[Wolves] Bloke vs. Bloke: graphics engines: some initial thoughts

[Aquarius]

Last night at the LUG meeting, we talked about a game, Bloke vs. Bloke,
which would be the old Spy vs. Spy (you all remember it, I'm sure).
Peter went away to look at the old game itself, and I had a lok around
at which tools we could use to build it. Now, there are really only
four possibilities for the coding language (form a graphics engine
point of view): C, Perl, Python, and custom languages (i.e., specific
to the engine). We liked the idea of using an existing engine because
it means that we don't have to repeatedly reinvent the wheel. However,
there aren't *actually* all that many that are really usable, and
especially not with scripting-language bindings. The major open-source
engine is obviously CrystalSpace. CS appears to have Python bindings,
and I have also seen Perl bindings mentioned, but these things are
rampantly undocumented. The Nebula Engine uses Tcl/Tk (oof) as its
scripting language. Ogre seems to have Python bindings. Everything else
requires you to write in C.

Obviously there's a war between Pete's partisan Perlship and my Python
advocacy, but we both agreed that we don't want to do it in C, since
(a) this project is supposed to be fun, and (b) Spy vs. Spy really,
really does not need really fast things, which is the *only* reason to
use C these days.

I will be investigating Ogre and CS further over the next few days, and
I'll try and report back on their scripting language support, in
particular which ones are usable, and whether you could write a whole
game just in the scripting language. Failing that, we may have to go to
a lower level and use Perl or Pytohn bindings to SDL or similar, which
will give us graphics, sound, etc support but require that we write all
the *game* logic.

All thoughts on this welcome!

Aq.

-- 
Two things I learned for sure during a particularly intense acid trip
in my own lost youth: (1) everything is a trivial special case of
something else; and, (2) death is a bunch of blue spheres.
        -- Tim Peters