D and the world

[Peter Modzelewski]

Walter Bright napisał(a):
> Tom S wrote:
>> First of all, thanks for all the feedback, guys :) It matters a lot to 
>> us.
> 
> I want to put together a slide on your project for my talk at the 
> upcoming game developers' conference.
> 

Hi I'm KeYeR from team0xf. I'm responsible for skeletal animation, sound 
system, bsp levels. Also I'm helping a little with gameplay and 
renderer. I think that it will be a great honor for us if you mention 
our project on such a conference :)


>> Some info on the project:
>> Deadlock is currently being developed by five univ students for the 
>> 'Team Programming' course at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, 
>> Poland. The development has lasted about 6 months, during which we've 
>> coded lots of cool features, such as:
>> - OpenGL-based rendering with Cg boosted graphics and fallbacks for 
>> older machines
>> - Particle systems
>> - Skeletal animation
>> - 3d sound
>> - Networked physics using the PhysX middleware
>> - Framebuffer effects
>> - Pretty advanced (IMHO) scene graph management
>> - Custom Immediate Mode GUI
>> - In-game console
>> - Custom model exporter (MAXScript) and importer (D)
>> - Quake3 BSP level loading and rendering
>>
>> It wouldn't be quite possible in any other language...
> 
> Why? (I want to know, because I'll get asked this!)

- quick compilation
- easy debugging without special tools: asserts, exceptions, unittests 
and writelfn debug info are enough in 99,99% of cases, thx to D it's 
harder to do stupid mistakes
- templates, delegates and other builtin D features let us use 
auto-magical solutions
- D lets us build high level interfaces but also allows us to go low 
when  optimizaitons are necessery.
- D is just neat... code can look good and work fast
- we were able to use c/c++ libraries via bindings without any problems.

Personally I'm not much longer a D programmer then deadlock is going. 
I've learned it quickly and right on I was able to use it in serious 
projects (not only in deadlock). I know java quite well and was coding 
in c++ also. I'm sure that it would be impossible to write as much and 
as quick in the mentioned languages. Many times when writing the 
skeletal animation library, where i used lots of delegates, templates 
(our skeletal animation library is one big template really :P), hash 
tables, dynamic tables etc a lot of times i was delighted with things I 
am able to do in D. In D I code what I have in mind, in C++ I would have 
to think how to hack things to get what I want .



> 
>> Some of us had prior C++ knowledge, some knew Java, others a bit of 
>> Python. None of the languages would do quite the job that D did. As 
>> the lead programmer, I talked the rest of the team into trying out D 
>> and they got sucked in. Most of us had little to no idea about game or 
>> 3d graphics programming prior to the project, and yet it turns out 
>> that it's possible to learn D, 3d and game programming AND make a cool 
>> game in half a year.
> 
> This is good stuff, mind if I quote you for my presentation?
> 
>> I hope no one minds the shameless self-promoting. We wanted to publish 
>> some info about the project after its official presentation on May, 
>> 10th but as the info has already 'leaked' to the NG ;) then maybe 
>> someone might want to hear more about it.
> 
> My talk will be on the 11th.

good luck! :) I really am addicted to D. One of the things I'm mostly 
afraid of is that I would be made to code in C++ or Java in my future 
work. Conferences like that bring me shadow of hope that there would be 
place for D coders in the game industry when I finish my studies.

As this is my first post directed to you, I personally want to thank you 
for creating such a great language. I am sure D will change the coders' 
world for good.

KeYeR