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."

Comments

Still being worked on.

[mandrake*rpgdx]

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.

Also Torque

[BrookHarty]

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)

Maybe.

[mandrake*rpgdx]

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.

Yeah.

[mandrake*rpgdx]

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).

I should have mentioned

[mandrake*rpgdx]

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.

Re:Newbie Question...

[zarthrag]

At the zero level, I'd like to give lua a resounding "no". Learn a "mid-low level" language such as c++ or even java. Lua is a scripting language that's *embedded* in your c/c++ application - that is, it's originally meant to allow you to easily use for configuration and stuff - not for writing standalone apps. It's use in game development (homeworld 2 used it, I know) is superb because you can do your AI programming and stuff outside of your game engine using easily edited files.