I will try to make a mock-up now and send it here, please help me remember if I forget... =X.
As the code of your UI-system is in common lisp, I guess it won't be too hard to make it an addition on Climacs and integrate it already :). Maybe you can give it a try and we can bake up some basic code already that way. I see you already use github, I will dump climacs and dependencies on github as well as soon as I got it running (I wanted to 'release' the ideas already so I'll have some people pushing and out there to help :) currently the clx is biting me... I will keep you up to date on my efforts, although it's pretty much a free time only project) and maybe create a superproject with climacs, dependencies, your project etc to get new developers up and running quickly (although it's pretty much vaporware now... but climacs is not so we have something to get starting anyway :)).
So, on to the drawing!
2010/4/3 David O'Toole dto1138@gmail.com
Hi Joop,
This sounds like a good idea. Expanding the tools space is great.
I am working on a project with a few similar goals but some big differences. My game engine and IDE were written originally in Emacs Lisp in late 2006, and then over the last few years I've gradually rewritten it in Common Lisp. In the process I built a set of CL user interface widgets that behave in roughly emacsy ways. So my IDE is now split into two portions: GNU Emacs for the lisp code editing and SLIME stuff, and a spreadsheet-like Common Lisp UI system for the map editor and such.
If you are curious to see, my game engine is at http://dto.github.com/notebook/xe2-reference.html
What are your thoughts on user interfaces?
On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Joop Kiefte ikojba@gmail.com wrote:
Hello guys, At the moment I am gathering together all pieces of the Climacs editor to start an open source project to create a modular, extensible, capable and easy to use game-development IDE. Until I switched to Linux I have made
some
games with Game Maker, a fine but windows only piece of software that is
too
commercialized nowadays for me to like it as it is now, and I (and some others as well I think) have been looking for a good replacement on linux for quite some time. As most good programmers I am extremely lazy and
don't
like to do repetitive work if I can prevent it, and as such have skipped things like py-game. I have done a little bit of fiddling with clojure and as I see it now
some
gaming stuff is coming up for clojure as well, but I didn't feel like
gaming
is the perfect bet for clojure. Now I am programming for a small company
in
common lisp and doing that I feel like I need some open source project to keep in shape on common lisp on the side line. So I thought, let's make a game maker clone! I am not going to make things from scratch, it won't be useful to do and besides, if there is nothing to build upon, we won't even get started. So
I
thought this might be a perfect use for climacs. It might even be a
revival
of the climacs project if you like. Gamemacs is just a working name (and
a
bit more, as I will explain later), I mean to contribute to the several sub-projects and with normal add-ons as much as possible, to keep
everything
as modular as possible. To not keep things vague, and to have a good direction, this is a list of things I want to have for a nice game-editor (and in general to make of Climacs an emacs-killer instead of an emacs-clone), most of it taken from Game Maker:
- Integration of something like Lispbuilder (most probably just
Lispbuilder).
- It has SDL
- It has OpenGL
- It has an .exe-creator/binary compiler
- Integration of the .exe-creator/binary compiler in the editor itself
- Publish versions of Climacs compiled that way to make further
development
easier
- so for basic development of games you don't even need to install
anything else than that compiled version of climacs
- we can call this compiled package with extensions Gamemacs, and keep
the
source pure climacs, so it remains as modular as it can be
- I would like to have a generic graphical editor for lisp-code on top of
the textual editing mode.
- and this to be extensible with cool graphical editors for example to
create levels (I think I will need to make a mock-up of this idea to get
it
clear)
- Create libraries for game-development that are included by default and
work nicely with the graphical interface so you will be able to make
simple
games with mostly point and click and harder games with a great
emacs-like
editor :) I have all this quite detailed in my head, but after dumping it all here
I
want your input as well, so it will be great to work with. In the end my goal is to have fun creating games on linux and to be able to sketch and prototype and build games all in one place. (If you can develop
everything
for emacs in emacs without leaving it, why shouldn't you be able to
create
games without hassle?) First things I will do anyhow (but help is appreciated on all sides!):
- Put all the dependencies of climacs on Git
- Build climacs and fiddle with it to get accustomed to the inner
workings
- Same with lispbuilder etc.
What do you think? Greetings, Joop Kiefte -- Communication is essential. So we need decent tools when communication is lacking, when language capability is hard to acquire...
Linux-user #496644 (http://counter.li.org) - first touch of linux in
2004
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