Oblivious Sponge

More fun with coroutines. Having written off Lua for the job (creating new variables due to typos? Agh!) we decided to have a look elsewhere. There’s not exactly a glut of small embedded languages that support coroutines. In fact, there’s just one, Io. It looks really interesting, but frankly it’s a bit too bleeding age for me right now (F# is about as bleeding as I can cope with).

Anyway, implementing game logic in coroutines is still a cunning plan - the more Dave describes it the more cunning it gets, so I tried (naively) good old Python. It’s had generators since 2.2, so maybe, just maybe, I could write coroutines using some dummy yields. Ah. No. Realised this evening (with a little prototyping and other help) that it’s not possible without switching to Stackless Python. Which would mean breaking all the libraries I want to use - the major merit of Py. Sigh.

In other (kind of related, and better) news, my DS PassMe arrived today. Now I can start ‘real’ DS development. In that vast amount of spare time I have. *cough*

And in further (kind of-kind of related news), myself, Dave and another colleague, Matthew are attempting our first Game Jam this weekend. Hopefully we can get something fun done in a day - I’ll post the results next week!

I’m quite happy with Visual Studio 2003 (I’ll be even happier with 2005, judging by the beta). I’m determined to use it for as much coding as possible - something I never managed in Visual Studio 6.

Anyway, I’ve semi-happily got it working with F# (an OCaml under the CLR, for those who care. A lengthy post may eventually appear on this subject). Tonight I’ve started using Lua again and have got into a reasonable state of editing/running code in Visual Studio. I downloaded lualite and added lua.exe as an external tool in VS with $(ItemFileName)$(ItemExt) as arguments and $(ItemDir) as the initial directory.

There’s probably a better way of getting it to play nice with project configurations and the like, but this will more than suffice for now.

As for justification for Lua? Well DaveT (a wise work colleague) has a crazy idea That Might Just Work about Lua and DS development. I’ve currently got plans of a yielding PacMan. Don’t ask.

I bought a Nintendo DS when I was over in the States this summer. I’ve become something of a serial importer and my impatience with European release dates (and prices!) has resulted in ridiculously large DS games collection already. I can’t recommend the console hightly enough - it’s unique, robust, plays all my beloved GBA games, is properly lit and the battery lasts for weeks.

Anyway, the DS homebrew scene seems to be trundling along nicely (although nothing like the PSP) and the architecture of the machine really appeals. I tried some GBA coding a while back but the results always felt like simple stuff I could have done on the PC. The DS and its stylus, however, give me lots of scope for interesting ideas.

So, I’ve just ordered a DS PassMe. It took a fair bit of hoops and jumping - I don’t have a PayPal account and that’s the only payment method the site took. After some pursuading a friendly work colleague ordered a couple using his account - now all I have to do is wait. The guy puts the things together himself, so it may be some time.