Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

dragonruby.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 146 posts

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#41

Post by phaedryx »

TylerE wrote: post #35
phaedryx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that DragonRuby is faster as a 2D game engine and doesn't make sense for a complex 3D game.

I don't believe that either. Unity works just fine for Cuphead, which is a pretty graphically intense game. Plenty of other graphical complicated 2d games too.

I think you're moving the goalposts. Of course Unity can work "just fine" for things like Cuphead. However, DragonRuby is an mRuby wrapper around SDL by the guy who wrote SDL vs. a 3D engine that was reworked into a 2D engine?

Surely Unity has more overhead and DragonRuby can make more optimizations.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#42

Post by stolen_biscuit »

Why would I choose this over a FOSS 2D game engine like Godot that offers almost everything this engine offers without the price tag? Not trying to shit on the project, I just don't see a compelling argument put forth on the website as to why I should pay $50 or $98 a year for an engine that I can only see has been used to port one open source game to Switch and a bunch of tech demos. What's the hook? Why should this be my game engine of choice?

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#43

Post by neolog »

hu3 wrote: post #31
neolog wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVE Online is written in Python

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’d suggest CCP implemented the EVE GUI in-house, not using a (open source) widget library. I’ve been playing EVE for many years now, and the GUI has evolved a lot since the days I first tried EVE (around 2005). This also strongly suggests that the code was written by CCP.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#44

Post by TylerE »

phaedryx wrote: post #41
TylerE wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that either. Unity works just fine for Cuphead, which is a pretty graphically intense game. Plenty of other graphical complicated 2d games too.

I think you're moving the goalposts. Of course Unity can work "just fine" for things like Cuphead. However, DragonRuby is an mRuby wrapper around SDL by the guy who wrote SDL vs. a 3D engine that was reworked into a 2D engine? Surely Unity has more overhead and DragonRuby can make more optimizations.

GP made a blanket "We're faster" claim. I'm the one moving the goalposts?

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#45

Post by AlchemistCamp »

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…

> 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?

A good reason would be that RoR is still a competitive advantage for indie web devs and small startup teams working on non performance-constrained domains.

It's amazing how many successes In see in the IH world using Ruby despite far larger numbers of people building everything in JS or maybe Python.

Dev experience matters and there are some durable advantages the Ruby ecosystem has maintained despite others growing more quickly in popularity. Building DSLs is one.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#46

Post by p1necone »

offtop5 wrote: post #10
Pfhreak wrote: post #5

> This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it). > DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon. This feels like a liability for the long term. The community is now depending on Ryan to maintain this custom Ruby implementation, if I'm reading correctly.

In general I don't think I'd be comfortable using any type of engine or framework which is solely developed by one person. Let's say he goes crazy tomorrow and decides to camp on the beaches of Jamaica. No matter what you do, particularly with a closed source engine, you're stuck. With unity if one programmer decides to quit, we still have a game engine that gets updated. With Godot if both of the paid maintainers qu…

> crazy

> camp on the beaches of Jamaica

This sounds great.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#47

Post by p1necone »

dluan wrote: post #39
amirrajan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s four of us in the partnership (Ryan just handles the core xplat stuff). And we are leveraging a lot of OSS foundational components SDL, mRuby, LLVM. With regards to insolvency. It’s answered in the FAQ: http://docs.dragonruby.org/#--frequently-asked-questions,-co...

I'm not a game dev, but I just want to say thanks for working on this. I empathize and also don't quite understand how the "let's shit on ruby" sentiment spreads even to this, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Among Us is built on dragonruby! I always love to see ruby's focus on developer productivity being spread, and if I decide to take a crack at making a game, I'll be sure to check this out.

FWIW I think the issue is more that it's closed source than that it's using ruby.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#48

Post by AlchemistCamp »

This looks like a fantastic dev experience and it's great to see this team building something like this. Indie game dev is near and dear to my heart.

Unfortunately, HN tends to be full of haters. On the behalf of the rest of us, thanks for sharing DragonRuby!

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#49

Post by kamranjon »

jchw wrote: post #22
tomlin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I don't know if the Ruby interpreter is what I'd look to for performance in a game.

The irony is that Ruby was actually designed for this kind of thing. And in fact, RPG Maker XP’s Ruby Game Scripting System, a commercial usage of Ruby as an embedded scripting language for game dev, was released at least a few months prior to the first Ruby on Rails release if memory serves correct.

Do you have a source for the claim that ruby was designed for game development? I'm not saying it's wrong, I just have never heard that before.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#50

Post by minitech »

amirrajan wrote: post #17
tomlin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you're suggesting Ruby is better than Unity? This has to be a joke.

Nope. Not a joke. We’re faster too: https://youtu.be/UuY7CWdvyWM

Looks like the Ruby code in https://gist.github.com/amirrajan/e26fc9de3c20e7c395f6809a99... does a fixed update, so maybe FixedUpdate with Unity would be a better comparison?
Post reply on HN