[Haskell-cafe] Programming videogames in haskell

Ivan Perez ivan.perez at keera.co.uk
Fri Nov 14 12:13:03 UTC 2014


Hi Quentin,

This is precisely what we are doing (see [1, 2, 3, 4] for examples of
Haskell on Android). There a few games over there, and videos of a
fully-working graphic adventure game IDE and engine.

A shorter version of a sample game has been released as open source [5]. It
uses SDL for multimedia and Yampa for game logic and physics. You can
control it with a mouse or a wiimote. I have a version that can be
controlled with a kinect.

Yampa has its own mailing list, where real FRP experts are listening. I am
not one such expert, but as the current maintainer of Yampa, so you can
also email me directly.

Our internal version uses SDL2 for graphics, because that works better than
SDL1.2 on Android. The repositories for SDL2 are *not* the ones on hackage,
but others on github. I can send you the links. On desktop, we are
currently running at 720 FPS with a standard machine (over 200FPS more than
when the blog posts were published). There is plenty of room for further
improvement, both on desktop and on android (currently rendering at 60 FPS).

The reason for using SDL instead of OpenGL is that it works well, it
provides a higher-level API, and creating 2D graphics is cheaper for us.
Nothing stops you from using OpenGL. If you choose to do so, I personally
found "Beautiful code, Compelling evidence" [6] to be one of the most
amazing introductions to Haskell multimedia I have ever read.

Also, make sure you take a look at Nikki and the Robots. You might want to
read about the company behind it, or get in touch with them.

I heard about Elise Huard. Did she finish the book? I thought she was still
working on it.

I wish you a busy weekend :)

Ivan

[1]
http://keera.co.uk/blog/2014/08/13/most-inspiring-green-screen-you-will-ever-see/
[2] http://keera.co.uk/blog/2014/10/15/from-60-fps-to-500/
[3] http://keera.co.uk/blog/2014/10/18/par-thy-android-followup-60-fps-500/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/user/KeeraStudios
[5] https://github.com/ivanperez-keera/haskanoid
[6] http://www.renci.org/wp-content/pub/tutorials/BeautifulCode.pdf

On 14 November 2014 09:26, Quentin Le Guennec <quentin.leguennec1 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We're building a indie game studio with some friends. I am the lead
> developper and i am planning to write the game logic and graphics in
> haskell. I would like to know if some of you have some experience in game
> developpement in haskell, functionnal reactive programming in particular.
>
> Furthermore, knowing which tools/DSL's/libraries i could use and where to
> get good documentation could really help me. Elise Huard recently wrote an
> ebook about game programming in haskell, did some of you read it ? Is it
> worth buying it ?
>
> Thanks for your feedback.
>
> --
> Quentin Le Guennec
>
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> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
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>
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