Game Programming in Squeak

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Thu Nov 1 06:08:16 UTC 2001


Jon Hylands wrote:
> 
> Be that as it may, I still stand by my (corrected) post saying that you
> will probably not be able to write a "state of the art" first person
> shooter (i.e., one that is directly comparable with id's latest game) in
> Squeak, at least not unless Squeak gets an order of magnitude faster than
> it is now (through software, not hardware).

The arguments back and forth on this have been interesting, but regardless, there are a lot of other types of games out there besides ones which require bleeding-edge graphics performance.

Since Squeak is a *real* high-level langauge (as opposed to C++, Java, Dark Basic, UnrealScript, etc.) with a powerful IDE, it could be great for games which are highly complex.  To be honest, I haven't been keeping up with the latest games in the last five years or so, but I'm thinking strategy games, maybe Riven-like games, etc.

Squeak could also be good for simpler games which need to run on many platforms, such as PCs, Macs, Linux/Unix, and also PDA's.  Although I suppose there hasn't been much of a market demand for this sort of super-portability for games.  (PDA games are usually written separately from PC games...)

It would be neat if someone took a stab at seriously writing games with Squeak.  Possibly modularity has been an issue with creating easily deployable games, but that is now being addressed.

For awhile now, I've wanted to port a 3D game I wrote for the Mac awhile ago to Squeak.  See http://www.mindspring.com/~dway/bebound.html .  It ran on a Mac IIsi with 30 frames/sec, so it shouldn't strain Squeak too much. ;)  When I have time, maybe when the modularity stuff has settled... I'll get back to it.

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com

(I remember playing Wizardry on the Apple II when I was 13, by the way. :) )




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