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Freya Reaches 2.0 Beta Release
mandrake*rpgdx writes "Freya, a game programming environment for the Lua programming language, reaches 2.0 beta this week. Freya allows you to program cross platform games in the programming language Lua. It sports speeds 2x-10x faster than PyGame, and contains a built in map engine, pixel perfect collision detection, support for many graphics and sound formats including Ogg Vorbis and different MOD formats.
Right now the beta release is looking for people to test the Linux version."
I wonder how long will it be until Lua really takes off? Well if they take off at the wrong time, they might as well could miss Mars... :|
May
I wanna see some games to play and hack with and see if it's even worth pulling down the stuff to write my own... the games page is empty... and the screenshots aren't exactly inspiring...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I'm working on one and some others are too. But right now teh Freya community is spread thin through 4 or 5 other message boards. This site has only been up for a week. So I'm trying to gather and bring together all of the disperate coders under this one roof. You can always download it and give it a shot.
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Torque from GarageGames also has some new SDK's out. Not free for but 100 bux for the engine and 50 for the RTS pack, you can make some cool freeware games. Unless I read it wrong, you only have to license if you make over 250K..
BTW, I didnt care for torque when it came out in Tribes2, buggy and early release. But they kept working on it, adding new features, and the new Beta engine they showed off even have really good plantlife, the grass was amazing. And the RTS kit and content packs make it easy to do some really cool FPS's.
But for Freya, I've always wonder why not as many Bardstale old style RPG's, easy to do, and looks like a good use of it. And I bet lot lighter than the torque engine.
(Also Torque engine compiles for linux/osx and windows, so you get cross platform games)
Well that takes away some of the pain. Souns cool!!!
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
Blizzard Software's new hit, the MMORPG "World of Warcraft", has a fully programmable and extendable UI. Using XML described UI enhancements, and a backing application, you can actually add all sorts of things - i've even seen someone add multiplayer chess that you can play with other players with the same UI extensions.
:)
What is the programming language they use for the UI?
You guessed it. LUA.
It's pretty cool, if you ask me
When 2.0 is out of beta. Right now there are a few floating point errors on Linux for some of the examples, and some of the libs need changed to work on OSX, but other than that it's heading there. Bard's Tale style- that would be neat. I myself is working on a hybrid zelda-roguelike kind of game using it.
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I have absolutely zero programming experience, but am setting myself up to start learning. One of the things I want to do is to actually make some of the game ideas I have real. Would this be a good place to start?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Lua, like Python are both easy to learn programming languages and take less time to learn than C or C++ or Java. But, if you are not keen on learning even a simple proreamming langauge Game Maker might be a better choice. But, if you want a good stepping stone to video game programming, Freya does speed things up.
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I really think Lua is the choice for an embeddable scripting language. After using it for Freya, I will always promote it.
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The "jab" at Pygame got me interested. Trying to determine what libraries this is built on, but not seeing it immediately. It looks like a great set of features for now, congrats. How does this compare to LuaSdl?
:-) I admit Pygame's been dragging over the summer, but trying to gear up for a new release before the end of the year.
As the Pygame author, it's fun to see what other projects are doing in similar fields. Now I need to determine what benchmark was used to determine the 2x.
Does anyone have a list or can at least rattle off any other gave development sdks there are for other interpteted languages (besides java). For example does ruby have any? how about lisp?
Philosophy.
I was originally going to opt for other resolutions (some people are complaining about that), but I want something that's retro gaming specific. And I can push out more speed this way and optimizing things a bit.
The speed test was done by writing a small demo in both and running them on a 350mhz. No offense, but I designed Freya because Pygame was moving to slow for me. And, I didn't know enough about SDL to do anything to help it.
If I had known SDL, this might be different. It is faster than LuaSDL, but the makers of it even admit that it's not for gaming but more for multimedia apps.
The secret to Freya's speed is in it's limatations (and how much faster Lua is to Python. When I get around to porting Freya to Python, it will probably run at the same speed or slower than PyGame).
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Is that I plan on making it easy to port to languages other than Lua. To the point of where you can just run SWIG for the target languages.
There is Sphere for Javascript, but other than that and PyGame and Ika (Python as well), I don't see any other scripting language friendly gaming lib's.
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http://luaforge.net/projects/luax/
I didn't really mean for that to be jab at Pygame. The two are completely different projects with different goals.
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Yup. It basically combines a lot of good allegro lib's (like DUMB, DUMBOGG, etc) and extends them to Lua. It's pretty effective as a fast and easy way to make games.
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I even ran a simple demo for myself with over 100 sprites flying across the screen without any slowdown.
My current game framework hasn't even made it to Alpha, yet, so there's no optimizations to speak of, and it's actually running too fast for the final gameplay.
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
I had made with PyGame. It was going to be a Chrono Trigger style game and used it's own Map system and etc. After awhile, it began to slow down. I think Python and PyGame are good for small games running on faster systems, but on anything less than 1ghz I had problems with. And a lot of people are still running on 700-800mhz pentuims.
Anything of decent size for a game, and I don't think PyGame holds up. Not yet anyway.
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PyGame is still in it's infancy, and if it wasn't for PyGame I would never have even thought about doing something like this.
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I decided not to use any scrolling in my game since that's where PyGame gets killed.
Lots of people have had success with OpenGL and PyGame for sound and input, I know, but I think it'd really help if PyGame included OpenGL compatability out of the box. Probably won't happen until SDL does that though.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
But I thought it was mentioned on Fblend's website- the stable version won't run in Linux, you need the latest unstable version.
I think it's here-> yup
Anyway, here's some really good stuff on getting everything *but* dumb and dumbogg running on Linux (and he also made it really easy to get it runnning on arch linux): here
Hope that helps.
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she had reached 2.0 beta ;)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
it's infancy
"its".
Sorry about that. I'm going to contact the fblend author.
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One the names for the Nordic Godess's of earth (being that she has a gajillion names- like Jord and Frigg). FF9 is full of mother-earth Goddess references. The world they live on is Gaia, they visit a planet called Terra, Freija, etc etc
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...at home. Seriously, recommending C++ or Java as introductory languages is IMHO a really bad idea. Both languages suffer from design problems that will take a lot of fun from the learning experience.
:) for learning a new language. With manual memory management, heavy generic programming (templates) and mostly speed-optimized libraries (easy interfaces vs. performance) C++ is the heavy machine gun of languages that can be very difficuly to handle...
;). It's too strict in this sense, at least for learning purposes. Take a look at the Java version of Hello world, does this look intuitive?
C++ is probably the worst choice besides C or Assembler (not talking about Braindead et al
Java does sufficently abstract low-level aspects of programming and thus is often used as introductory language, but in my experience teaching it at my university I noticed one huge problem that's very difficult to get over: the massive SDK, with it's miles deep object hierarchies, doesn't make sense for people not yet thinking in object oriented terms (arguably it does for the rest
Lua might not be a good choice either, as it is very lightweight (missing some nice functionality you might better get a grip of early on).
Personally I would recommend Ruby (the cleanest language around) or Python (also very clean, with more mature community support) for a start. Both offer everything necessary to develop computer games...
The library is limited to 320x240 resolution, and simulates a joystick using keypress events! This is obviously a toy project of the article submitter. Do the editors bother checking the background of articles anymore?
The poster then has the audacity to compare the library favorably to pygame, (and poke fun at it) which supports anything SDL can do. That means any resolution your video card can do, not just 320x240.
The speed comparison is also irrelevant. It is simply a comparison of Allegro and SDL, not Freya and pygame. Anyone serious about speed avoids SDL and opts for an OpenGL accelerated backend anyway...
Sw.
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
It's also a comparison of Lua and Python as well. Lua is much faster than Python. And it's got quite a following now, people who want to use it to make retro games. I'm suprised it made it to slashdot- I've been submitting stories for quite a while now (none to do with Freya, however) and been rejected quite a bit. I'm very glad they put it up, and a lot of people really like the engine and it's capibilities.
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