D game development: a call to action

[luminousone]

On Monday, 5 August 2013 at 18:18:30 UTC, Jonathan A Dunlap 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!

I am working on a media/gaming library for D, its not even pre 
alpha, and I am learning parts of the language as I go so the 
code is very ugly, and the naming conventions are scatter brained.

However I don't use any wrappers of other media libraries such as 
sfml, I only have the minimal bindings required to link with X11 
and opengl(I do plan on windows bindings as well, but i haven't 
done that yet).

At the moment I am tackling concurrency, That bit is giving me 
endless headaches, I am trying to setup a seperate thread to 
handle opengl calls and a seperate thread for handling object 
updates.

https://github.com/luminousone/dmedia

I haven't picked a license yet, but it will be something that is 
rather open but leaves me the option to staticly link it in 
closed projects.

I still think you might find a few interesting bits in that link, 
but it does have a while to go before it is remotely useable.

I am open to working with others, or making changes to what I 
have done if anyone is interested.