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Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

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Re: Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

#21

Post by cv5005 »

jasode wrote: post #19
Y_Y wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives Plenty of other comments have already disputed this. It's a reasonable mistake to make, especially if your experience is with more recent technologies and languages. All the same if reminds me of this perennial quote from a man who really couldn't just use C for everything; > On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put i…

>> It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives > I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. [...] , but you can do it all in C If you trace the actual context of the conversation from ggp (doubtfuluser - "SDL is not 1000 lines anymore" ) to gp (shric - "pure C" ) ... it is clear that "pure C" was just an imprecise and shorthand alte…

Since FILE io is part if standard C I guess you could do a plan9-style interface where you fopen("framebuffer"); and fwrite() means writing a pixel value to the screen. Since io is always implementation defined anyway, it wouldnt be any less portable than when you do printf("some string") and 'expects to see a string somewhere'.

Re: Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

#22

Post by Y_Y »

jasode wrote: post #19
Y_Y wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives Plenty of other comments have already disputed this. It's a reasonable mistake to make, especially if your experience is with more recent technologies and languages. All the same if reminds me of this perennial quote from a man who really couldn't just use C for everything; > On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put i…

>> It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives > I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. [...] , but you can do it all in C If you trace the actual context of the conversation from ggp (doubtfuluser - "SDL is not 1000 lines anymore" ) to gp (shric - "pure C" ) ... it is clear that "pure C" was just an imprecise and shorthand alte…

Perhaps you're responding to the wrong person? I didn't think or write that GGP didn't know any of this. I was (clearly, I thought) considering the idea that someone might take such a position.

I wouldn't even mention this, except that you've expressed a interest in avoiding misinterpretation.

Re: Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

#23

Post by Y_Y »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #18
Y_Y wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives Plenty of other comments have already disputed this. It's a reasonable mistake to make, especially if your experience is with more recent technologies and languages. All the same if reminds me of this perennial quote from a man who really couldn't just use C for everything; > On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put i…

Yes indeed, if the project were targetting a simpler machine without an operating system and windowing system in the way, then doing the whole thing - graphics presentation and all - in a thousand lines of C would be perfectly feasible > I'm acutely aware how it's not turtles all the way down (as the logophiles believe) De Chelonian Mobile

> De Chelonian Mobile

Get out of here with that monotestudonist heresy!

Re: Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

#24

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

Y_Y wrote: post #15
shric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives? Whatever you do at whatever level of abstraction/portability (SDL, OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, Unity, ...), you're leveraging zillions of lines of other people's code. The only way arguably you could do it in pure C (with undefined behavior) is in enviroments that let you write straight to graphics framebuffers without any abstraction layer and even w…

> It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives Plenty of other comments have already disputed this. It's a reasonable mistake to make, especially if your experience is with more recent technologies and languages. All the same if reminds me of this perennial quote from a man who really couldn't just use C for everything; > On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put i…

> Although I don't start new projects in C very often, I'm acutely aware how it's not turtles all the way down (as the logophiles believe), but rather C. With some infrequent exceptions the whole tower of abstraction was written in C. SDL is written in C, the compiler? C, the Linux kernel is written in C, the graphics driver was written in C, the GPU firmware was C. It might be unfeasible for you to get by without writing these yourself, but with enough C and somewhere to sit you can move the earth.

This is a Linux-only situation. A significant fraction of systems code in Windows and macOS are written in fairly modern C++, including core system libraries and the kernel. A project that emerged out of Windows' C++ effort is the Windows Implementation Library[1]. I'm also certain Windows and macOS graphics drivers are written in C++.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil

Re: Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

#26

Post by mysterydip »

shric wrote: post #4
Buttons840 wrote: post #2

It uses SDL. Not saying that's good or bad, but it's the first thing I wondered about.

Yeah, it still seems like a reasonable choice if you're going to write a simple game in C.

raylib might be an option for consideration as well: https://www.raylib.com/

Re: Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

#27

Post by baudaux »

CodeArtisan wrote: post #14
shric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives? Whatever you do at whatever level of abstraction/portability (SDL, OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, Unity, ...), you're leveraging zillions of lines of other people's code. The only way arguably you could do it in pure C (with undefined behavior) is in enviroments that let you write straight to graphics framebuffers without any abstraction layer and even w…

On Linux, you may mmap /dev/fb0 to access the front buffer like you would have on old computers. Not all kernel configs and GPU devices allow that. You can test if fb0 is usable with cat /dev/random > /dev/fb0 to see if the screen is filled with garbage (you may also need root privilege).

For this reason, I have added framebuffer support in https://exaequos.com.

Re: Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

#28

Post by bryancoxwell »

Y_Y wrote: post #15
shric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives? Whatever you do at whatever level of abstraction/portability (SDL, OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, Unity, ...), you're leveraging zillions of lines of other people's code. The only way arguably you could do it in pure C (with undefined behavior) is in enviroments that let you write straight to graphics framebuffers without any abstraction layer and even w…

> It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives Plenty of other comments have already disputed this. It's a reasonable mistake to make, especially if your experience is with more recent technologies and languages. All the same if reminds me of this perennial quote from a man who really couldn't just use C for everything; > On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put i…

> with enough C and somewhere to sit you can move the earth

Love this.

Re: Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C

#30

Post by kevindamm »

fgh wrote: post #11
pan69 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible to do graphics in pure C, so what are the alternatives? Back in the days of DOS I used to do this all the time :)

Yes, that brings back the memory of working through books by Andre LaMothe and implementing little games in DOS with C and a little bit of Assembler. I believe there was a very primitive graphics library included in Borland C, but it was not that useful for this task.

Andre LaMothe showed me the wonder of alternative graphics memory layout like Mode 13h and Mode Z. Though it confused teenage me at the time why you would have four memory segments each dealing with (offset %4) bytes in a line-oriented graphics buffer, it was magical when it worked and was one of the first times I had to let the code just work and move on.

Double buffering was an understandable neat trick and one that would have taken me a bit longer to discover on my own. He also had a custom controller wired through the printer port and some C+ASM for interfacing with it.

I had three of his books, I think the Black Art book was constantly on my desk in the 90s.

https://archive.org/details/BlackArt3DEBook

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