Doom3 (id tech 4) port/binding in D ?

[Regan Heath]

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:16:40 -0000, deadalnix <deadalnix at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to suggest a project to the community. Doom3 source code has just  
> been released, and I think we may want to do a port in D. Here are the  
> reasons :
> 1/ I think D is suitable and pertinent for video games.
> 2/ This would make a solid code base to promote D.
> 3/ Id software is very popular, and porting one of their engine is free  
> advertisement for D.
> 4/ The build system for doom engine is scons, and it support D too.
> 5/ The code base is an high quality one. (for exemple, the _t suffix is  
> used to differenciate what we call struct and classes in D - and that  
> has no difference in C++ except in the usage you make of it).
> 6/ It's an interesting project.
> 7/ Many people in the D community are interested in video game projects.
> 8/ Doom's story take place on mars, phobos and deimos (well and on  
> earth, but who care ?).
>
> In addition, this is a good occasion to produce some code for deimos and  
> can enlight us on D future evolutions backed with solid fact. On my  
> knowledge, such a big project (big in size, but also in technicity)  
> don't exist in D yet.

I had an idea along these lines the other day.  Does Doom3 support the  
addition of community content in the for of mods etc and, assuming we had  
a D port of Doom3, would the mods be written in D?  My thought/idea was  
that D needed a game, where the modding api was in D, so that people  
wanting to create mods or other content for the game would need to write  
them in D.

I was actually thinking about Minecraft and how in just a short space of  
time it has become immensely popular and the amount of community added  
content is amazing.  The source for Minecraft (written primarily in Java)  
was going to be released, not sure of the status of this today I think it  
got sidelined as they geared up for the official release.  This is a  
project which would really benefit from being (re-)written in D (or C/C++  
for that matter) because it does suffer from performance issues, and  
crashes when the JVM runs out of memory (a common problem with Java or  
perhaps garbage collection as a whole?).  If we could produce a D version  
of Minecraft, where community content was written in D, we'd automatically  
inherit a large user base interested in using D.

It doesn't /have/ to be Minecraft, but what I thought was that D needs is  
a popular game, where community content requires the use of D... it seems  
an ideal way to entice new programmers in, and once they're in they'll be  
hooked :)

Regan

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