Helm: A functionally reactive game engine in Haskell

Re:Helm: A functionally reactive game engine in Haskell by fgaaldal on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @07:40PM (#10013659)

It would be nice to see some examples, otherwise this is "yet another game engine that will be deprecated in 1 year". I consider this very important as games are so different that it is hard to find common parts to put into a library that are not trivial and could be reimplemented. In particular have at least 3 slightly involved examples, otherwise it is unclear what one would gain over simply using SDL/OpenGL.

This goes also the other way. If I hack for fun, I often think about how to abstract stuff that is not specific to my current problem and put it into a library (I think we all have been there). Fact is, I often rush, so my abstraction only works for the current situation and so does not belong into a library. Until I did not reimplement the stuff at least 3 times I try to avoid making a library.

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Re:Helm: A functionally reactive game engine in Haskell by sseefried on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @09:39PM (#10014106)

Yes, and so few people write actual games, just game engines.

My game is pretty crappy but I overcame a bunch of (mostly boring) technical issues to get it running on both Android and iOS. Here is a repo that sets up an Android development environment.

https://github.com/sseefried/docker-epidemic-build-env

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Re:Helm: A functionally reactive game engine in Haskell by lobo_tuerto on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @07:58PM (#10013764)

I posted this because I was looking for info on how to go about writing a game using Haskell, or FP for that matter.

I think this at least exposes how you can do it, and what kind of tools it uses to accomplish it.

After I also stumbled upon this: http://elm-lang.org/guide/reactivity

And then on this: https://github.com/evancz/elm-architecture-tutorial/

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Re:Helm: A functionally reactive game engine in Haskell by fgaaldal on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @08:50PM (#10013973)

Obviously it depends on the game. However if you do not plan to make a straight-forward game or do not have to be fast, I highly recommend the combination SDL2 + OpenGL. It just works.

  - you find tons of documentation
  - you will run anywhere (that is obviously not trivial)

In particular if you are going 2D you can skip OpenGL if speed is not a problem (yet).

You then just write a small C-kernel which provides the main functionality and explore Haskell's FFI.

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Re:Helm: A functionally reactive game engine in Haskell by efnx on Thursday August 06, 2015 @06:45PM (#10019924)

Check out the Haskell game dev reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/haskellgamedev/

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