[gambit-list] Video game written in Gambit

Pavel Dudrenov dudrenov at gmail.com
Fri Aug 14 02:47:47 EDT 2009


I spend some time today thinking what would be the difficult/challenging
parts in writing a game in scheme with Gambit-C kind of system. ...

So over all a lot of hot spots could be moved to C. Tight loops can happen
completely in C. Game primitives can have their constructors, accessors,
mutators, etc. in C as well and their representation in scheme could be as
some atomic value, like an unsigned int for example, that would not require
gc and would be easily communicated between scheme and the C functions. A
lot of things could be declared constant, or as such as to not be GC'ed at
all...

No matter of what I thought there was one thing that always came up,
eventually the garbage collection would kick in and would want to do some
house cleaning. More then likely the game would feel sluggish or stalling in
at that point, no? Was that a problem when you guys were writing this game?
And if it was a problem then how did you got around it? Did this impact the
way you had to write the code for the game?

This may even not be an issue when Gambit is used, in which case forgive my
naive questions, but I've mainly used Gambit and scheme for doing exercises
in various books. I don't claim to have deep understanding of it or how it's
best to talk between Gambit and C.

Could you guys share any thoughts on the gc problem or in general of any
challenges you faced? That's is if your NDAs allows you talk about this, no
matter how abstractly.

Thanks,
Pavel


On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:56 AM, David St-Hilaire <
sthilaid at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> Adrien Piérard wrote:
> > 2009/8/14 David St-Hilaire <sthilaid at iro.umontreal.ca>:
> >
> >> Hehe, I wouldn't count on that... But, some might be interested to know
> >> that Guillaume and I are pushing our bosses to get the chance to also
> >> make a linux release. But there is nothing done toward this so far. ;)
> >>
> >
> > Did you work on that game?
> > I'd be interested in getting the names of the people behind this game
> > (at least the coders), if this isn't covered by any NDA…
> >
> Well this game was developed by Robert Lizee and designed by Martin
> Lizee. Guillaume Germain and I both joined/created the dev team in May.
> There is also a summer student working with us. I mostly worked on the
> internationalization of the game and Guillaume on refactoring the build
> system. We also both debugged and fixed problems until the final release
> was made.
>
> You might also be interested in trying to switch the langage to Japanese
> ;). I also implemented a kana input manager, but I'm not sure if it was
> removed from the final build at the last minute or not...
>
> Working for this game was a lot of fun! I am looking forward for our
> next release for the iPhone! :)
> > Also, remember that you don't have to give access to the source code
> > for free either.
> > A licence like the GPL says roughly that "you can sell sell the source
> > for at most the price of the binaries".
> > So, given that the game (which is not GPL, I know), sells for a cheap
> > price, the source could be sold too.
> >
> > Say: "binary, CAD 12.99", "source: CAD 30", "pack binary+source: CAD 50".
> > And with a proper licence on the source (which would be mostly "no
> > forking of the game" [1]), that could do some extra revenue.
> >
> > What do you think of that ?
> >
> I can't answer this question without my lawyer... hehe
>
> David
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