-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

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-----

Reply via email to