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Programming Software Entertainment Games IT Linux Technology

Freya Reaches 2.0 Beta Release 50

Posted by Zonk from the you-think-you-can-do-better?-prove-it dept.
mandrake*rpgdx writes "Freya, a game programming environment for the Lua programming language, reaches 2.0 beta this week. Freya allows you to program cross platform games in the programming language Lua. It sports speeds 2x-10x faster than PyGame, and contains a built in map engine, pixel perfect collision detection, support for many graphics and sound formats including Ogg Vorbis and different MOD formats. Right now the beta release is looking for people to test the Linux version."
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Freya Reaches 2.0 Beta Release More

Freya Reaches 2.0 Beta Release

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  • I wonder how long will it be until Lua really takes off? Well if they take off at the wrong time, they might as well could miss Mars... :|

  • Games... where are the games... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @02:53PM (#10965372)
    I wanna see some games to play and hack with and see if it's even worth pulling down the stuff to write my own... the games page is empty... and the screenshots aren't exactly inspiring...
    • I'm working on one and some others are too. But right now teh Freya community is spread thin through 4 or 5 other message boards. This site has only been up for a week. So I'm trying to gather and bring together all of the disperate coders under this one roof. You can always download it and give it a shot.

      • Re:Still being worked on. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @05:52PM (#10967684)
        "You can always download it and give it a shot.""

        It would help if the dependencies would compile... fblend 0.4 is the problem so far...

        In file included from src/x86/trans16.s:15:
        src/x86/trans.inc:128:7: warning: no newline at end of file
        gcc -x assembler-with-cpp -c src/x86/trans15.s -o obj/unix/release/x86/trans15.o
        -I. -Isrc -Iinclude
        In file included from src/x86/trans15.s:15:
        src/x86/trans.inc:128:7: warning: no newline at end of file

        [then no problems until the end]

        src/x86/2xstretch.s: Assembler messages:
        src/x86/2xstretch.s:177: Error: junk `(%esi)movq ' after expression
        src/x86/2xstretch.s:177: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `prefetcht0'
        make: *** [obj/unix/release/x86/2xstretch.o] Error 1

        Turns out it's a missing semi-colon on at the end of line 184 of 2xstretch.s. And that's supposed to be the three year old stable release!!!!!!! oh and I had to stick a new line at the end of the last line of trans.inc as well

        I've stopped for a while to let my head unwind... the readme for alfont is all geekspeak to me...

        • But I thought it was mentioned on Fblend's website- the stable version won't run in Linux, you need the latest unstable version.

          I think it's here-> yup [sourceforge.net]

          Anyway, here's some really good stuff on getting everything *but* dumb and dumbogg running on Linux (and he also made it really easy to get it runnning on arch linux): here [rpgdx.net]

          Hope that helps.

  • Also Torque (Score:5, Informative)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @02:57PM (#10965414) Journal
    Torque from GarageGames [garagegames.com] also has some new SDK's out. Not free for but 100 bux for the engine and 50 for the RTS pack, you can make some cool freeware games. Unless I read it wrong, you only have to license if you make over 250K..

    BTW, I didnt care for torque when it came out in Tribes2, buggy and early release. But they kept working on it, adding new features, and the new Beta engine they showed off even have really good plantlife, the grass was amazing. And the RTS kit and content packs make it easy to do some really cool FPS's.

    But for Freya, I've always wonder why not as many Bardstale old style RPG's, easy to do, and looks like a good use of it. And I bet lot lighter than the torque engine.

    (Also Torque engine compiles for linux/osx and windows, so you get cross platform games)

    • When 2.0 is out of beta. Right now there are a few floating point errors on Linux for some of the examples, and some of the libs need changed to work on OSX, but other than that it's heading there. Bard's Tale style- that would be neat. I myself is working on a hybrid zelda-roguelike kind of game using it.
    • Does anyone have a list or can at least rattle off any other gave development sdks there are for other interpteted languages (besides java). For example does ruby have any? how about lisp?
      • Is that I plan on making it easy to port to languages other than Lua. To the point of where you can just run SWIG for the target languages.

        There is Sphere for Javascript, but other than that and PyGame and Ika (Python as well), I don't see any other scripting language friendly gaming lib's.

      • Does anyone have a list or can at least rattle off any other gave development sdks there are for other interpteted languages (besides java). For example does ruby have any? how about lisp?

        Before I provide you with useful links, I'm obligated to be a pedantic pain in the ass and point out that:
        1. Languages aren't "interpreted." Their implementations may be.
        2. There aren't any interpreters for Java - the politically correct term is virtual machines.
        3. The information I am about to provide is really off

  • Well that takes away some of the pain. Souns cool!!!

  • World of Warcraft (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rit ( 64731 ) <bwmcadams&gmail,com> on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @03:26PM (#10965671) Homepage
    Blizzard Software's new hit, the MMORPG "World of Warcraft", has a fully programmable and extendable UI. Using XML described UI enhancements, and a backing application, you can actually add all sorts of things - i've even seen someone add multiplayer chess that you can play with other players with the same UI extensions.

    What is the programming language they use for the UI?

    You guessed it. LUA.

    It's pretty cool, if you ask me :)
    • I really think Lua is the choice for an embeddable scripting language. After using it for Freya, I will always promote it.
    • Ya, they already have fishing bots written in LUA for World of Warcraft, thats why they turned fishing off in some areas. People where selling the fish for gold, then selling the gold on ebay.

      Not bad for 1 week, and already bot'ed.

      • Re:World of Warcraft (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I'm pretty sure the bots were using an external program to feed a mouse click over the bobber, since the lua scripts do not have access to the information (nor are they able to select a world object in any fashion).

        On the other hand, the lua bots might be used to navigate, which I believe is doable.
    • WOW did it right.
  • I have absolutely zero programming experience, but am setting myself up to start learning. One of the things I want to do is to actually make some of the game ideas I have real. Would this be a good place to start?

    • Maybe. (Score:3, Informative)

      by mandrake*rpgdx ( 650221 )
      Lua, like Python are both easy to learn programming languages and take less time to learn than C or C++ or Java. But, if you are not keen on learning even a simple proreamming langauge Game Maker might be a better choice. But, if you want a good stepping stone to video game programming, Freya does speed things up.
    • If you think that you'd like to hash out a quick and dirty game, you have 2 options:

      1) take some basic and intermediate classes at your local university or technical college. Then look at some game programming options then and only then, like Game Institute [gameinstitute.com] or something like that afterwards.

      2) Get comfortable with an advanced presentations program like Flash or Liquid Media [skunklabs.cc] which at present handle enough options to put some simple games together. It will have even more options to manipulate 3D environ
    • I learned some C++ and used the allegro game library, I think the website is allegro.cc It's probably a bit higher learning curve, but you can make better games. There is also a 3D version but I don't have any experience with it.

    • Re:Newbie Question... (Score:3, Informative)

      by zarthrag ( 650912 )
      At the zero level, I'd like to give lua a resounding "no". Learn a "mid-low level" language such as c++ or even java. Lua is a scripting language that's *embedded* in your c/c++ application - that is, it's originally meant to allow you to easily use for configuration and stuff - not for writing standalone apps. It's use in game development (homeworld 2 used it, I know) is superb because you can do your AI programming and stuff outside of your game engine using easily edited files.
      • ...at home. Seriously, recommending C++ or Java as introductory languages is IMHO a really bad idea. Both languages suffer from design problems that will take a lot of fun from the learning experience.

        C++ is probably the worst choice besides C or Assembler (not talking about Braindead et al :) for learning a new language. With manual memory management, heavy generic programming (templates) and mostly speed-optimized libraries (easy interfaces vs. performance) C++ is the heavy machine gun of languages that

  • What's it built on? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shredwheat ( 199954 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @04:01PM (#10966237) Homepage
    The "jab" at Pygame [pygame.org] got me interested. Trying to determine what libraries this is built on, but not seeing it immediately. It looks like a great set of features for now, congrats. How does this compare to LuaSdl [lua-users.org]?

    As the Pygame [pygame.org] author, it's fun to see what other projects are doing in similar fields. Now I need to determine what benchmark was used to determine the 2x. :-) I admit Pygame's been dragging over the summer, but trying to gear up for a new release before the end of the year.
    • Self reply, after further information found. It appears Allegro is the base of this, along with several supporting library. I was a little let down when I read this part of the documentation

      The first is the limit of resolution. The only resolution you have available is 320x240x16bpp. The second is how input is sent to and from the user. Freya uses a virtual joystick design (with meta keys for input from the keyboard) that makes the keyboard act like a joystick. In 2.0 mouse support has been added as w

      • Resolution limit of 320x240, eh? It looks like Pygame is still safe for now, except possibly in the retro-gamer arena :-)

        • Yeah. (Score:4, Informative)

          by mandrake*rpgdx ( 650221 ) on Wednesday December 01, 2004 @04:27PM (#10966612) Homepage
          I was originally going to opt for other resolutions (some people are complaining about that), but I want something that's retro gaming specific. And I can push out more speed this way and optimizing things a bit.

          The speed test was done by writing a small demo in both and running them on a 350mhz. No offense, but I designed Freya because Pygame was moving to slow for me. And, I didn't know enough about SDL to do anything to help it.

          If I had known SDL, this might be different. It is faster than LuaSDL, but the makers of it even admit that it's not for gaming but more for multimedia apps.

          The secret to Freya's speed is in it's limatations (and how much faster Lua is to Python. When I get around to porting Freya to Python, it will probably run at the same speed or slower than PyGame).
    • I even ran a simple demo for myself with over 100 sprites flying across the screen without any slowdown.

      My current game framework hasn't even made it to Alpha, yet, so there's no optimizations to speak of, and it's actually running too fast for the final gameplay.
  • Lua is a fantastic language for embedding... even if you have no interest whatsoever in game programming, it is worth a download to play with the system.

    --
    Evan

  • she [ucsb.edu] had reached 2.0 beta ;)
  • It's kind of surreal seeing this article make slashdot...

    The library is limited to 320x240 resolution, and simulates a joystick using keypress events! This is obviously a toy project of the article submitter. Do the editors bother checking the background of articles anymore?

    The poster then has the audacity to compare the library favorably to pygame, (and poke fun at it) which supports anything SDL can do. That means any resolution your video card can do, not just 320x240.

    The speed comparison is also i

    • It's also a comparison of Lua and Python as well. Lua is much faster than Python. And it's got quite a following now, people who want to use it to make retro games. I'm suprised it made it to slashdot- I've been submitting stories for quite a while now (none to do with Freya, however) and been rejected quite a bit. I'm very glad they put it up, and a lot of people really like the engine and it's capibilities.

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