in reply to Perl TK books

I want to get into Perl game development, is Perl TK the best way to go about this?

IMHO: no. Take a look at that other Perl game, Frozen Bubble. I think that whatever library they've used, lies more in the proper direction, for graphical games in Perl.

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Re^2: Perl TK books
by jZed (Prior) on Nov 12, 2004 at 02:13 UTC
    Apparently, Frozen Bubble uses SDL
[reply]
      SDL has a very hard time compiling on many platforms (snapshot or CPAN version) in most incarnations. It also has issues with hanging, etc, that are quite a problem.

      Tk is definitely fun to play with, Mastering Perl/Tk is a great book, however I do not think Perl is really a good game development language for 2D. If you can get the OpenGL bindings to work (this may be a toss-up), OpenGL is a fine way to go. However Perl's OpenGL bindings are not well updated and tend to pose problems.

      I've tried many times to make it such, but ultimately it never ends well. While Frozen Bubble is a masterfully beautiful game, the code isn't IMHO, and there is a lot of pixel manipulation and other routines done in extra libraries built on top of SDL. SDL is brutally low level and unforgiving.

      I still maintain that game development was MUCH more fun back when we had GW-basic, simple C pixel routines, and mode 13h. Why? You made simple stuff and it worked.

      OpenGL is fun, but there is a bit of a learning curve. 2D in OpenGL is doable, but sound is a bit of a problem.

[reply]

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