D game development: a call to action

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 14 December 2014 at 11:00, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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!

I'm also very interested in experiments writing game code on
commercial-style engines.
Hobby engines are nice, but we will get a much better feel for using D
in the AAA games industry if a commercial-style engine is used.

My project FeedBack in an attempt to explore this sort of D code
(https://github.com/FeedBackDevs/feedback), but it's somewhat limited
by my free time at the moment.