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

What about all the libraries SDL is missing?

[master_p]

SDL is "a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer" (quote taken from the SDL web site). What about:

1) drawing functions
2) fonts
3) openGL
4) file formats
5) game GUI
6) sound formats
7) networking
8) configuration

etc?

there are various SDL-derived libraries that implement, more or less, the above, but they are C/C++ libraries, and the quality varies. Does Perl make it easy to use those libraries?

Easy

[Andy Dodd]

All that highly optimized C is part of a prewritten library (as is the case here).

For the remaining non-performance-critical stuff, Perl is often MUCH easier to develop with.

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.

Many years ago, I was writing a program in Perl. I knew that there was a good chance I'd have to rewrite some of it in C eventually for decent performance, and this turned out to be true. In the end, I obtained 20-40 times the performance (and most likely 95%+ of the performance I would have obtained using C only) by rewriting approximately five lines out of 100-200 lines of Perl in C. The time it took me to figure out how to interface C and Perl (doing so was not documented very well then, it took me 2 weeks to find SWIG) was still far less than the time it would've taken me to write the entire program in scratch using straight C.