my software projects in Perl the choice was quite natural. Minecraft also showed that a 3D engine does not need to be written in C/C++. So I also thought it was time for a 3D game in Perl.

What do you think are the biggest advantages for people considering Perl for game development?

The biggest advantages of Perl are the data structures like hashes, arrays and string that are tied closely into the core of the language.

This allows for rapid development of new ideas and algorithms, which is essential for any game project. You just need to try out many approaches to find the right one for your project.

The scripting character of Perl really starts to pay off once you get to implement the game logic and balance and user interface. Everything stays in a flexible shape and you can change it at will without having to rearrange the whole code archtitecture.

On top of that modules like Coro and AnyEvent which come with utilities like Coro::Debug or AnyEvent::Debug allow runtime debugging in the running game. You can peek into all your data structures and execute code at will at runtime, and this really pays off for bugs that are hard to reproduce.

How about disadvantages? Where does Perl (and underlying CPAN modules) need to improve for gamedev?

It would be great if Perl had a JIT, then probably even less parts of Construder would have to be in C/XS. But this doesn't mean that Perl is slow. It's definitively fast enough for 80-90% of the engine, but handling volume data in Perl is neither fun nor fast.

The CPAN modules, like SDL or OpenGL are quite useful and don't really need much improvement with regard to Construder. Maybe there could be a more useful 3D engine module for Perl, which makes it easier and faster to handle 3D data.

But the Construder engine is quite customized anyways, so a module, except maybe a special voxel world module, wouldn't have helped much anyway.

What's next?

Next issues that need to be resolved is the distribution. It would be great if distribution maintainers could package it for Debian and/or Ubuntu for example. It would also be great if volunteers could make a binary for Windows.

I probably wont have so much time to devote to Construder anymore, as I need to concentrate on finishing my diploma. However, as author I will try to maintain the project, and apply patches and bug fixes.

YAPC::NA Links and Presentation of the TALK

2011-06-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

Presentation

Game Development in Perl on Prezi

Notes

Links to modules I discussed: http://search.cpan.org/~kthakore/

https://github.com/PerlGameDev/Avenger ( We had to fix some stuff )

http://github.com/PerlGameDev in general has all the cake

SDL Game Contest:

http://yapgh.blogspot.com/2011/04/sdl-perl-game-contest-week-4-roundup.html

http://yapgh.blogspot.com/2011/03/sdl-perl-game-contest-week-3-roundup.html

http://yapgh.blogspot.com/2011/03/sdl-perl-game-contest-week-2-roundup.html

http://yapgh.blogspot.com/2011/03/sdl-perl-game-contest-week-1-roundup.html

http://yapgh.blogspot.com/2011/02/sdl-perl-game-contest.html

Other stuff I do do (hehe):

https://github.com/kthakore

Lacuna Expanse: http://www.lacunaexpanse.com

Construder: http://ue.o---o.eu/and see SDLperl wiki link up some place

A new Box2D Perl Demo!

2011-05-02T22:59:00.000-07:00

So since the last 2 days, Abram Hindle has made an awesome physics demo.

You can get the script from the github repo.

Things are getting interesting :)

Introduction Box2D for Perl Games!

2011-05-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

So over the last couple days I have started binding Box2D 2.1.0 to Perl. Box2D is a 2D physics engine used in game such as the popular Angry Birds. Here is the repository:
https://github.com/PerlGameDev/Box2D-perl

Also here is the helloWorld Box2D example in pure Perl and rendered with SDL Perl. You can
see the video on Box2D Hello World and SDL on Vimeo.

To run this example you will need to install Box2D 2.1.0 .

SDL Perl Game Contest - week 4 roundup

2011-04-02T07:07:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! Sorry for delaying this post, it's been one hellish week...

Wow, 4 weeks already... can you believe it? I'm really sad this is the last round of the SDL Perl Game Contest - I guess time flies when you're having fun - but I'm also pretty excited to show you guys the awesome entries we had this week. Check'em out!

Electric Lines, by JT Palmer (jtpalmer)

JT does it again, providing players with a very challenging (and fun) piece! Electric Lines was inspired by Mario's Slides, a mini-game in Nintendo's Super Mario 64 and New Super Mario Bros., both for the DS console. Drag your mouse cursor to draw lines across the horizontal paths in order to guide the electric energy balls to the exit, but watch out: you can only hit the red circles three times!

Rand Explorer, by Blaise Roth (Blaizer)

This quick-and-dirty submission was born a classic. In Rand Explorer, you use the spacebar to control a white square through a colored tunnel. As you pick up speed, you must steer clear of the narrow walls and obstacles and prove your skills to travel the furthest. Awesome!

Groove Board, by... me (garu)

Groove Board is a music rhythm game, similar to Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) and StepMania. I'm particularly proud of this one since it was done in a single day! The gameplay is dead simple: just listen to the music and press the arrow keys when the scrolling arrows reach the top ones. Have fun!

Wrapping Up

Thus ends the very first SDL Perl Game Contest - and what a rush! We had a total of 16 new games written from scratch in just one month!! I'd like to take this opportunity and thank everyone that joined and wrote all those amazing entries, week after week. You guys rock!

Also, a big thanks to all of you that followed this one-month challenge, reading the weekly posts and playing the games. I had a good time and hope you guys had a good time too!

The Contest is over, but that doesn't mean you have to wait for the next one to turn your awesome game idea into a reality. Just install the latest SDL Perl distribution, read the fine manual and get cracking! If you have any questions at all just drop by the IRC channel (#sdl at irc.perl.org) or send them to the SDL Perl mailing list.

See ya =)

SDL Perl Game Contest - week 3 roundup

2011-03-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

Alright, boys and girls, it's the moment you've been waiting for all week: The SDL Perl Game Contest weekly showdown. Round. Three. FIGHT!!

Bubble Breaker, by Tobias Leich (FROGGS)

Our german battletoad presents us with another masterpiece. Bubble Breaker is a highly addictive puzzle game where you try to eliminate the largest number of balls by matching groups of two or more balls with the same color.

Puzzle Cars, by JT Palmer (jtpalmer)

Speaking of puzzles, JT did a really nice job in his latest addition to the Contest. Puzzle Cars is a game where you must click the arrows to redirect the (sometimes intense!) traffic to their appropriate destinations, according to car colour. It's an easy concept, but can prove very challenging, and soon enough you'll find yourself storming rapidly between arrows to achieve as many points as possible!

Crossfire, by Kartik Thakore (kthakore)

This was a really busy week for Kartik, and he had to spend much of his free time updating branches of the SDL Perl project and moving around, so he wasn't able to finish his Crossfire clone just yet. But so far it's looking really sharp, and we are anxious to see what he'll make of it next week!

Saving Sue, by... me (garu)

I wrote this Frogger clone as a birthday present for a good friend of mine that has the terrible habit of crossing the street without looking. I think the game turned out pretty cool and features some nice graphics, music and sound effects. In fact, my friend liked it so much she even recorded the audio samples!

As contestants dive into the last week of the SDL Perl Game Contest, I get even more excited to see what they'll come up with. Will there be new additions? Which games will be used as inspiration? Which will be original? Where *is* that Carmen Sandiego chick after all?! That and much more in our next - and last! - roundup of games!

See you next week =)

SDL Perl Game Contest - week 2 roundup

2011-03-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know it's already wednesday, sorry for the delay! The SDL Perl Game Contest continues - I should know, I'm about halfway through my third game now! - and last week we had some real nice entries. Check 'em out!

Wheel of Fortune, by Tobias Leich (FROGGS)

Who never yelled madly in front of the TV watching contestants make a fool out of themselves for not knowing the words in Wheel of Fortune? Well, now you can show them how it's done in this Hangman style classic! One note though: to play it, you must install the latest experimental version of SDL Perl, that includes rects with alpha blending and other goodies.

Snake, by JT Palmer (jtpalmer)

Another classic remake beautifully done by jtpalmer. This "nibbles" clone actually comes with a nice twist: a full-blown network version that lets you enjoy the game with a friend anywhere in the world. Sweet!

CyberHack, by Zach Morgan (zpmorgan)

CyberHack is a quick platformer demo by zpmorgan, our newest participant in the Challenge! In this game, you control a green creature that falls through a deep underground maze. It still has some minor quirks in the image blitting, but it's nevertheless really fun to play!

Synthesia Kinda, by Kartik Thakore (kthakore)

The Mad Canadian strikes again, in a dazzling... thing. It was originally supposed to be based in Synthesia, but kthakore envisioned a game that plays any image! Of course, as FROGGS put it, "you can't play a random image and expect that it sounds like mozart", but kthakore is determined to work on it even more, letting it flow until it find its course in game art history.

Reflex, by... me (garu)

This is a very simple game in which you test your reflexes by pressing any key on your keyboard whenever the big red button lights up. Your Top 20 times appear on the right. According to HumanBenchmark, the average reaction time for visual stimuli in a humans is 215 miliseconds. Are you faster??

This week's roundup of games showed some pretty interesting stuff, and we saw a lot of ideas come to life in a very short period of time. I can't wait to see the next entries!

See you next week =)

SDL Perl Game Contest - week 1 roundup

2011-03-08T01:07:00.000-08:00

As you probably know, last week we started the SDL Perl Game Contest (more like a Game Challenge, as people pointed out), where you have to write one game per week throughout the entire month of March!

So far we had some awesome entries - people really stood up to the challenge! Check them out:

Solar Conflict, by JT Palmer (jtpalmer)

When JT came to #sdl in the middle of the week with some bugfixes for SDLx::Controller::Interface, we knew he was up to something. Solar Conflict is a brilliant clone of Spacewar!, one of the earliest known computer games, where two spaceships battle against each other while steering clear of a star's gravity well. This version of the game lets you play against the computer or another player, and all graphics were taken from Open Game Art. Funny fact: the initial version of the original Spacewar! game took approximately 200 hours to be created. Way to go, JT!

Asteroids, by Tobias Leich (FROGGS)

Speaking of spaceships and classic remakes, who doesn't remember Asteroids? This Atari masterpiece served as inspiration to FROGGS this week, and he provided a beautifully crafted clone, taking you back to the golden age of arcade games.

Polyzle, by Kartik Thakore (kthakore)

But enough of rethinking the past - Kartik pushed the limits of avant-garde this week and brought us Polyzle (or "Polygon Trouble"). The player is faced with several colored polygons swarming around the screen, and needs to click on them to score points - but only has 30 seconds to do it, and believe me, it's not as easy as it looks! While the game certainly doesn't fit the usual rationalities of a standard gameplay, Kartik replies that maybe his game is just too ahead of its time. What do you think? Could he be the Van Gogh of game design? Only time will tell ;-)

FingerTwister, by... me =P (garu)

Last but not least, my precioussssssss.... FingerTwister! In this game, the player needs to press the keys on the keyboard as they show up on screen, and keep them pressed as new keys appear. You can only let go the keys after they disappear from the screen, and the sooner you press a key (the green bar on the bottom) the more points you get. The game also features music and sound effects from talented artists at ccMixter and FreeSound, and a highscore table. Unfortunately, as any game that requires multiple keys pressed at the same time, it suffers from key-jamming issues on regular (plain) keyboards. I tried to provide a workaround for that, but the only real solution is getting a n-key rollover keyboard like razerzone's and logitech's G15/G19.

Overall, I'm really happy about this week's roundup of games, and we're still receiving submissions! Perl coder or not, if you always wanted to write a computer game, join us on the SDL Perl Game Contest, and we'll help you take it out of your TODO list and into the glory it deserves!

See you next week =)

The SDL Perl Game Contest!

2011-02-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

Let's get a Party Started

Sure, you know what SDL is, right? Well, SDL has very nice Perl
bindings that let you use the power and flexibility of Perl to write
awesome games in no time!

There's even a manual to help you get started, including full game
tutorials and a list of free/open-source resources for your games,
like sprites, sound effects and music.

The Premise

Everyone know that by far the Coolest Game Ever™ is the one *you*
write, from that silly idea you had the other day to a playable game
you and your friends can enjoy.

This march, the SDL Perl team is going to help you take that project
out of your dusty drawer of "TODO"s and turn it into a reality, with
the "SDL Perl Game Contest!"

The rules are simple, and much like the Perl Ironman contest:

"One game per week. Every week of march."

This means by the end of march you'll have not one, but FOUR games to
show for. How cool is that?!

In fact, you can even make your weekly game the subject of your
Ironman posts this month, and take out two birds with one stone
(hmm... more game ideas)!

So this monday (feb. 28), start writing your game! You have until the
following monday to make it playable ("complete") and start all over
again with a brand new game for the next week.

** But what if I miss a deadline? What if I can't start this monday?

It doesn't really matter - just join the party and have some fun! Even
if you only get to do one game, it's still a great opportunity to
improve your skills and learn a bit about game design and development.

If you need any assistance writing your game, from ideas to code, WE
WILL HELP! Just send an email to the SDL Perl mailing list with your
questions (you know, this one) or, better yet, join us live in #sdl
over at irc.perl.org and we'll be more than happy to assist you and
try your game out. If you never used irc before, please keep in mind
people might be busy or in different timezones than you, so you may
get instant responses or have to wait a few of hours before you get a
reply. Be patient!

It can be a game about anything. Just make sure it's doable in a week.
Some games take years to be complete, but you might be surprised at
how much you can accomplish in just a few hours with SDL Perl :)

Oh, there's one extra rule, actually, and that's mandatory - HAVE FUN!! :)

Where to submit

Send your games code an all in an email to sdl-devel@perl.org with the
subject "SDL Perl Game Contest #1: Submission". After a period of entries
a voting subject will be opened. See SDL Perl Site
on how to join the mailing list.

Cheers,

breno (garu)

Closing the Grant

2011-01-18T15:56:00.000-08:00

With the following commit I am closing the grant.

This is what has been accomplished from each of the objectives:

Cleaner Code and a lot of memory and performance improvements ( SDL 2.527 released Jan 18th )
10 out of 11 chapters completed:

The profiling chapter was dropped as there was not enough content to justify a chapter.

3 Extra chapters added.
Deviation from a CPAN SDL::Manual release due to the nature of the Manual it is being released as a creative commons book instead.

Next Steps:

Get the book polished and edited with chromatic's help
Fix build system of the html to make a real SDL::Manual release
Constant update of the book with more releases of SDL and reviewer comments.

Grant Progess Reports 1-3: Sept - Nov

2010-11-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

As you know I have received a TPF grant to write a SDL Perl Manual.

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/08/2010q3-grant-proposal-manual-f.html

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/08/accepted-grants-for-2010q3.html

I have been a bit busy with that and not been able to update my blog. Anyway here are some of the back dated Grant Updates. These updates where also posted on http://news.perlfoundation.org/

REPORT 1: Sept 2010

1st drafts
- Preface
- Chapter 2: First SDL Application
Started work on Chapter 3: Drawing
Outlines for the first 7 chapters have been completed
Book build framework has been setup
Released SDL 2.514 (2.515 will be released on 16th of September)
- This code is the one that will be used in the book for chapter 02
Got more of the Drawing chapter done (It will be done by the end of the week)
Added several more code examples for other chapters

Progress: 2.75 chapters / 11 chapters = approx 25%
Kartik's work can be followed at:

REPORT 2: October 2010

Since last time:

We have released SDL 2.518
- Game Loop support completed

Chapters:

2nd Drafts for:
- Preface to Game Loop ( Chapter 0 - Chapter 04)
Chapters completed: 5/11 => 45%

Extra:

cfedde has made a script to extract code listings for readers to try examples with out having to retype them.

Coments:

I am receiving a lot more help from the community, most notable from cfedde for proofreading.
I will be fleshing out the next 6 chapters shortly and work will begin on them soon
I am pleased with the progress so far, and I feel the quality is improving due to the pacing.

Our work can be seen at:

REPORT 3: November 2010

This is the progress so far:

- SDL 2.523 Releases:
        - Adds stability and better memory management for the game loop

- 2 chapters have been completed
        - Pong Chapter (Contributed by garu)
        - Additional Modules
- 1 extra chapter has been added
        - Puzz(le) Chapter (Contributed by Blaizer)

- 2 Chapters are in the Works
        - Tetris Code has been mostly done (contributed by FROGGS)
                - Needs to be fixed
                - Needs write up
        - Sound and Music Effects code is done
                - Needs to be fixed
                - Needs write up

Our work can be seen at:

http://sdlperl.ath.cx/releases/SDL_Manual.pdf

http://sdlperl.ath.cx/releases/SDL_Manual.html

http://github.com/PerlGameDev/SDL_Manual

Regards,
YAPGH

SDL 2.518 Released: Neverhood Clone

2010-10-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

So Blaizer started a Neverhood clone and fixed a lot of the Controller code to make it work nicely. This has been released as SDL 2.518. It does break back compat a bit, but not too much.

Have a look at http://sdl.perl.org/SDL-Deprecated.html#2_517 to see the breakages.

The documentation for Controller has also been improved considerably.

http://sdl.perl.org/SDLx-Controller.html

Finally here is a video of the neverhood clone so far

SDL Manual: Reviewers Needed

2010-09-27T05:09:00.000-07:00

Work has begun on the 4th chapter of the SDL Manual. The code is on github, and I regularly update the pdf on our server.

Writing manuals is not of my greatest skills, so I would love some review of my work. Any problems can be reported in the issues.

If you want to help with writing the manual, please join me on #sdl irc.perl.org or email us at
sdl-devel@perl.org

--yapgh

SDL 2.512 released - Layers Support added

2010-08-31T08:09:00.000-07:00

The new release of SDL adds Layer support, which means that rendering surfaces by layers is a lot easier. SDL 2.512 has several other changes too. An experimental physics interface and minor fixes. Have a look at the CHANGELOG.

Here is an implementation of the new Layer stuff. Solitaire.

Introducing SDLx::Controller::Object, with our good friend Mario!

2010-08-20T07:24:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks

This past week I have been working on making interfacing physics with SDL rendering a lot easier. The idea was to provide the user a callback to describe the acceleration of their object in the X, Y axis and Rotation. Using this idea I have completed a preliminary work for SDLx::Controller::Object. The demo below shows an example that was made with it. The SDLx* code is available at http://github.com/kthakore/SDL_perl and demo code is available at http://github.com/kthakore/scroller.

Mario Demo using SDL Perl from SDLPerl on Vimeo.

SDL 2.511 + Using SDL for quick visualizations

2010-08-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

SDL Perl 2.511 is showing great promises. The initial tests show a great deal of stability. http://search.cpan.org/~kthakore/SDL-2.511/

Moreover we are seeing more varied users of SDL Perl.

John.O Writes:

This is for a tool that we'll be providing our dealers... it measures cellular modem signal strengths out in the middle of nowhere, so dealers can evaluate if our products will work in customers' fields. And of course, I'm using Perl/SDL for the graphics... C gets on my nerves.

Our company is http://smartfield.com.

John O.

Perl+SDL 3D Rendering

2010-07-31T13:13:00.000-07:00

Recently we have done a lot of work on the next release of SDL Perl. But it all pays off when I see users do cool things as one of the users has done below. Talon^++! This project is a great example for people wanting to learn 3D from scratch.

--yapgh

This was a project to test how well Perl+SDL performs and does not use OpenGL at all. This is all perl and SDL, with the help of libsdl_gfx for SDL::GFX::Primitives. Texture mapping doesn't use SDL::GFX::Primitives because textured_polygon just takes a surface, tiles it, and clips out the polygon, which doesn't look 3D at all.

Below are some screen shots of this little toy in action. If you'd like to try it yourself, you can download the entire project here. You can rotate the objects with the mouse, or keyboard arrows. Also press shift to toggle shading and space to switch objects.

NOTE: the project is compressed in the .tgz format, if you are a windows user, you may need a tool like 7zip to extract the contents.

Standard Cube:

Standard Cube with Pseudo Shading:

Standard Diamond:

Standard Diamond with Pseudo Shading:

Textured Cube:

Perspectively Correct Textured Cube:

Perspectively Correct Textured Cube with shading:

SDL 2.503 Released!

2010-07-22T16:55:00.001-07:00

SDL 2.503 has been released on to CPAN. The changes are mostly in the new features added to SDLx::* layer. However as our continuing attempt to improve cross platform support we have some low level fixes.

Most interstingly we have begun work on SDLx::Sprite::Animated. Although, volatile, this addition will be highly anticipated. We look forward for more work on it soon. Additionally are the changes in SDLx::Surface. SDLx::Surface is an attempt to provide gfx, pixels, video and low level surface functions in a combined and simpler interface.

Since SDLx::Sprite and SDLx::App depends on SDLx::Surface, new features will be propagated and the magic amplified! These are exciting times for SDL in Perl. So come join us for great justice on #sdl irc.perl.org or sdl-devel@perl.org.

The detailed changelog are provided at CPAN.

Kartik Thakore

Huge World Maps in less then 100 lines

2010-07-16T07:55:00.000-07:00

Hello folks,

Recently we have been working on making the Perl syntax sugar for SDL in the form of SDLx. So far we have got the SDLx::Surface and SDLx::Sprite (garu++) done. So the first thing we did was throw together a quick Zelda map walker. As you can see above. The code is at http://gist.github.com/478440. The SDL code that this depends on will be SDL 2.503 soonish . We are in the process of cleaning up some more SDLx and Alien::SDL bugs. After that SDLx::App will be overhauled to make this sort of thing even easier. Finally living up to our goal of 'Simple Games Easy. Complex Games Possible.'

UPDATE: with some help, and newcomer jtpalmer's help we have added Link

--caio yapgh