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Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

dragonruby.org

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Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#111

Post by Applejinx »

mathgladiator wrote: post #59
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #48

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!

I wanted to second this, so thank you for being positive. Even though I'm not a rubyist, I do appreciate having options. A hard yet important lesson in life is to learn to do things in spite of haters hating. For example, I'm writing a programming language, and I can almost guarantee that people will hate it... and that's ok.

I feel like if you can't generate haters, you're too bland.

What you want is for the correct people to hate it, because it's not there to serve them, and makes no concessions to 'em about it.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#112

Post by jack_riminton »

unixhero wrote: post #105
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #99

If I understand correctly (from a quick browse of the docs) this is Ruby _without_ anything remotely like Rails. That makes it interesting. I did a Rails job once. I kept thinking that I liked the language as a kind of modern OO language in the spirit of Python (and also Lua a bit) but I really disliked the ecosystem around Rails. For instance, the project I worked on had to maintain two separate versions of Ruby bec…

A friend of mine sat me down and showed me how to work with rails. We ended up programming the entire weekend and worked our way through a few cases of beer in the same time. Working in rails was incredible and the productivity was unlike anything I have ever seen.

I still can't believe how productive Rails is either. One can literally recreate the most popular CRUD apps in a weekend

I've been learning React and played around with a Rails API backend and separate React front-end and I forget just how much work Rails takes out

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#114

Post by castwide »

jchw wrote: post #96
kamranjon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily game dev, but rather as an embeddable scripting language. There’s also mruby which is even more portable and designed to be more embeddable. My understanding is that in Japan, Ruby is often used as an embedded scripting language the way people might use Lua. (I don’t have an exact source for this, it’s something that seems to come up periodically when talking about Ruby. Matz mentions it briefly when…

I can vouch for Ruby's practicality as an embedded scripting language. The first time I used it was in a game engine (which, IIRC, also predated Rails) with a C++ core. Writing the high-level game logic in Ruby was pleasant, and hooking into C++ functions that did the heavy lifting kept it performant.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#115

Post by toomanybeersies »

mattbee wrote: post #102

20 years ago, I shipped a Ruby/SDL powered quiz game to a network of Windows NT4-powered games cabinets in pubs. They had 64MB RAM and the jerky animation due to garbage collection pauses ATE ME ALIVE for about 6 months. What's changed in Ruby since then to make smooth animation possible?

For a start, most computers have more than 64 MB of memory these days.

The GC has changed a lot in the past 20 years too. Here's a great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcQ-hIfiljA

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#116

Post by nrjames »

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…

Unity is a giant download and very complicated. Something like DragonRuby, Renpy, Python Arcade, or LOVE2D are far smaller and suitable for many small games. Even Godot is significantly smaller and offers many of the features of Unity.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#117

Post by cashewchoo »

jack_riminton wrote: post #112
unixhero wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine sat me down and showed me how to work with rails. We ended up programming the entire weekend and worked our way through a few cases of beer in the same time. Working in rails was incredible and the productivity was unlike anything I have ever seen.

I still can't believe how productive Rails is either. One can literally recreate the most popular CRUD apps in a weekend I've been learning React and played around with a Rails API backend and separate React front-end and I forget just how much work Rails takes out

I've had good results with the react-rails gem, basically letting me plop bits of react into a rails view. It's not like, the best the in the world from a pure design standpoint? But it does a really, really good job of not having react step on the toes of all the super nice things that Rails will do for you.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#118

Post by cortesoft »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #99

If I understand correctly (from a quick browse of the docs) this is Ruby _without_ anything remotely like Rails. That makes it interesting. I did a Rails job once. I kept thinking that I liked the language as a kind of modern OO language in the spirit of Python (and also Lua a bit) but I really disliked the ecosystem around Rails. For instance, the project I worked on had to maintain two separate versions of Ruby bec…

I have been using ruby professionally for 15 years, and I have not used rails in the last 12. I have not found it difficult to avoid rails stuff when searching for help.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#119

Post by VectorLock »

alekq wrote: post #75
VectorLock wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be really cool if it wasn't Ruby.

What is wrong Ruby? Which language would be "cool" choice?

In my opinion Python provides a better syntax in almost all areas.

Ruby has been a language in decline for quite some time.

Re: Show HN: DragonRuby Game Toolkit

#120

Post by endemic »

leetrout wrote: post #104
mattbee wrote: post #102

20 years ago, I shipped a Ruby/SDL powered quiz game to a network of Windows NT4-powered games cabinets in pubs. They had 64MB RAM and the jerky animation due to garbage collection pauses ATE ME ALIVE for about 6 months. What's changed in Ruby since then to make smooth animation possible?

Further down on the page: > Optimized for size and speed. 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. He is one of the core maintainers of libSDL

Name dropping Ryan Gordon sold me on taking this for a spin.
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