August 2010 - lisp-game-dev@common-lisp.net

[lisp-game-dev] my ILGE postmortem
by David O'Toole 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

Due to travel and having a bad cold, I wasn't able to finish everything, but here is my postmortem: http://dto.github.com/notebook/ilge-2010-postmortem.html I'll be away for about 10 days but will have at least intermittent net access.

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[lisp-game-dev] a big fat tarball of binaries?
by Shawn Betts 17 Aug '10

17 Aug '10

I'd love to try out all the games that have been posted here but I don't have the time to grab the libs and build them, and inevitably debugging the weirdness. What if some super awesome person grabbed them all, built binaries for whatever platform is best, and tossed them all together somewhere? Then I and others could quickly and easily try each one. That would be way cool. -Shawn

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[lisp-game-dev] Expo wrap-up and discussion
by David O'Toole 16 Aug '10

16 Aug '10

Hi everyone, I'm back from my road trip to Virginia and will be finishing up my postmortem. It's been great to see everyone's postings, and I'll begin blogposting soon. See you on IRC later :)

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[lisp-game-dev] bourtange postmortem
by Schell Scivally 12 Aug '10

12 Aug '10

This is a repost from my blog: BOURTANGE POSTMORTEM Overall I’m satisfied with my lisp game. My major goals were to learn lisp (to a shallow yet useable degree), learn a little about functional programming and last but not least to end up with a playable game. I feel I hit those goals and as an added bonus I’ve enjoyed programming in lisp so much that I’m looking for another project to start working on. That said, here is an explanation of what went into the game, what went right and what went wrong. Built with I made the bulk of the game using sbcl with cl-opengl for graphics and TextMate for editing. I wrote some custom ‘build’ scripts to send my monolithic game file to the sbcl repl. The development cycle was similar to what you’d expect from programming in C, ‘write->compile->test’. Later on after my first version I got help from the guys at #lispgames (irc.freenode.net) (sykopomp, xristos, 3b) with setting up emacs and using slime-connect, as well as setting up a .asd for my game. Using the interactive dev env that emacs + slime enables is really a liberating way to program. What went right * My game is playable! More often than not I leave my game projects in an unplayable (sometimes not compilable) state. I’m proud to say that this game is playable. * The difficulty of the game goes up over time. * I tried to program in a very functional way, which worked most of the time. It enabled my program to easily reset, and should allow for a fairly easy save function, but I never got into file i/o to finish that. * The colors are cool What went wrong * Writing in a functional way messed me up a little. I tried my best to make things functional, without really having a firm grasp on what that means. I would give up on writing functionally and go back to just making things work when the going got tough. This means that in the end, I feel the code is naive and dirty. * Collision detection is very simple. This would be fine if things didn’t move very fast, but when using gravitational equations for motion, things get very fast when they get very close. In order to keep the collision detection simple I put limits on how fast things can move. It works, but it’s dirty. * After something gets hit I recalculate 360 points of an arc to display the life left. Halfway through development I wanted to have all the circles be drawn using ONE list of points generated ONCE. I could draw some percentage of the points to represent life lost. When I tried to refactor for this, drawing became very, very broken. If I had more time to work this out I think the game would be much faster and much smoother. All in all, I’m pleased. I hope you play my game, and I hope you have fun playing it! -- Schell Scivally schell(a)efnx.com (efsubenovex(a)gmail.com) http://blog.efnx.com http://github.com/efnx

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[lisp-game-dev] my game
by Aaron Maus 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Alrighty. Here's what I've been able to come up with in a month's time. SUPER Bourtange! (not to be confused with Schell's "Bourtange") The source is here: http://github.com/lostandsupine/super-bourtange I wrote it in clisp, on a netbook running windows, using cl-opengl. I had a really fun time making this. Seems like most of my lisp projects never get finished, so it's nice to have an external deadline to keep me on track. It's a very asteroidsy space defense game. Asteroids fall down, and you have to shoot them. You've got guns, missiles that follow a parabolic path, and a whole menu full of upgrades. This was my first experience with collision-detection, and rather than do any research I just made my own from scratch. It doesn't seem very efficient, but it works on a small scale game such as this. Anyway, thanks to the hosts of ILGE 2010, and thanks to Schell for telling me that this was going on in the first place! -aaron

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[lisp-game-dev] Evil Slayer postmortem
by Shawn Betts 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Hi lisp gamers, I started late and didn't have much time to work on my game. Using lispbuilder-sdl I built an editor and the beginnings of a 2d side scrolling hack'n'slash game. I thought I'd shoot for something like castlevania as you can tell from the candles. The code is pretty much garbage. I coded fast and furiously in my limited time available without care for anything but git'n'r done. I only got as far as a man who can run and jump around the level and I only got collision detection on his feet. So he can walk through walks. This is important to know if you wish to walk through the demo level that I put together. In the demo your goal is to find your way to the DANCE POTTY! http://github.com/sabetts/evilslayer/ There are downloads for windows and osx. Sorry linux, you lose. You might have to kick the code a bit to get it running; I built it against outdated versions of lispbuilder-sdl. Oh, in case you never played those old 2d games: press up to go in the doors. -Shawn

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[lisp-game-dev] [ILGE2010] Robotime
by Quentin Stievenart 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Robotime is a robot-like game, you can find more infos here[1], with a screenshot and some kind of post-mortem. There's also a Mercurial repository here[2]. If you have troubles when trying to launch it, you might set *resources-dir* to the complete path to robotime/resources/ in graphic.lisp (I didn't have this problem, but some people did). Every informations about dependencies etc. can be found in the first link. Quentin [1] http://awesom.eu/~acieroid/ilge/robotime.html [2] http://hg.awesom.eu/robotime/

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[lisp-game-dev] [ILGE2010] Browser Lisp Arcade
by Eric Bergstrome 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

I have a fairly long write-up on my "about" page now, including a postmortem, for anyone interested in that sort of thing. http://norstrulde.org/ilge10/about.html Thanks to everyone who participated and made the Expo so much fun. If you have a fast browser, you can try out the final versions of my games here: http://norstrulde.org/ilge10/index.html Eric

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[lisp-game-dev] [ILGE2010] My Non-Games
by Elliott Slaughter 11 Aug '10

11 Aug '10

Well, I started off in July wanting to do a rewrite of Bunny Slayer<http://code.google.com/p/blackthorn-engine/wiki/BunnySlayer>, but that didn't really get off the ground. Instead, I ended up working some libraries and did some general cleanup. Blackthorn Starter Pack One of my goals for a long time has been to make it as easy as possible to compile and run my game from source. As a step in that direction, I created the Blackthorn Starter Pack, which is basically a tarball with all the libraries you need plus a little glue to make things work. See the wiki link for more information and downloads. http://code.google.com/p/blackthorn-engine/wiki/BlackthornStarterPack Escalator For fun I've been working on Escalator, which is yet another experimental object system for Common Lisp. Escalator is inspired by this blog post on Entity Systems<http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-…>, which are supposedly used in the MMO industry. Escalator is my attempt to provide idiomatic support for Entity Systems in Common Lisp as a high-performance alternative to CLOS. http://bitbucket.org/elliottslaughter/escalator -- Elliott Slaughter "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

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[lisp-game-dev] [ILGE2010] TB Tanks Postmortem
by Brian Taylor 10 Aug '10

10 Aug '10

I wrote TB Tanks for ILGE2010. TB stands for "turn based" and also happens to be a transposition of my initials. Clojure was my dialect. The game should work on any 1.5 or better JVM. * Source: git://github.com/netguy204/1MonthLispGame.git * Screenshots: http://wiki.github.com/netguy204/1MonthLispGame/ * Releases: http://github.com/netguy204/1MonthLispGame/downloads -- This has been fun! I've really enjoyed participating in ILGE2010 and am especially thankful for the friendly and technically excellent community I infiltrated in the process. This is my first >100 line Lisp project. I've read countless tutorials and PG evangelism essays and I've even worked through the first chapter or so of SICP and written my own junky lisp dialect but I didn't really "get it" until now. This project has opened my eyes to the infinite flexibility of the lisp family of languages and the community of creative and exploring minds that gives them life. This community rocks. Thank you all. What went well: * I always have too many projects going on at once but this was a rare case where I was able to stay focused and interested in one thing for the majority of the expo. My attention only really disappeared when my copy of PAIP came in the mail. * I developed in spurts that were typically about an evening long. I started each spurt with a goal I thought could be achieved in the time and I ended with something functional at the end of each. * Almost every other spurt was focused on cleaning up code and abstracting code and concept duplication I had failed to noticed during the previous spurt. * I made many releases. About every other spurt or when I could make a screen shot that looked cool in some new and interesting way. This led to me doing lots of bragging on IRC which really helped to keep me motivated. * Building graphical effects is fun and it's nice to be able to brag and demonstrate cool stuff to non-programmers. I found that it helps keep me motivated. My wife is a non-programmer so being able to show her something graphical and take advantage of her inspirations as well made this even more enjoyable to work on. * The Lisp development work-flow is a thing of beauty. Lisp + Slime is a far more effective development environment than Java + Eclipse (my day job.) After each evening of coding in the promised land of Lisp I was pretty disappointed to have to spend the following day in the Java desert. It was a bit like going repeatedly going back into Plato's cave and having to pretend that I didn't know what all the shadows really were. What Went Badly: * Every time I sat down and focused on designing something general ("proper" software design) I ended up taking forever and producing something useless. Every time I just coded like a monkey on fire I ended up with something dead-ugly that I could then abstract and generalize into something broadly useful. I had to rediscover this truth at least 3 times. I should have done more flaming-monkey and less aspiring architect. * Speaking of monkey like critters: The Java sound API was designed by lemurs and documented by them as well. That was 5 days of zero fun. * While I'm griping about bad code: The JLayer API (which, I gather is the favorite java hotness for decoding mp3's) is not well designed. I lost a good 2 days to an undocumented side-effect of a particular function call. (I really didn't expect it to be trashing my decode buffer behind my back. Sheesh guys! At least document that sort of thing!) * I didn't spend the time optimizing that I should have. This is an unusual mistake for me since usually I optimize too early and before I have hard data. This time I know there are some serious inefficiencies in the way I'm rendering and I just didn't get around to making it better. Expect this game to be a resource hog. That's all for me. Thanks again to everyone that made this expo such a great experience. I've enjoyed getting to know this community and getting a lot more experience in Lisp. Regards, Brian Taylor (wubo)

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[lisp-game-dev] [ILGE2010] Push
by Morgan Veyret 09 Aug '10

09 Aug '10

It's time to release my entry for the ILGE2010. You can find the code at: http://github.com/patzy/push You'll need glop (http://github.com/patzy/glop) and glaw ( http://github.com/patzy/glaw) It's supposed to work on both linux and windows but I only really tested on linux. You can get binaries at http://appart.kicks-ass.net/patzy/files/ilge2010/(may not be the latest version). The postmortem is at http://github.com/patzy/blob/master/postmortem.org Some screenshots are attached. I tried to send the same email with screenshots attached but it looks like it required moderation so I put the screenshots here: http://appart.kicks-ass.net/patzy/files/ilge2010/ -- Patzy

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[lisp-game-dev] [POST-MORTEM] Engine Troubles over Tentacle Planet
by Erik Winkels 09 Aug '10

09 Aug '10

Blogificated here: http://aerique.blogspot.com/2010/08/ilge-2010-post-mortem-engine-troubles.h… This is a ASCII repost of the above link: 1 Progress ~~~~~~~~~~ I have made very little progress since the last report, mainly due to the little time that was available to me. Only two things were done: 1. The source code was cleaned up a little. 2. A windows binary was made (OpenGL only). In the short term I will not work on ETOTP anymore but perhaps for ILGE 2011 or another challenge or expo I'll continue where I left off. 2 What Went Right ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - Making wrapper functions in C for Ogre's C++ methods and adding them to ECL from C using ECL's API. I used this approach because the inverse (making the C wrapper code from Lisp) gave me segmentation faults and didn't get me very far about 2 years ago. (Note: this was using ECL functionality, not CFFI for which there's Okra.) - Compiling a C program on both Linux and Windows that was (dynamically) linked to ECL, Ogre and OIS. This C program can, for example, start a game right away and quit back to the OS but it can also provide a CL REPL (like ECL's `si:toplevel') so one can interactively play with a 3D scene. Since it's just a plain CL one can load extra packages and perhaps start Slime. 3 What Went Wrong ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - Compiling a statically linked binary on Linux. This didn't go as easily as I had hoped and was starting to eat into my time budget. - ManualObjects and shadows. I had to resort to Ogre's prefab entities to get shadows working the way I wanted in the time that I had available. 4 What I Learned ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - ECL is a really good option for embedding a CL implementation in C(++) programs. Juanjo has been working on ECL for years now and he's still going strong. Questions on the mailing-list are generally answered within hours. - One doesn't just add "-static" to a build rule and be done with it :-) - Perlin noise is usable to animate objects with. Definitely for prototyping since it's so easy and quick to implement. - I should brush up on my maths. 5 Source & Binary ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The source code and the Windows binary are available here: http://www.aerique.net/software/etotp/. I have not given the source code its separate GitHub repository since it will be added to Okra. 5.1 Linux Dependencies ====================== ECL (10.4.1) configured "--with-cxx". (Feel free to try without it, I haven't.) Debian: libogre-dev libois-dev ogre-plugins-cgprogrammanager 5.2 Windows Dependencies ======================== I develop on Linux but the build is checked and tested on Windows using MinGW and MSYS. Either MSYS 1.10 or 1.11 was used, it doesn't really matter. The MinGW release that was used is TDM-GCC 4.4.1 but I see there's a 4.5.0 release out now. Ogre SDK 1.6.1 for MinGW (there's no later 1.6.x SDK for MinGW). You can try the 1.7.x SDK for MinGW since the Ogre API is pretty stable, but I can make no guarantees that it will work.

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[lisp-game-dev] Bourtange v1.0!
by Schell Scivally 09 Aug '10

09 Aug '10

Hi guys, I just finished my sprint for the deadline. I've checked in the code to my github. There's a .asd to get the thing started. Let me know what you think! http://github.com/efnx/kabukitheatre.bourtange -- Schell Scivally schell(a)efnx.com (efsubenovex(a)gmail.com) http://blog.efnx.com http://github.com/efnx

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[lisp-game-dev] Game of Life, first release
by Замковий/Олексій 07 Aug '10

07 Aug '10

Hi, i have released Game of Life implemented in Lisp using opengl. Here is announce http://olexiy.info/article/7 and look for repository here http://github.com/html/gol

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[lisp-game-dev] My first version of Bourtange (a planetary fort defense game)
by Schell Scivally 01 Aug '10

01 Aug '10

Hi guys. First off I wanted to say thanks for helping me with my initial foray into lisp development. That said, I wrote a blog post detailing my progress on the game so far. If you'd like to read it at my blog, it's here: http://efnx.com/lisp-game-progress/. For those less click happy I'll post it in this email (hopefully the formatting doesn't get all wacked out): So after my first (almost) 30 days of learning lisp<http://efnx.com/lisp-game-competition/>, I have a playable game. The gameplay is a cross between tower defense<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_defense> and orbient <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbient>. You control a planet-base (the core) in the center of the screen. This core comes equipped with one weapon, the core-blast. Enemies are generated at the edge of the screen, in the spawning-belt, and are drawn toward your core by gravity. When enemies collide with the core, the core looses life. Life is displayed as a green outline around the core and when your core is out of life, it explodes. When an enemy dies, which happens either by colliding with your core, being hit by a blast or being thrown past the spawning belt, you gain resources. Resources are displayed by purple boxes in the upper left. You can spend these resources on extra cores and weapons in the weapon-store, which is displayed in the upper right. Below is a screen shot of the game in action. [image: Screen Shot]<http://efnx.com/domains/efnx.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Screen-shot-201…> A lot of work still remains to be done, but I hit the 30 day deadline with this first draft. Luckily, the contest hosts have extended the due date<http://dto.github.com/notebook/2010expo.html> to August 10th. By then I plan to fix some bugs, add more weapons, enemies, a game-over screen and do some optimization. I feel accomplished after learning lisp, though I know I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg and have found my new favorite language. To the hosts of the competition, thanks! You guys have made me a better programer. The source to the game is here<http://github.com/efnx/kabukitheatre.bourtange> and you can download and build the game as you please. Send me a message with your thoughts on my game or my code! -- Schell Scivally schell(a)efnx.com (efsubenovex(a)gmail.com) http://efnx.com http://github.com/efnx

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