D game development: a call to action

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 6 August 2013 at 04:18, Jonathan A Dunlap <jdunlap at outlook.com> wrote:
> I am one of the few who have taken a keen interest in D for game
> development. The concise language and modern conveniences may be able to
> reduce many hours worth of development time off a game project, while making
> the code more maintainable. Aside from the core language, Dlang graphics
> bindings have a way to go before even earning acceptance in the indie gaming
> scene, but it's making great strides to get there.
>
> The main challenge I've hit is the lack of any sort of path for adopting a
> media engine. Bindings (like SFML https://github.com/krzat/SFML-D) all
> suffer from:
>
> A) No information about its current status: this is scary if its repo hasn't
> been updated in months.
> B) Usually are complex to get working in a new project (manually building or
> searching for undocumented dependency DLLs)
> C) Lack practical references and tutorials for "real would usage"
> e.g. "how to create an OpenGL window" or "how to render a triangle"
> versus something like "how to load from disk an image texture onto a quad
> and move it around using keyboard events"
>
> SFML bindings are also in https://github.com/aldacron/Derelict3 but I
> couldn't find a scrap of information on how to use it, how to compile
> correctly, or example usage. It's unclear if the library is even usable in
> its current state.
>
> Please don't take this as blind criticism, but rather a plea to action for
> the community to provide better library documentation support for: current
> lib status, getting started adding it, and a general use tutorial/example.
> If we start doing this, it'll make a big impact for other game developers
> who are new to Dlang to adopt the language. Thanks for listening!

You could consider engines that bind to D. I don't think it's
particularly important that the engine is written in D, as long as the
binding is in the D style, and convenient.
It's no different than OpenGL isn't written in D, but there are some
bindings, and people tend to wrap them up for convenience.

This is precisely what I've been doing for 5-6 years now with my
engine: https://github.com/TurkeyMan/fuji

If people want to do D gamedev, but don't want to worry about the
engine component, they're more than welcome to use my engine.
I'm always available to offer full engine support to users writing
interesting software!