[JarrettBillingsley]

I'm thinking: a MiniD interface to the Arc library. Develop games in MiniD which can be run in a "player" program compiled with ArcLib for the current platform. Easy cross-platform games.

And I suppose it'd also go the other way: an Arc interface to MiniD to add scripting to games written in D.

THOUGHTS?!

[ChristianK]

That definitely sounds interesting. I have not used MiniD before: how much effort is writing these bindings?

[JarrettBillingsley]

Something like:

[ChristianK]

Well, that seems simple enough. Are the wrapping functions and options documented somewhere on the MiniD page? I checked the "Native API" section, but didn't find it.

Basically, I'm all for having bindings to a scripting language for Arc. Particularly if it allows users to expose their own functions and data easily. Having a player program for games that run mostly in MiniD sounds good too.

On the other hand, we need to find time for it. I imagine Clay and me will be busy with performing fundamental revisions and improvements for the next few months: After all, 0.2 has only just been released and it's the time for the major overhauls of 0.3.

I have created a ticket for it, so we can look at it again once 0.3 becomes a bit more stable:
http://www.dsource.org/projects/arclib/ticket/91

[JarrettBillingsley]

Huh! I must have never generated the docs for minid.bind, or maybe they weren't generated because of template weirdness. Well the binding library is documented, if a little sparsely, in minid/bind.d in the repo. I want to make a more complete page on how to use the binding library too.

[clayasaurus]

I'd like to see a MiniArc competitor to the PyGame, but I'd imagine such a task would be a project of it's own. It could be attempted now, but API things are still moving pretty fast and it's not completely solidified yet.

As for the other way around, how would that work? How could Arc integration with minid be any more helpful than the end-user integrating with minid themselves?

edit: I'll have to think about this idea a little bit, to determine what priority to put it at

[JarrettBillingsley]

The MiniD-in-Arc support probably wouldn't be that much -- it might just mostly involve providing some MiniD-friendly "hooks" into the engine to make it easy to add scriptability to an Arc game. I'm not entirely sure what that would entail, as I've never made a game with scripting

[JScott]

MiniD could be used to help create a component based object system. This way new game objects types wouldn't have to belong to a huge inheritance chain. Instead they could sort of dynamicly mixin the required functionality.

This is higher level than arclib is at the moment so maybe it would have to be another project.

[clayasaurus]

Tell you what... I might be up for this.

After Arc v.3 is released and you (Jarrett) are still up for MiniArc, you can startup a MiniArc project, and I can help out where needed.

Now, even after v.3 is out, there may be some refactoring, and I'm going to promise a refactor (or just code cleanup) before Arc 1.0 is released, but we are not terribly close to that mark yet, or we won't realize it until we get there.

~ Clay

[JarrettBillingsley]

Weeeeeeeee!