dear Lispers and dear game-devs,
I'm working on a project to make games on Lisp for smartphones.
I'm writing to let you all know of this project. If someone is
interested, please let me know, so we can advance the project faster
and make better code.
The project works using ECL, which has being ported to Android and iOS
thanks to the work of Ram Krishnan and Sylvain Ageneau. Right now, you
can start ECL on these devices, load and execute any Lisp code. As an
example, which is included in the project, you can run a Swank server
on the devices, and connect to it from Slime.
I'm starting from those projects and I'm attempting to make the
connections necessary for making games. My first target is Android.
Right now, Lisp can communicate with OpenGL (but there are some
crashes...), and Java can communicate touch events to Lisp.
The first goal is to be able to draw OpenGL primitives (without
crashing), draw textures, and output sound. The second goal is to
build the same connections for iOS. The third goal, for the remote
future, is to have internet connections. And the fourth goal, for an
even farther future, is to read gyroscopes data and GPS data.
This project is not aiming at making a Lisp game engine. That is left
as an exercise for the developer. But with all the connections there,
making your game/engine should be easier.
Also, since this project is aiming at releasing games through the App
Store, it cannot contain any GPL software. All my work is on the
public domain (as in "yes, you can go, use it, make money, and never
tell me"). ECL is released under the LGPL license, so there should be
no problems if you fulfill your responsibilities.
If you want to check the (still crashing) project go to:
https://github.com/o-simon/ecl-smartphones
If you want to collaborate, please send me an email. I'll give you
write access to the repository.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
--
Simón Ortiz B., M.Sc., Ing. en Computación
Linux Registered User #388735
Hi everyone,
This spring I was lucky enough to be able to spend time working on something
I've wanted to do for a long time--work on a full-blown 3D game engine in
Common Lisp. As a part of CSE 125 at UCSD <http://pisa.ucsd.edu/cse125/> (a
senior design project course in video game), I worked a team with 4 other
people to create a 3D multiplayer video game in 10 weeks. The result is
Blackthorn 3D, and an accompanying demo game named LKCAS.
The game engine uses cl-opengl (with lispbuilder-sdl) for graphics, and
supports particle effects, portals, skinning and animation (with a loader
for the Collada <http://www.collada.org/> format). The custom-built, pure-CL
physics engine has support for swept sphere collisions against the static
environment, allowing us to do things like have the players walk on all the
walls in our levels. The network code was written with usocket and userial,
and easily supports 4 players over a LAN, or even over the internet (albeit
with the latency of your connection). See the following video for an example
of what the engine can do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz1OFjVLvcc
The course is now over, and I am transitioning Blackthorn 3D into being an
open source project. I am planning on being the primary maintainer for the
engine, and am looking to see whether anyone in the community is interested
in helping out. At this point, I am still working on extracting
game-specific code from the engine, but I am hoping that the engine will be
usable in 3rd-party games by the end of the summer.
For more information, source code, and binaries (for Windows), see the
project page:
http://code.google.com/p/blackthorn-engine-3d/
--
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