At 9:44 PM +1100 10/29/01, Patrick Castle wrote:
>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?

Actually, Squeak may already contain much of what you need, though 
you would probably need to expand it to get some functions. The 
Balloon 3D engine which supports Squeak-Alice is platform-independent 
but hardware-accelerated through OpenGL on several platforms. The 
Win32 Squeak VM is available in two flavors, one that uses DirectX 
and one that uses OpenGL.

-Martin