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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 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)
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
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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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.
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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If you think that you'd like to hash out a quick and dirty game, you have 2 options:
1) take some basic and intermediate classes at your local university or technical college. Then look at some game programming options then and only then, like Game Institute or something like that afterwards.
2) Get comfortable with an advanced presentations program like Flash or Liquid Media which at present handle enough options to put some simple games together. It will have even more options to manipulate 3D environments in the near future, so I would say this is a real possibility for you, since it saves the programming pain. You sacrifice the flexibiltiy of a real game engine and have to work with the constraints of a presentation. Still very workable IMHO.
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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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.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???