Game Programming in Squeak

Patrick Castle lemeia at bigpond.com
Mon Oct 29 10:44:30 UTC 2001


Hi all,

I was paging through a computer magazine the other day and came across a
development environment called Dark Basic.
The concept was a simple language used to program 2D/3D games on IBM
computers using Direct X etc.

The concept was pretty good and I had a little play with a demo of the
product.

However, the more I looked at it, the more I thought that it made more sense
to do this in Smalltalk - particularly Squeak.

In my mind computer games seemed particularly suited to Object oriented
programming with a aircraft being an instance of a class with its own
individual behaviour flying over a landscape which could easily be an
instance of a special kind of Squeak Morph.

However, programming a game on an IBM PC would involve using platform
specific tools like Direct X which would have to be built into the VM I
imagine to maintain Smalltalk's platform independence. I'm assuming that
Squeak's VM does not contain all these nifty tools, but is it likely to in
the future?

I know the ability to program 3D shoot-em-ups isn't exactly priority number
1 for the Squeak movement, but I do believe it certainly fits into the
scheme of things so I'm hoping the question doesn't seem out of line. 

So is the language that strives to offer more in the way of music going to
go a little further into the realm of serious game playing?

And no - don't ask me to do it. I still don't think I could reproduce the
counter application at this stage.

Regards
Patrick

"Happiness is the hidden behind the obvious."

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