No photo
By Robert Ward
Date: Wednesday, 23 June 2010 16:00
Duration: 40 minutes
Target audience: Intermediate
Language: English
Tags: gaming sdl

Gaming With Perl

Once upon a time, game development was a domain reserved for only the most intrepid programmers: those willing to bear the burden of manual memory management and hours of debugging highly optimized C code. Now, however, we are entering a brave new world of game development. Modern AAA titles are increasingly using dynamic languages to create core game logic while still keeping processor intensive tasks like AI and graphics in C. Moving forward further, we are starting to see bindings for languages like Perl and Python into graphics toolkits and other optimized libraries. Now programmers from all types of backgrounds can pop open their favorite text editor and have basic games running in very short order.

I will be giving a brief overview of the state of the art in Perl programming and talking about the different libraries that are available. Focusing on the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), I will take the audience through the creation of a simple game from empty file to (hopefully) fun times. Lastly, I will pontificate briefly about the place of Perl and other dynamic languages in the future of game development.

Attended by: