Re: LLVM discussion
A home-brew compiler isn't the answer: if you're looking for community contributions, then a compiler is too complex. Not to mention the fact that it's going to be ugly and hard to understand, at least unless it's something you've done before. Most worthwhile contributions aren't going to be done via the engine, they're going to be done in the engine. This is an important point to think about.
But you've still not answered the question. I can provide at least 50 different definitions for game, varying mostly according to supported gameplay features, and at least 3 different definitions for engine. In order to discuss this we need more.
let me put it another way. Bare with me on this, because it's important. Accuracy to reality is not the point: I know that, by the definition of community contributions, it's intended to be free. But we're visiting fantasy lan
d for a moment.
You are the CEO of a company and you've just developed your amazing and commercial audiogame engine. Bob Smith comes along and asks you "Why should I buy this? I've already got x, y, and z". What do you tell him? What does your engine, now that it is finished in some sense, let our imaginary consumer do? Your goal is not to portray your company's values or your personal opinions. Your goal is to tell Bob why he cares.
Once we know why Bob cares, we can talk about how to get you to that point. This is not something unique to this thread. Other people do this. Libaudioverse did it, though less explicitly: I knew from Camlorn_audio what people wanted and couldn't get, and I knew what I wanted and couldn't get. I did not do this for Camlorn_audio, and now I've got several thousand lines of abandoned code. Before I even wrote a single line of code for Libaudiovers
e, I had answered the question as to how my imaginary Bob Smith would program with it, and what it would let him do that he couldn't do elsewhere. This particular idea is not unique to me: imagining the imaginary customer is a pretty standard thing, even at places like Microsoft.
And don't make the mistake of thinking that your engine is free. It's not. It might not cost money nor get you anything, but it's going to cost Bob time and effort to learn it and transition from what he used to use. And so in this sense Bob had to pay.
Saying "community contributions are good" and "lets people make games" is broad. So broad that assembly language fits in some sense. With those two statements together, you could use literally anything. Because of the nature of your project, you need not be concerned with being friendly to other programmers from the community: any programmer who can't learn more than o
ne language is probably not at the point of being able to write robust, reusable code for other game developers.
And, to be honest, your project won't get far without more definition. If I say anything goes, then everything goes. And the project collapses from its own weight and complexity. The input library has 10 special cases for everything from card to rhythm to first-person shooters, all in different coding styles and uncommented. Saying what your project is also says what it is not and, from that base, lets you know what you can and must exclude.
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