Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday January 26th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B David O'Toole on Common Lisp and Rogue-like Games

David O'Toole will give a talk about Common Lisp and Rogue-like Games.

The 1980 gaming classic "Rogue" and its descendants (NetHack and Angband, among many others) continue to thrill hard-core gamers, finding a new audience many years later. Part of the thrill comes from the high replayability factor brought about by the genres's randomized settings and endlessly variable play experiences; rogue-like games used "procedural content generation" a long time before it became a games-industry buzzword. These games have usually been written in C or C++, but a growing, seething mass of Lisp Rogue-likes have lurched ominously onto the scene. David will show how Rogue-like games present interesting challenges to the Lisp developer, and how he met those challenges with video demonstrations of his code in action. His software can be found at http://dto.github.com/notebook/rlx.html

David O'Toole is a Lisp developer living in Central Massachusetts, USA, who works in Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp. His lifelong interest in video and computer games led him to study computer science and then to work at Irrational Games in Boston (now called 2K Boston). David is now a consultant and builds custom audio-oriented computers in his spare time.

His website is at http://dto.github.com/notebook/

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The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday January 26th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor. This is the usual location, on 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us.

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Dinner: we don't yet have a sponsor this year for an after-meeting buffet, but the organizers will go someplace to have dinner and a drink not too far from the conference venue, and you'll be welcome to join us.

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The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on November 24th had over 30 participants. Gregory Marton gave a very inspiring talk about the meanings of English words as programs, and how computers could learn such programs through various interactions.

We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html

For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

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