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avalanche-games / avalanche

An utility package for making easy building games using Vala and SDL2. Targetting Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and Android.
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[idea] another use: generic cross-platform app making #13

Open arkenidar opened 8 years ago

arkenidar commented 8 years ago

Games are a kind of app but not the only one. I propose to share a common goal: cross-platform app making with Vala. Then the ones interested with games will use game related code (e.g. scene-graph). Other will use "general" app code (a mobile responsive GUI). Some code can be common such as S.D.L. (that will be used in both cases, for drawing the application GUI, for drawing the game scene-graph ). S.D.L. is already cross-platform (both for desktop and mobile platform, maybe there could be a focus on mobile platforms). Vala should be cross platform being based on C language compilers. This could be a good business, in my estimation, perhaps. PS: I was searching for cross-platform C tools such as SDL, GObject, Vala even application GUIs can use scenegraphs. one example of this is the HTML used as a scene-graph in web browsers

PedroHLC commented 8 years ago

Cross compiling Vala apps is easier then it seems, but Vala has two limitations: 1> it requires glib, glib has it owns dependencies, this dependencies doesn't come in-tree on Android for example. 2> Vala is not finished yet, it syntax may change dramatically yet...

chrisfls commented 8 years ago

I'm learning functional programming these days... So not interested on Vala anymore. It looks like @PedroHLC don't wants to take the project forward too.

Just remember, this was a very small and niche project, we never intended it to be great, the real deal was to create a RGSS[1]-like framework with an idiomatic Vala API. This was the single project's purpose, gluing SDL to Vala was a consequence.

If I used some help I would work on some "avalanche"-like project using nim.

While nim is not perfect (no language is), to me it's kinda like a ideal language for games.

EDIT: The only flaw found was that each thread has it's own GC, this is good for servers but not for games. But future versions will additionally include a GC "per thread group" and Nim's type system will be enhanced to accurately model this shared memory heap.

(another reminder: nim's development is going pretty faster than vala)

Also see #12