World: r3wp

it had to be difficult as they were deciding almost 6 months:)

Oldes ... how about letting RT advertise the fact that you used Rebol 
tools to build this game?

Oldes: who is they?

Has anyone played around with Unity-3D?

I did just a little

I was head of a project 2-3 years ago for the danish team behind 
Unity to port one of their games to a newer version of Unity. I found 
Unity 3D to have many features, but was too clumpsy to really work 
with. It may have changed, as I haven't looked at it since.

The game was GooBall:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/gooball/

You can find old posts from me about GooBall in the groups "OSX" 
and "Advocacy".

ah, that was one of the first games I remember that they were showing 
as showcase of unity .. but I never could find a PC version of it 
to try it

what do you mean by it being clumsy? Did you have exp. with any other 
3d engines at the time? (I was so far only making 2d games, but I 
wasted a lot of time looking and trying various 3d engines)

I plan to do something in my free time in a 3d engine .. I need that 
it works in a browser so unity seems the most obvious choice, adobe 
director is expensive and probably outdated, stonetrip / shiva seems 
even more IDE/GUI heavy than unity giving me even less controll (although 
I am not 100% sure bcause I haven't digged really deep in any of 
those.) Then there is Java (which has Ardor3d which is very early 
in the making , and jme which is somewhat "out") but starting with 
it would be at a lot more low level than unity and similar game engines, 
with no real docs and tools as far as I can see.

those are the options I saw, and unity was winning, that's why I 
am interested in your opinion on it

I helped some friends about the same time, that were starting a game 
developing company. I had a little experience there first with Torque 
before they changed to Reality Engine, which used C# and C++. I left 
after a few months, because I saw, it wouldn't happen. 2 years later, 
they stopped the development.


Unity had a development tool with lists of content and parameters 
to set. At first it looked good, but in practical work, it fast became 
a huge mess. It was difficult to find and set parameters, so a lot 
of time was wasted in the process of creating a game. The porting, 
I was doing, ended up being a totally recreate in some areas, like 
the animations. The data couldn't be kept and converted from the 
old version to the new, but had to be recreated. I even tried to 
figure out the binary files using REBOL, but was very hard, as much 
of it wasn't documented. That a bad sign for me, when we talk going 
from one version to a newer one with the same engine.


But it could have changed in the last years, I don't know. Haven't 
looked.

Very interesting. I was burned too few times with GUI based tools 
with no simple representation taht you could programatically or by 
hand edit also.

Thx for the info. I'm wondering if such an engine can be used for 
business apps as well. Doing visualizations or nice UI.

I'm waiting for Maxim to design us all a nice game engine via openGL 
extensions. :-)

Well, my release plan ends 2099. Not sure he can make it...

zing!!!

Max was quick to show me the basic workings of a vector drawing application 
that he built  with his Liquid code in hopes to help get me started 
in creating an app that required a vector drawing feature built-in. 
 He does have some great code, albeit too complex for my simple brain. 
 From my perspective it's show him the money, and he'll build you 
a masterpiece.  He's one of the few guys I know that can say they 
make their living solely on Rebol coding.  Not to mention he has 
about as many interests outside of coding as Carl does.

(us Canadians need to stick together)  ;-)

Janko: they = someone from Microsoft.. I don't know who exactly.. 
they are crazy anyway:)

Robert, !scream has different layers.  the scene description layer 
is generic and much like liquid-paint, of which I will be releasing 
a commercial application within a few days.

this layer is designed to be used for any application type, providing 
whatever amount of user feedback it can based on pointer and keyboard 
activity in the viewport.

Somebody on the ML is looking for the "Rebol theBeast" game which 
was based on Cyphre's Arcadia. Cyphre (or anybody else) is it still 
available?

Was it ever a game or just a scrolling parallax demo ?

I don't know I've never seen it.

I think it was just a demo. I don't know where a public link is, 
unless available from Cyphre's Viewtop site.

yes, just a demo ... showing parallax scrolling ....

however - Cyphre's rebsite was placed on my server. I did mistake 
during server reinstall, I forgot to back-up his content. Cyphre 
would have to make it available again ...

is someone playing this ? http://www.scoutshonour.com/digital/

Davide: I am :) Very cool game. Inspired me to create a virtual computer 
game that teaches programming. Haven't finished the game yet but 
I played it for a couple of hours until I got stuck.

...virtual computer game that teaches programming...
 
Interesting, written in Rebol?

Mostly Ruby and a bit Java => http://rubility.heroku.com; It's in 
very early stages though. At the moment I am creating the underlying 
technologies for the game and the virtual computer it runs on. Well, 
let's call it a virtual virtual computer since I use a very easy 
trick to simulate a virtual computer :p (the game is an MDI app, 
and "apps" in the game are just MDI windows)

I did start writing a Rogue like game with Rebol today though :) 
I did try to make a jump and run game half a year ago when I first 
started to learn Rebol, but the keyboard events made that impossible 
(at least for me because I don't know if you can improve the event 
system). It takes a few seconds until the keyboard event is sent 
continually when you press and hold a key, like for walking left 
or right. For the rogue like game this isn't a problem since you 
always move one step at a time which also acts as a turn in the game.

the R2 event system has severe limitations.  for gaming its almost 
unusable unless you really hack it, and even then, you don't get 
key UP events so its hard to do a lot of types of games.

Which is sad because the drawing capabilities of Rebol are pretty 
cool. I got tile based map rendering and scrolling working in 5 minutes 
tops :)

yep  it is a shame .

I guess Rebol 3 will improve that. I hope.

yes and we'll have access to the event mechanism at some point via 
the extension.  so we can customize it for specific needs if its 
really necessary.

Me too on the hope.  I took a crack at a game in REBOL once. But 
I could not get my head round some of the event handling.  Drawing 
was easy (umm, for a stick figure artist type ala moi that is, if 
not 'good').    ;)

Stick figure graphics are really popular nowadays if you look at 
some of the top iPhone games :)

http://uni.xkcd.com/wicked interface on a wicked comic

When you visit, try the sequence...

make me a sandwich
sudo make me a sandwich

one of my favourite gags ever.

hahaha

the help command is also VERY usefull hahaha

Has anyone done some Corewar simulator in Rebol? I just remembered 
this cool game.

I thought about the same thing a few years ago Robert. I found that 
I still have old downloads from looking into it, but no REBOL code.

Ok. I can imagine an online-version where you play life against others.

I have a REBOL version of CoreWars, made in 2008. Search for "corewars" 
in group "Chat". As I remember, the last part of the asm macros isn't 
made, and it's slow compared to a compiled version. I can send you 
the code, if you like.

That would be nice. Thanks.