Monster 0.2 released!

[Nicolay Korslund]

Hello and Merry Christmas fellow D-ers!

Monster, my D based game programming language has seen its second
release (0.2), and is available at http://monster.snaptoad.com

If you missed the last release: Monster is an open source scripting &
modding language intended for game programming, and can probably be
described as a cross between D, Java and UnrealScript. The package
includes a compiler as a stand alone program, and a VM that you link
into your code as a library. Monster is written entirely in D, but now
has bindings to C++ as well. It should still be considered to be in
the early development / experimental stage.

This release has taken much longer than planned. It's been so long
that people have started asking me if Monster is still being developed
:) The reason is mainly because I put way to many changes into one
release, so from now on I will make releases much smaller and
hopefully release much more often (this is my new years resolution
<g>)

Some technical comments:

Monster still uses phobos, but from what I understand more and more
active D users are switching to Tango. I have looked it over and I
don't think switching over would be too difficult in my case (90% of
my phobos calls are writef/writefln anyway.) Tango also comes with
clear licensing and an automatic installer that includes DMD, a huge
plus for reaching and recruiting non-D programmers. The main
disadvantage is of course that it locks out people using vanilla a
DMD/phobos installation, which is after all the "official" default.

In short, I haven't decided to move to Tango yet, but it's definitely
possible if people request it.

Several people have also asked about DSSS, but Rebuild seems to choke
on some of the source files. I will file a bug report on that. There also
seems to be some template problems with DMD (these already have bug
reports) that prevent Monster from compiling unless you specify all
files on one command line (like my makefile does.) The same bug
prevents GDC from working at all. I will do what I can to fix this
(including fixing the DMD/GDC bugs myself if I have to), but for now
you'll have to stick with make or do it manually.

So if you want to try it out you can download it at
http://monster.snaptoad.com . It comes with a few working examples
(including an SDL example), and there are a few short examples on the
web page. Also, thanks to Brad Anderson over at dsource there is a
new Monster forum at www.dsource.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=167

-Nico