Comments on: Live Coding Games in Python

By: Stan Shepherd

Stan Shepherd — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 04:20:38 +0000

Hi Erik, I am not a functional programmer, but I like the approach. I first saw it here http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

And more technically here:http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

I thought then that it would be a great way to develop games. Have you progressed this much? Any show-stooping issues?

Stan

By: Nicola Larosa

Nicola Larosa — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 16:02:12 +0000

> The only downside is that some day I’m going to start writing flash games
> that run directly in the browser. When I do that, I’m really going to miss all this
> dynamic language magic that I’m learning to use with Python.

Not necessarily. Work is going on to have Python in Firefox, besides Javascript:

Breaking the grip JS has on the DOM
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Breaking_the_grip_JS_has_on_the_DOM

“We want to change the grip JS [Javascript] has on the DOM and on XUL. [...] The initial work on this, including a Python implementation is largely complete.”

This goes nicely hand in hand with the work Brett Cannon is recently doing on a new restricted environment for Python:

[Python-Dev] doc for new restricted execution design for Python
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-June/066344.html

By: Logan Koester

Logan Koester — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 01:41:41 +0000

Looking forward to it, Erik

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 22:42:58 +0000

@Logan: I’m working on a bit of code that displays an image without loading it every frame, and does some simple animation. I’ll do a follow up blog entry once I get it to the point that I’m happy with it.

@Steve: Yes, Smalltalk does interest me a lot. It and Lisp pioneered dynamic language features long ago. But it’s fun to push the limits and see what Python can do. Plus there are reasons why I find Python useful for game development, even if it isn’t the ideal language for live coding.

I know that Smalltalk and Lisp could do this sort of thing years ago, but I find it odd that I’ve never heard of people developing in an environment where their code is automatically run and tested as they save it. Perhaps I’ve just never read the correct stuff.

By: Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 21:50:26 +0000

I don’t want to get into language-war territory, so please forgive – but Smalltalk might interest you if you want to play with ‘live coding’.

It’s (from some people) common practice to code inside the debugger, creating classes and methods as they are called, halting, changing and re-running live objects,defining variables on the fly, etc. I don’t think it’s the height of good design to do so, but it can make debugging and exploratory coding quite a hoot.

By: jas mhz

jas mhz — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 20:36:49 +0000

This is the ultimate force – live coding networked enviroments – oh I think the network needs a new iteration number or protocol now – wow.
Multicoloured Code like a vital source flowed and spewed from an ever increasing number of finger-tips. An evermore inelluctable knowledge onrush entertwined in the collective intuition emerges somethink new, unexpectedl; a paradigm shift, number 11 on the dial.
Many thanks for your beautiful idea – I love it.

By: Logan Koester

Logan Koester — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:53:30 +0000

I’m not entirely sure I understand your caching solution. Could you maybe provide some more detail, or better yet an example implementation?

If I’m lucky I’ll have the time to play around with this a bit over the weekend, see if we can’t get a few of these features implemented, eh?

Cheers

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 15:50:48 +0000

I’m sure that this could be made to work in a network environment. The controller might have to take care maintaining the connections, but it could be done. Live coding an RPG is a neat idea. I imagine that there are MUDs out there that allow you to do some of this sort of thing.

In terms of caching, my thought was to define an initialization function, that defines starting states for objects, and performs actions like loading images. I would call the init function with the PyGame initialization, so that it only happens once. Then I would have the ‘r’ key trigger the init function. So if you made some changes in the init, they wouldn’t take effect until you hit ‘r’.

I’m not really sure about threading and live coding. One thing I do want to try is having a python shell running in a thread alongside the game, so that you can modify the live game’s state by typing commands into the shell.

By: Logan Koester

Logan Koester — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 12:53:43 +0000

Wow, what a great idea. I really like where this is going. Wouldn’t it be interesting to add network support, and have a dungeon master creating the environment in realtime while players are online? Just a thought.

As you said, performance will be a real issue for anything that complex. Do you have any ideas about caching? What about threading?

I’m pretty new to python myself.