Glop Refactor: Floaters, Actors, Input, …

I took a long walk last night at 9:00 to ponder some of the design decisions of Glop. I knew something had to be done about the Input subsystem, and some other things needed thinking through as well. Here’s what I came up with. I came back and implemented half of it.
First, [...]

Transient Channels

Transient Queues have failed. I wrote a simple demo the other day of a little pixar-like lamp guy who moves his joints when you push the arrow keys. I had to make him move them smoothly, lest he explode due to the integration error. I could have used a transient queue to [...]

Glop Presentation

Here’s the intro, slides, and examples to my OSCON presentation of Glop. Enjoy!

Speeding up OpenGL calls

A game with decent graphics (not even “good” by today’s standards) will crank through something to the order of 50,000 OpenGL calls per frame. Maintaining a 30 FPS framerate, then, would require 1,500,000 calls per second. According to my benchmark, on my box, perl is capable of making 2,100,000 do-nothing sub calls [...]

Glop Actor Heirarchy

Just as POE has Components, Glop has Actors. And unlike the rest of the design, you use Actors by inheriting from them (well, you can use them directly, too). A simple Actor that will come with glop will be the 2D::Circle actor, which is good enough to toss into a scene and watch [...]

Animations and Transient Callbacks

Animations in games are too hard. Usually they consist of creating some convoluted state machine, where the state is what they’re supposed to be doing, and the data is for how long they’ve been doing it. Now this is a fine model, but most of the time it isn’t formalized, and thus becomes [...]

Glop Input Design

Into the plethora of modules included in Glop I add POE. I’m going to use it under the hood, and try to hide it from the user as much as possible (well, in that postmodern way of exposing it when people want it). You’ll note that I’m coupling the design with all the [...]

Glop and PDL

As my third Glop example program I wrote a visualization of a quantum particle propagating in a crystal lattice1. I did it all in plain old Perl to start, and it was painfully slow: 1/2 a frame per second on a 32 x 24 lattice. Uh oh, this kind of speed simply won’t [...]

Class::Closure

I’ve released the first segment of Glop to the CPAN, and it’s called Class::Closure. It’s not directly related to games, but it is in a yak-shaving sort of way. Perl’s class syntax sucks, most Perl programmers agree on that. Both creating a basic class and referring to its members is a pain. [...]

Auf Wiedersehen, C(?:\+\+)?

I just got SDL_perl working. And you know what that means… C++: so long and good riddance. I shall now be doing my graphical programming in Perl.
I will, of course, still need to tolerate that vile language until the completion of Glop. After that, it will be used as a kind of [...]