Re: [ANN] gzochi project development release 0.5

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

Hi guys!

Since I'm also an author of a(nother) multimedia framework 

in guile+sdl/opengl called SLAYER, I thought that I might join

the conversation :)

Perhaps it would make sense to collaborate more and to somehow

integrate our efforts. It might seem difficult at first, because

I guess that everyone of us does his work in his spare time,

and our plans and visions might be vague, but it would be really

nice if we were able at least to formulate the intersections of our

goals.

Mine is to create games that would teach their players programming,

i.e. to show that some repeatable actions could be automated quite

easily and naturally with simple scripts, that could later on become

more complex.

I thought that it would be more motivating if a gameplay was set

up in a competetive environment, so that the players would easily

see that even simple programatic enhancements of their user

interface would give them an advantage over their opponents.

I came up with the idea of a 3d robot sword battle game, where

the players can come up with new moves for their avatars,

and even write scripts that would control their robots entirely.

For that reason, SLAYER is equipped with bindings to Open

Dynamics Engine, and also has a stub of a text editor widget

(which obiously allows to evaluate lisp expressions in a similar

way emacs+geiser does ;])

Some time ago, I have also been experimenting with a design

of a general network architecture, but I eventually dropped it,

believing that there were some more urgent things to be done.

Anyway, the goal is ambitious, and I think that for that reason

we have a lot in common. There are also some ideas that I

see in guile-2d and that I truly love and would love to steal,

but that's impossible, because it's LGPL :)

I also see that our approach differs in that I have been

using the GOOPS system extensively for the GUI design

(which has some advantages, despite its drawbacks, such

as decreased portability between other Scheme

implementations)

One thing that might seem dubious is my decision to keep

slayer a stand-alone application (rather than guile module).

It is not a deep decision and could be changed rather easily,

but as for now it has proven good at some points (namely,

it gave me a better control over the program behaviour while

I was creating a Windows port), and a pain-in-the-ass at

anothers (it's difficult to create slayer applications using the

emacs+geiser methodology). 

Anyway, if any of you thinks that we could cooperate,

I'm really looking forward to it. I'd also like to hear about

your goals and ideas, if you're willing to share :)