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Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

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Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#71

Post by jbluepolarbear »

kfischer_okarin wrote: post #60
jbluepolarbear wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot, unity, and unreal do all that too. I’m not seeing the advantage other than it’s ruby. Seems like a niche product.

I can only speak for Unity until versions till maybe 2019 - and I never developed a full commercial title with it - just a few game jam games - so maybe I'm not the best authority on that... But I think it's quite far away in many of those features Sure you can try out your game immediately in the editor, by pressing the play button - but can you edit Source code and it will be immediately applied without restarting…

Playing from editor is the testing on desktop. You can make a parallel builds in Unity with the new build tools. Hot swapping code breaks down quickly as complexity increases (it’s also supported by default in Unity). With nested prefabs changes can be made while scenes are running and preserved. You can debug an unity game remotely with Rider or Visual Studio, you can add new code, change execution order, memory, etc. I guess Ya got Unity best on build speed though; although, I bet a lot of what you saw as build time was asset conversion. In my experience with unity I rarely leave the editor/rider combo and I only make builds when testing new libraries (because of IL2CPP) and for performance analysis. It is much, much faster to iterate through the editor than hot swap could ever hope to achieve; I can test every resolution, notch configuration, etc without leaving the editor. I have built professional games with custom engines, unreal 3, unity, and torque and Unity is by far the most enjoyable to make games in.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#72

Post by AlchemistCamp »

gfxgirl wrote: post #34
monkmartinez wrote: post #2

Lets say I am not a Ruby dev, what would compel me to learn this over Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this? I remember Ruby Motion was a thing, then it wasn't... then it was again? I started learning web dev with RoR and quickly moved to Python as the ecosystem was so much bigger. I could transfer my Python knowledge…

I had this discussion with a AAA game studio recently. They have a hit game will millions of players and it's been a hit for many years. It uses a custom engine. They've been releasing new games. Those new games are in both Unity and Unreal. You can see all the reasons 1. Their custom engine doesn't have all the features of either of those other engines. Their artists in particular are pushing to switch to get those…

The needs of AAA game studios and solo/small-team indie devs are very, very different.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#73

Post by Toutouxc »

grawprog wrote: post #62
WillPostForFood wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the hook? The hook is you like to program in Ruby, so here is a game engine where you can use Ruby.

What makes ruby worth using for a game that makes this worth paying for over any other free, oss or commercial game engine with more flexibility in language and capability? No offense to ruby programmers but, Ruby's not necessarily the ideal language for game programming even when it comes to scripting languages. And...if you know ruby well enough to make a game, you could learn one of the many other languages better…

You're trying to dig deeper where there's no deeper.

What makes this worth paying for, without considering the technical details (like maybe it's a bit faster for some stuff than Godot or Unity) is just Ruby.

Yes, most programmers are able to learn other languages just fine, but we all have preferences. And people who prefer Ruby usually tend to like Ruby a lot.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#74

Post by vidarh »

stolen_biscuit wrote: post #57
WillPostForFood wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the hook? The hook is you like to program in Ruby, so here is a game engine where you can use Ruby.

Fair enough, but for that price I'd expect more than a language I like. It's got some interesting features, but like I said many other game engines have similar features with no cost, what's the stand-out reason to make me spend $50 once on it or $98 a year. Is this just being marketed to language enthusiasts?

To me, if it saves me even one hour of battling a language I don't like, it has paid for itself.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#76

Post by vidarh »

gfxgirl wrote: post #32
amirrajan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this? So far so good. We’ve been in business for nearly a decade now (with the game engine going onto year 3). > Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? Well our ability to deploy to console eliminates most engines as competitors/options. Unreal is a fantastic engine for 3D games. Unity is... well... not that great to be h…

Unity is just fine. 1000s of shipping successful games. The latest hit game made in Unity is Valheim. I don't choose games based on their engine I choose them based on if they are fun. Same as I don't choose movies based on what camera was used to shoot them or what software was used to render the CGI scenes.

By that measure, pure hardware-banging from C is just fine too. Heck, thousands of commercial games written in 6502 assembler have been released over the years. Doesn't mean it was an ideal developer experience.

The market for a game engine is not players. Most games could be written with almost anything.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#77

Post by hu3 »

neolog wrote: post #43
hu3 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post tells me the heavy lifting is done in C++ including 3D rendering, network communication and input handling: https://forums.eveonline.com/t/how-is-the-eve-online-client-...

The quote is > As far as we know, the EVE client is written in C++ and Python. C++ handles all the low-level stuff like 3D rendering, network communication, input handling and such. (Stackless) Python is used for everything else, which includes the user interface and even the management of graphic resources (you can see this in the debug window by pressing ctrl+alt+shift+m). This technology mix is quite unique, so I’…

Yep, C++ where performance matters.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#78

Post by neolog »

hu3 wrote: post #77
neolog wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote is > As far as we know, the EVE client is written in C++ and Python. C++ handles all the low-level stuff like 3D rendering, network communication, input handling and such. (Stackless) Python is used for everything else, which includes the user interface and even the management of graphic resources (you can see this in the debug window by pressing ctrl+alt+shift+m). This technology mix is quite unique, so I’…

Yep, C++ where performance matters.

Surprising they'd go C++ for networking. Python's had top-notch async for nearly 20 years.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#79

Post by vidarh »

gfxgirl wrote: post #34
monkmartinez wrote: post #2

Lets say I am not a Ruby dev, what would compel me to learn this over Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there? Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this? I remember Ruby Motion was a thing, then it wasn't... then it was again? I started learning web dev with RoR and quickly moved to Python as the ecosystem was so much bigger. I could transfer my Python knowledge…

I had this discussion with a AAA game studio recently. They have a hit game will millions of players and it's been a hit for many years. It uses a custom engine. They've been releasing new games. Those new games are in both Unity and Unreal. You can see all the reasons 1. Their custom engine doesn't have all the features of either of those other engines. Their artists in particular are pushing to switch to get those…

The target for this is not AAA studios, but indie developers.

For my part, I don't have enough spare time to learn one of the big engines. They're too complex, and this is a hobby.

DragonRuby on the other hand is simple enough that you can start doing stuff immediately if you know even basic Ruby. That is the appeal to me.

Whether or not it would work for a large team is totally irrelevant for that kind of use, because I have no interest in starting a studio.

It seems a lot of the people criticizing DragonRuby in this thread forgets that game dev spans from hobby development by individuals who might toy with it a few hours a week to multi year projects by major companies, and they have different needs and interests.

E.g. I value having fun over ever completing a publishable game. DragonRuby is fun.

That I could release something with it is a bonus, but to me even that is secondary.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#80

Post by lloeki »

phaedryx wrote: post #3

I don't see this mentioned on the website, but, if I remember correctly, they also have materials for teaching kids how to code. I was thinking about running something at my son's school last year before Covid shut everything down. The "hotloading" is really nice and the community on Discord is excellent.

Instead of DR, I think I'll use Ruby2D as a very first step: it's incredibly limited, having only basic primitives, but it's also much more approachable, in a BASIC/LOGO-like way.

Coincidentally because of that use case I just remembered yesterday that I had a PR open on Ruby2D...

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