Developing Games with Perl and SDL

segphault writes "Andy Bakun has written an excellent 20 page guide to game development with SDL_Perl for Ars Technica. The tutorial, which includes extensive code examples and plenty of screenshots, walks readers through the process of building a clone of the original Atari Kaboom! game." From the article: "One of the biggest benefits of using SDL is that it allows portable media applications to be written without having to be concerned with specific implementations of media libraries for each target platform. Bringing Perl into the picture takes the portability one step further, allowing media-rich applications to be written in a high-level language that can be targeted to a number of platforms. While programming using SDL requires knowledge of C and access to a C compiler, using SDL_perl does not. This greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to get something up on the screen and working."

Comments

example game

[falkryn]

http://www.frozen-bubble.org/ example of a nifty game written with sdl_perl

Re:Python has been used for this.

[Haeleth]

Python with SDL (pygame) has been used to write Dungeon Siege (I think that was the game, correct me if I'm wrong) and I liked the result a lot.

I don't know what game you're thinking of, but it certainly isn't Dungeon Siege, which was written very conventionally in C++ with DirectX. (It was originally developed with OpenGL, but the developers switched to Direct3D later on, possibly because the game was being published by Microsoft.)

At any rate, certainly neither Python nor SDL was involved at any stage.

Re:What about all the libraries SDL is missing?

[TommyBear]

There are other thirdparty libraries that offer this kind of support:

http://www.libsdl.org/libraries.php

There is even an SDL based opengl render target.

Tommy.

Re:Easy

[Junks Jerzey]

And in many cases, keep in mind the 80/20 rule of thumb. 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code. This does vary, but in many cases the amount of highly optimized code needed for good performance is very little.

That rule of thumb quite often doesn't apply to video games, at least high-end, complex video games. In such, you often see a flat profile, where the work is divided among a large number of functions, none of which stands out as a huge time sink.

(That said, I still think writing games in languages like Perl is a good idea.)