Game Programming in Squeak

Peter Crowther peter.crowther at networkinference.com
Tue Oct 30 16:39:09 UTC 2001


> From: Jon Hylands [mailto:jon at huv.com]
> Yes, I've thought about that perspective. I'm a big advocate of
> writing games in Smalltalk, but in my opinion you can't write a "state
> of the art" (which is what I really meant instead of "modern") first
> person shooter in Squeak. I have my doubts you could do it in any of
> the currently available Smalltalks.
> 
> The problem is that the target is constantly moving. Yes, you could
> probably do Doom or maybe even Quake using Smalltalk MT on todays
> hardware, but that is hardly state of the art... 

I'm not a "modern" 3D games programmer, but know plenty of folks who are.
Although some of the inner loops are still hand-optimised, 99.9% of the code
is written in some (moderately) appropriate high-level language these days.
If you gave Squeak the appropriate 3D plug-in, which would probably have to
be hand-optimised, I think you could have a pretty good go at something that
was perhaps a year behind the art (i.e. needed a CPU about twice as fast as
the equivalent hand-crafted equivalent).  However, portability would likely
be a *big* problem as you'd almost certainly have tied yourself to one
architecture in the process.

If you're using a software blt to to any of this, however, forget it!

		- Peter




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