From: Alex Gutteridge <alexg@...>
Date: 2006-05-23T10:22:52+09:00
Subject: Re: program writing

On 23 May 2006, at 06:23, corey konrad wrote:

> maybe i shoud look at opengl or something like that, is it possible to
> integrate opengl with ruby or is it even necessary, i could write a  
> text
> game i guess but where would i start is what i dont understand. i just
> dont get how to begin something like that because i dont understand  
> what
> is involved. How do i write a method to allow people to connect to the
> program and play the game etc i just have no idea i would have to look
> at other peoples source code and rack my brain over it for a couple
> weeks to try and figure out how it works but then i would just be  
> doing
> something that has already been done. There are hundreds of those  
> games
> all over the internet i find it hard to get excited about things like
> that. I dont know maybe i should just stick with art, i would like to
> get into graphics programming and actually be one of the people who
> works on programming things like maya and poser etc but i cant even
> begin to fathom how all of that is done is there a grahics api for  
> ruby?

There's more to computer/algorithmic art than just writing tools  
(like Maya and Poser) for other artists to use. A friend of mine at  
work wanted to learn some graphics programming, so he wrote a short  
program that could take a bitmap and a few parameters on the command  
line and generate a new distorted image. It was simple and dumb, but  
we had a fun (and creative!) afternoon sticking photos of our faces  
into the algorithm and seeing what weird effects we could come up  
with. This was written in C, but there's no reason why Ruby couldn't  
do something similar with the SDL or even OpenGL interfaces.

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-sdl/
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/opengl/

If you're more interested in music then I'd recommend SuperCollider3:  
it uses Smalltalk-like (and hence vaguely Ruby-like) syntax to  
generate music/sounds. There's a whole new learning curve to tackle,  
but it might be fun along the way if you have an interest in music. I  
don't know if there's anything similar for Ruby itself.

http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/

Playing around with these tools is OK, but to progress you WILL need  
to get a project to work on. Even if (to start with) it's something  
totally stupid and made-up. As one of the previous replies mentioned,  
there are very few novelists who can just sit down and write without  
having a larger plan in mind.

Dr Alex Gutteridge
Post-Doctoral Researcher

Bioinformatics Center
Institute for Chemical Research
Kyoto University
Gokasho, Uji, Kyoto 611-0011
Japan