Dont try to tackle more than one at a time (my problem) thats for sure.
···
-----Original Message-----
From: "Joe Wiltrout" <wiltroutja@hotmail.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: 7/12/2007 11:15 PM
Subject: Re: I need serious help!
unknown wrote:
In message <3086e6b698191ec82127967a5cb62076@ruby-forum.com>, Joe > Wiltrout writes:
I sorta have no money to use on books and the like. I was hoping I could
avoid buying anything by consulting the greater population of Ruby
programmers. Maybe get someone to post a link to a good website that
dumbs the tutorials down enough for me to understand. And who knows?
Maybe I will get good enough that I will be able to go over to C++ and
not be this stupid. But I have heard that text-based games are easier to
make than games with moving graphics, so I might start off with a Sky
Pirate text-based game instead. It all depends whats easiest for a
beginner.
If you wanna write text adventures, my recommendation would be Inform 6.
(I don't like 7 as much.) It's a domain-specific language, but gets a
lot of advantages from it; on the other hand, it is probably by far the
quirkiest language I've ever used.
Ruby's a nice generic language for learning things. You can find
Pine's learning to program online, although I couldn't swear that it's
word-for-word identical to the printed book.
Depending on what kind of "no money" is involved, if it's possible for
you
to save up a few bucks here and there, it's not that hard to get a good
reference or something, and it is VERY useful. (You might consider the
PDF version of the PickAxe, which is cheaper than paper.)
-s
And would this 'Inform 6' be harder than Ruby? Because I don't even get
Ruby very well. And what's this 'Text Adventure' type thing? If you mean
text-based game, then I'll check it out. And say I was going to make
some sort of 2-d but still good graphic game, would it be possible in
Ruby, or would I have to use C++ or Java or something else? And could
you post a link to this Pines Learning to program? Because if it is as
helpful as you imply it to be, I would very much like to see it. And
define Quirky. I need to know what you mean before I go and confuse
myself on another coding language.
Dont try to tackle more than one at a time (my problem) thats for sure.
Great idea. My first problem is I need to know if coding games is
possible in Ruby. According to Why's, atleast Text Based Games are
possible. Problem solved. Next problem, I need to learn Ruby. Now im
gunna read thru some of Why's.
You can create just about any piece of software you like with Ruby. Ruby
is better suited for some things than others, however. For instance,
writing an operating system in Ruby might be a bit challenging
(especially since I'm not sure how practical it is to embed a Ruby
interpreter in your bootloader).
So . . . yes, you absolutely can write games in Ruby. I'm not a game
programmer myself, however, so it's a little outside my range of
expertise.
···
On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 12:40:54PM +0900, Joe Wiltrout wrote:
Skt wrote:
> Dont try to tackle more than one at a time (my problem) thats for sure.
Great idea. My first problem is I need to know if coding games is
possible in Ruby. According to Why's, atleast Text Based Games are
possible. Problem solved. Next problem, I need to learn Ruby. Now im
gunna read thru some of Why's.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Patrick J. LoPresti: "Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1)
Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk
quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"
Skt wrote:
> Dont try to tackle more than one at a time (my problem) thats for sure.
Great idea. My first problem is I need to know if coding games is
possible in Ruby. According to Why's, atleast Text Based Games are
possible. Problem solved. Next problem, I need to learn Ruby. Now im
gunna read thru some of Why's.
You can create just about any piece of software you like with Ruby.
Ruby
is better suited for some things than others, however. For instance,
writing an operating system in Ruby might be a bit challenging
(especially since I'm not sure how practical it is to embed a Ruby
interpreter in your bootloader).
So . . . yes, you absolutely can write games in Ruby. I'm not a game
programmer myself, however, so it's a little outside my range of
expertise.
What do you do with Ruby? I'v heard that programming better graphic
games like WoW would be hellishly hard. To my friend Matt, this stuff
seems to come naturally. To me, not so. I read 8 chapters of Why's and
took the in-browser tutorial of Ruby, and most of what I learned
involves making ("Damn those syntax errors!") go backwards. With ("Damn
those syntax errors!").reverse. And most of the other stuff just floated
around like jelly in space.
···
On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 12:40:54PM +0900, Joe Wiltrout wrote:
If your ambition is to create a game like WoW, then you're barking up
the wrong tree. It's possible in Ruby, sure... but you're not going to
like it.
WoW embeds a language called Lua... it's what is used to write mods.
However, it's not a powerful enough language for the actual game to be
written in.
Having a game that was scriptable in Ruby would be outstanding, and
certainly possible now... but I think it's going to be a long time
before there's a successful game that's written in a langauge that's
higher level than C/C++.
Ben
···
On Sat, Jul 14, 2007, Joe Wiltrout wrote:
What do you do with Ruby? I'v heard that programming better graphic
games like WoW would be hellishly hard. To my friend Matt, this stuff
seems to come naturally. To me, not so. I read 8 chapters of Why's and
took the in-browser tutorial of Ruby, and most of what I learned
involves making ("Damn those syntax errors!") go backwards. With ("Damn
those syntax errors!").reverse. And most of the other stuff just floated
around like jelly in space.
Me, personally? Glorified shell scripting, data munging, and web
development, mostly. I'm thinking about hacking together some minimal
GUI configuration tools using something like the Glade library. The
occasional "stupid programmer trick" for fun is also amongst the things I
do. I'm probably forgetting three or four more things I do with Ruby,
but at the moment the sysadmin scripts and web development work is taking
up more of my programming time than anything else.
Writing something like WoW from scratch would indeed be a herculean task.
There are some libraries for various languages that eliminate a lot of
the more complex work, but that requires a fair bit of research to choose
your libraries well and learn their APIs.
···
On Sat, Jul 14, 2007 at 02:53:08AM +0900, Joe Wiltrout wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 12:40:54PM +0900, Joe Wiltrout wrote:
>> Skt wrote:
>> > Dont try to tackle more than one at a time (my problem) thats for sure.
>>
>> Great idea. My first problem is I need to know if coding games is
>> possible in Ruby. According to Why's, atleast Text Based Games are
>> possible. Problem solved. Next problem, I need to learn Ruby. Now im
>> gunna read thru some of Why's.
>
> You can create just about any piece of software you like with Ruby.
> Ruby
> is better suited for some things than others, however. For instance,
> writing an operating system in Ruby might be a bit challenging
> (especially since I'm not sure how practical it is to embed a Ruby
> interpreter in your bootloader).
>
> So . . . yes, you absolutely can write games in Ruby. I'm not a game
> programmer myself, however, so it's a little outside my range of
> expertise.
What do you do with Ruby? I'v heard that programming better graphic
games like WoW would be hellishly hard. To my friend Matt, this stuff
seems to come naturally. To me, not so. I read 8 chapters of Why's and
took the in-browser tutorial of Ruby, and most of what I learned
involves making ("Damn those syntax errors!") go backwards. With ("Damn
those syntax errors!").reverse. And most of the other stuff just floated
around like jelly in space.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Patrick J. LoPresti: "Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1)
Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk
quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"
I'v heard that programming better graphic
games like WoW would be..
You're kidding right? WoW is written in C++ (Objective C for Mac which
is C++). Lua (another scripting language) is embedded and is used for
moding by Blizzard and the community. Games have to be fast and work
closely with hardware (like graphic cards). They are witten in the
lowest language you can hire. Right now, that's c/c++. Though be fun to
see WoW written in Assembler. But good luck finding programmers.
Can you write games in Ruby? Of course. But would it make sense? No.
Well mabe text-based games. Or games that wouldn't require 3D graphics.
Me, personally? Glorified shell scripting, data munging, and web
development, mostly. I'm thinking about hacking together some minimal
GUI configuration tools using something like the Glade library. The
occasional "stupid programmer trick" for fun is also amongst the things I
do. I'm probably forgetting three or four more things I do with Ruby,
but at the moment the sysadmin scripts and web development work is taking
up more of my programming time than anything else.
As an example from my own experience, I do weekly summaries of a mailing
list I'm on. I wrote a Ruby CGI script to do most of the repetitive
parts for me, so I just browse through writing up annotations and making
sure subject line drift is managed cleanly. (Harder than it sounded at
first.) It took maybe three-four hours to get the script working well
enough to meet my needs, and it saves me about an hour a week...
I also used Ruby to write a program to generate suitably-arcane passwords
and remember which sites it generated passwords for. Nothing fancy. Mostly
just an excuse to mess around a bit with Ruby's string handling.
Writing something like WoW from scratch would indeed be a herculean task.
There are some libraries for various languages that eliminate a lot of
the more complex work, but that requires a fair bit of research to choose
your libraries well and learn their APIs.
Ruby would not be my first choice for the bulk of the game, just because
that's a task that really DOES need the performance of a high-end system,
and even a factor of two slowdown might not be acceptable.
It'd be interesting to compare with Lua for the in-game GUI engine.
-s
···
In message <20070714051305.GB5258@demeter.hydra>, Chad Perrin writes:
I'm not sure what you mean by "Objective C for Mac which is C++".
Objective C and C++ are two entirely separate languages. Both are (in
theory at least) object oriented extensions of C, but they take very
different approaches to it with substantially different ideas of how to
accomplish that object orientation. ObjC is also an actual proper
superset of C, whereas C++ is not, strictly speaking.
In fact, Objective C's object model might be said to have more in common
with Ruby's than with C++'s.
If you didn't mean that ObjC is C++ for the Mac, then I apologize for
misunderstanding.
···
On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 04:19:41AM +0900, Stephen Cox wrote:
Joe Wiltrout wrote:
> I'v heard that programming better graphic
> games like WoW would be..
You're kidding right? WoW is written in C++ (Objective C for Mac which
is C++). Lua (another scripting language) is embedded and is used for
moding by Blizzard and the community. Games have to be fast and work
closely with hardware (like graphic cards). They are witten in the
lowest language you can hire. Right now, that's c/c++. Though be fun to
see WoW written in Assembler. But good luck finding programmers.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Ben Franklin: "As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others
we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of
ours, and this we should do freely and generously."
You're kidding right? WoW is written in C++ (Objective C for Mac which
is C++). Lua (another scripting language) is embedded and is used for
moding by Blizzard and the community. Games have to be fast and work
closely with hardware (like graphic cards). They are witten in the
lowest language you can hire. Right now, that's c/c++.
Actually, for the record, any language that is actually compiled would
qualify. That would include Delphi / Pascal. It would sort of include
visual basic since, as I understand it, VB code is translated into C/C++
and then compiled.
On Sat, Jul 14, 2007 at 02:20:06PM +0900, Peter Seebach wrote:
>Writing something like WoW from scratch would indeed be a herculean task.
>There are some libraries for various languages that eliminate a lot of
>the more complex work, but that requires a fair bit of research to choose
>your libraries well and learn their APIs.
Ruby would not be my first choice for the bulk of the game, just because
that's a task that really DOES need the performance of a high-end system,
and even a factor of two slowdown might not be acceptable.
It'd be interesting to compare with Lua for the in-game GUI engine.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
McCloctnick the Lucid: "The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your
time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do."
On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 04:19:41AM +0900, Stephen Cox wrote:
see WoW written in Assembler. But good luck finding programmers.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Objective C for Mac which is C++".
Objective C and C++ are two entirely separate languages. Both are (in
theory at least) object oriented extensions of C...
And that's what I meant. Bad placement of words on my part.
Objective C does have some similarity to Ruby, but that's because both inherited similar object ideas from SmallTalk.
But Obj-C is still a strict superset of C. There is also Obj-C++ which is not as clearly a superset of C++ (some C++ doesn't work in Obj-C++)
That said, Obj-C is about to undergo its biggest changes since it was created, Objective-C 2.0 is coming with the new OS X in the Fall. It is going to be garbage collected by default, which should make the writing of code much less troublesome. And it may make it more Ruby-like, but it is still a strongly typed language, even though it allows you to do things with objects similar to Ruby, by checking at run-time if an object responds to some method call.
···
On Jul 14, 2007, at 3:39 PM, Chad Perrin wrote:
On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 04:19:41AM +0900, Stephen Cox wrote:
Joe Wiltrout wrote:
I'v heard that programming better graphic
games like WoW would be..
You're kidding right? WoW is written in C++ (Objective C for Mac which
is C++). Lua (another scripting language) is embedded and is used for
moding by Blizzard and the community. Games have to be fast and work
closely with hardware (like graphic cards). They are witten in the
lowest language you can hire. Right now, that's c/c++. Though be fun to
see WoW written in Assembler. But good luck finding programmers.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Objective C for Mac which is C++".
Objective C and C++ are two entirely separate languages. Both are (in
theory at least) object oriented extensions of C, but they take very
different approaches to it with substantially different ideas of how to
accomplish that object orientation. ObjC is also an actual proper
superset of C, whereas C++ is not, strictly speaking.
In fact, Objective C's object model might be said to have more in common
with Ruby's than with C++'s.
If you didn't mean that ObjC is C++ for the Mac, then I apologize for
misunderstanding.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Ben Franklin: "As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others
we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of
ours, and this we should do freely and generously."
Some compiled languages are faster than others, depending on the
quality of the compiler and the information the language exposes to
it.
APL, an interpreted language, is probably much faster than C for most
of it's use cases (not sure though).
Aur
···
On 7/16/07, Lloyd Linklater <lloyd@2live4.com> wrote:
> You're kidding right? WoW is written in C++ (Objective C for Mac which
> is C++). Lua (another scripting language) is embedded and is used for
> moding by Blizzard and the community. Games have to be fast and work
> closely with hardware (like graphic cards). They are witten in the
> lowest language you can hire. Right now, that's c/c++.
Actually, for the record, any language that is actually compiled would
qualify. That would include Delphi / Pascal. It would sort of include
visual basic since, as I understand it, VB code is translated into C/C++
and then compiled.
VB.NET compiles to something called the "Common Intermediate Language", a
bit like Java's "bytecode" compilation. The CIL is then JIT-compiled to
native code and executed by the CRE ("Common Runtime Engine"). The
process isn't stunningly fast, however -- C# runs only about as fast as
Java *before* Java undergoes days of optimization by its VM.
I seem to recall that VB (before the .NET days) used to be compiled to C
or C++, which was then compiled to native binary, however.
···
On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 09:56:47PM +0900, Lloyd Linklater wrote:
> You're kidding right? WoW is written in C++ (Objective C for Mac which
> is C++). Lua (another scripting language) is embedded and is used for
> moding by Blizzard and the community. Games have to be fast and work
> closely with hardware (like graphic cards). They are witten in the
> lowest language you can hire. Right now, that's c/c++.
Actually, for the record, any language that is actually compiled would
qualify. That would include Delphi / Pascal. It would sort of include
visual basic since, as I understand it, VB code is translated into C/C++
and then compiled.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Marvin Minsky: "It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could
actually spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game."
"My first problem is I need to know if coding games is possible in Ruby.
"
Yes, but come to freenode (irc) #rubygame (if you want to use the SDL
wrapper that is, i dont think allegro or clanlib have one. There is also
ShatteredRuby (?) but i think the dev was a bit silent the last some
months on it)
Cool. It's always nice to share blame for a misunderstanding.
···
On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 07:19:13AM +0900, Stephen Cox wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 04:19:41AM +0900, Stephen Cox wrote:
>> see WoW written in Assembler. But good luck finding programmers.
> I'm not sure what you mean by "Objective C for Mac which is C++".
> Objective C and C++ are two entirely separate languages. Both are (in
> theory at least) object oriented extensions of C...
And that's what I meant. Bad placement of words on my part.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Larry Wall: "A script is what you give the actors. A program is what you
give the audience."
Objective C does have some similarity to Ruby, but that's because
both inherited similar object ideas from SmallTalk.
But Obj-C is still a strict superset of C. There is also Obj-C++
which is not as clearly a superset of C++ (some C++ doesn't work in
Obj-C++)
I hadn't heard of Objective C++. That sounds like a bad joke.
That said, Obj-C is about to undergo its biggest changes since it was
created, Objective-C 2.0 is coming with the new OS X in the Fall. It
is going to be garbage collected by default, which should make the
writing of code much less troublesome. And it may make it more Ruby-
like, but it is still a strongly typed language, even though it
allows you to do things with objects similar to Ruby, by checking at
run-time if an object responds to some method call.
I think you mean "statically", not "strongly", typed.
···
On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 02:08:42PM +0900, John Joyce wrote:
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
MacUser, Nov. 1990: "There comes a time in the history of any project when
it becomes necessary to shoot the engineers and begin production."
More a poorly documented and perhaps wisely neglected creature.
Not many people know much about it.
AFAIK it allows you to wrap C++ in Obj-C much the way C can easily be wrapped in Obj-C, but the obvious limitations are if you get too much C++ stuff happening, things could go crazy.
Even apple quietly uses C++ for some things like device drivers.
···
On Jul 15, 2007, at 1:27 AM, Chad Perrin wrote:
On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 02:08:42PM +0900, John Joyce wrote:
Objective C does have some similarity to Ruby, but that's because
both inherited similar object ideas from SmallTalk.
But Obj-C is still a strict superset of C. There is also Obj-C++
which is not as clearly a superset of C++ (some C++ doesn't work in
Obj-C++)
I hadn't heard of Objective C++. That sounds like a bad joke.
When you run GNU C, you can generally mix and match any keyword and
operation from any C language, including a few that GNU made up.
That sounds like a bad joke.
Maaster!! You have created ... a monster!!
Yes, Igor! By tr-r-ransplanting Smalltalk's virtual dispatch system into zee
skull of my cadaver of zee C language, zee virtual messages shall move zee
arms and zee legs of structs and ints! Und zey vill doo our biddings!! Vee
vill rool zee wooorld!! Mwha-ha-haha!