Re: [Chicken-users] 3D games in Chicken

[John]

I think a 3D framework in Scheme is a pretty rockin' idea.  I had a 
simple one running in Chicken that worked pretty well, but I ended up 
moving it to Bigloo.  I was more afraid of the copying collector than 
anything else:  It'd be easy enough to allocate all big stuff outside of 
scheme with the FFI, but I feel like I'd still get bitten by the copying 
gc in the end.  Which is kind of a shame, because Chicken's gc seems to 
handle cases that Bigloo doesn't like too much (lots of garbage in a 
short amount of time, which is handled by a minor gc).

The OpenGL interface wasn't too bad to write.  I ended up just adding 
OpenGL functions as I needed them along the way.  And if you don't mind 
names that are a little ugly, you can almost just feed gl.h into cigloo. 
The OpenGL egg for chicken is a pretty good start, and it's nice that it 
has good SDL functionality too.

In the end, I feel a little torn between Chicken and Bigloo. I really 
like the completeness of Chicken's REPL, call/cc and the community. 
Bigloo compiles faster, handles floating point numerics better, and has 
a nice module system.  I'd like to give gambit a try, but I'm not sure 
it'd be worth it.  It's got so little in the way of support libraries, I 
don't see a reasonable object system (meroon doesn't quite work with 
gsc), and the macro system is somewhat broken (syntax-case messes up DSSSL).

I definitely agree that it's a waste of time to try to make Chicken 
bindings for an existing engine.  Almost everything is written in C++ 
for starters -- it feels like interfacing any scheme with any C++ 
application of size will be a long, painful road.  Besides, Scheme will 
never achieve world domination if it's always just an extension language :)

-- John


Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> >  I've thought about binding Chicken to various 3D engines.  I'm inclined to
> > view this as a waste of time, though.  Every 3D engine out there will have
> > its own stupid C++ calls for manipulating the scene graph, and really,
> > that's something you'd rather be doing with Scheme proper.  Having to ape
> > other languages' baloney high level data structures just strikes me as
> > really really tacky and counterproductive.  I'm thinking it is better to
> > implement a 3D engine almost from scratch.  In practice, that means from
> > scratch.
>
> Yes I agree that would be nice, but since you'd want to take as much
> advantage as possible of hardware acceleration, how can you avoid the
> OpenGL API, for the sake of portability?
>
> My goal is not a game, but to mess around with next-generation GUI
> ideas.  I don't even need 3D very badly to do that, but I figure the
> trend is that 3D hardware acceleration is taking over, and the leading
> 2D GUI systems (OS X, Vista and xegl) are taking advantage of it, not
> to mention the 3D ones like Looking Glass.  Unfortunately I don't have
> experience with OpenGL, so I'm going to have to learn, I guess.
>
> I got all excited a few months ago when I discovered the openGL egg
> but then was disappointed when I saw how incomplete it was for my
> purposes, and how much real work all those bindings are still going to
> be to finish implementing, and how painful it is to use a 3D API for
> doing mostly 2D work.
>
> I am also interested in having my GUI system be portable to PDAs etc;
> realistically by the time I have done something useful, PDAs and
> phones and such will probably all have 3D hardware, but in the mean
> time there are a couple of software-only openGL implementations, like
> this one which does have some hardware acceleration on XScale
> processors:
>
> http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/klimt/
>
> So I think a 3D binding which is based on OpenGL is probably going to
> have a very long life.
>
> I'm not much of a gamer, but have enjoyed Civ and SimCity in the past,
> and agree that's probably a very good game genre to try to do in
> Scheme.
>
>
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