SDL - wow!!!

[miriam_e]

 
SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer

SDL is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."

Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Windows, BeOS, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, and IRIX. There is also code, but no official support, for Windows CE, AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, QNX, NetBSD, AIX, OSF/Tru64, and SymbianOS.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, Java, Lua, ML, Perl, PHP, Pike, Python, and Ruby.

http://www.libsdl.org

Comments

[apocraphilia.livejournal.com]

You sound like you're fixin' to write a game! Let me know if you want a hand with anything.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Oh, much, much better than any game!

Since I became disillusioned with what is happening to VRML (or rather what is not happening to it) I have wanted to write my own VR language.

Other than VRML there is no general-purpose VR language (that I know of). And VRML, while it was a giant step in the right direction, never made it. There are quite a few major shortcomings with VRML that ensure it will never become what we all wanted of it. The most important is the incredible difficulty of creating standard libraries of objects and attributes. Even worse is the case with animations, which can't easily be built upon and abstracted. And scripting of programmatic interaction and control is limited to specialised nodes which communicate with the scene through absurdly restrictive bottlenecks.

There are more problems with VRML, but those are the worst. Solving them would give a general-purpose VR language that would take the world by storm.

I started creating this language a while back, but had to stop to get an income. I should really get back to it while I am free. It would be such a blast to actually have it functional.

When I saw the SDL site I was blown away... a lot of the low-level work is already done for me, right there! All I need is to complete my language syntax design, then make a parser/interpreter/compiler and it would be just about done.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Are you interested? It would be the coolest thing, and would be a great way to create games. I originally wanted to make my own VR language because it turned out to be too hard to create VR fiction in VRML. But a language that is easy to use in creating VR fiction would be really easy to use to create games too.

It would also be useful to be able to bounce my thoughts off another human being.

[apocraphilia.livejournal.com]

I'm real interested. I was thinking of approaching it from a slightly different direction, plugging something like the Python scripting engine into a simple 3D environment. A fusion of both our intentions, really. I'd definitely be interested to see your ideas for capturing narrative for this sort of stuff. And you might be interested to check out 'machinima', too.

...and the second one:

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Something like that might work... I don't really know Python, but I figure it shouldn't be too hard to learn (though I groan at the thought of learning another language -- I already have several under my belt). I have a few friends who are Python evangelists and I have Python installed on my machine. I have a few books on Python too.

I looked up machinima. Excellent! I was aware of movies made using game engines, but had never heard of a name. Machinima is a lovely name. From now on I will use it when I would previously speak of VR fiction. I spent ages trying to come up with a cool, poetic name for VR fiction. Never mind that most machinima simply uses 3d engines as sets, props, and characters, and doesn't really take it much further than that. It is still almost the same thing as what I call VR fiction.

The difference is that I want the whole thing to be in a virtual world, including the audience. At the moment the viewer is on this side of the screen, even in machinima as created up till now.

[apocraphilia.livejournal.com]

Choice of scripting-language/scripting-method is a bit of a paradigm choice. If it's about effects and control, I'd say use a full-function scripting language like Perl/Python/PHP/Objective C etc, for control over every polygon. If it's more about ease of use (and you choose to put more of the power into the display engine instead of the script) I'd lean towards just an XML schema, like:

[movie]
[room name="Lounge"]
[actor name="Simon" mesh="simon.obj"/]
[action type="say" source="Simon"]Wassup?[/action]
[/movie]

I thought recently about a text-based Java adventure game engine that used XML like this, what I'm describing is just a more ambitious version of that.