From: winnocence@... (Innocence)
Date: 2004-07-16T17:32:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Writing games in Ruby?

Wow, huge interrest in this subject - and I though I was the only one
interresed in using Ruby for writing games :P

> Peter Thoman:
> I did the first 2 of that list (with RUDL, which I think is superior to PyGame btw

How so? On the paper RUDL is using PyGame as a template and PyGame
seems to feature more functionality. PyGame is also more mature which
I guess is the reason why it has fewer bugs. Sadly though, it seems
that both projects are stalled in their current state. It's a real
shame but understandable considering it's freeware :(

I see that other posters here (Florian Gross and Gabriele Renzi)
recommend using only SDL (ie. without a wrapping like RUDL). Is this
really an option? I mean, there must be a reason that modules like
PyGame and RUDL exist, ie. for making handling easier. What's your
take on this Peter?

> Florian Gross:
> A good friend of mine is working on creating Ruby bindings for his C++ 
> game framework (called Ruby/Gosu) and another friend of both of us is 
> currently making sure that portability won't be an issue.

Very interresting indeed! Do you think at some point it'll be a viable
alternative to using SDL/RUDL or is it much too soon to say? As far as
I can see RUDL & PyGame both build on top of the Simple DirectMedia
Layer with supposedly is written in C, but from what I can see on
various forums and from what you're saying ("..it has some
SDL-specific problems..."), SDL isn't exactly the Holy Grail. Still if
it's the best there currently, there isn't much to do about it really
:)

Seems to me that the Ruby community would really benefit from having a
superiour toolkit for handling gfx and audio. Whether such a toolkit
builds upon the existing SDL (for compatibility) or on a newer,
optimized C framework is hard to say, but presonally I'd prefer the
latter. While Ruby (or any similar high-level language) will probably
never become the language of choice for commercial game programming,
it could become a viable, friendly option for writing games, opening
the programming world to many novice free-time programmers.