Okra (Common Lisp bindings for the Ogre3D engine) hasn’t seen a lot of work lately. It covers my current needs and I’ve mostly been off to other projects. However, there’s good news from the Ogre camp: there’s now a community effort to create a C API!

Progress

I have made very little progress since the last report, mainly due to the little time that was available to me. Only two things were done:

1 Progress

Since the last report I’ve added: a controllable spaceship, bullets, tentacles and I made an unsuccessful attempt at producing a Linux binary.

Introduction

I’ve finally managed to scramble together a good couple of hours to work on my ILGE 2010 entry. At this rate it will be doubtful whether I’ll have a minimal game by the end of this month :-(

I’ve uploaded one-and-a-half project to GitHub that may or may not be useful to other people:

Black Tie packages the noise functions that were previously in Okra as a separate library. It is not very extensive yet and has only been optimized for SBCL. At the moment it includes functions for generating Perlin noise, simplex noise and Voronoi diagrams.

I was installing Debian (testing release) on a netbook since my main laptop is away for repairs and I noticed the Ogre packages in the distribution. So far I have always compiled Ogre and its dependencies myself so I was curious how much work it would take to get the Okra examples running.

Thanks to CL-GTK2’s author Dmitry Kalyanov for his help and patience and also thanks to several #lisp residents for testing some of my builds.

Go to ./software/okra-gtk-demo/ for the downloads.

This post should be treated more as a work-in-progress report[1] than as the blog I hoped I could publish, which would have had a title like: “Easy cross-platform executable delivery using CL-GTK2 and Okra”.

Torchlight has been released by Runic Games. It’s is a hack & slash game in the grand tradition of Rogue, Diablo and Diablo 2. Key people that worked on the last two titles have also worked on Torchlight.

The reason I blog about this is because it uses Ogre for its graphics engine which is the same library Okra uses.

I have been using Okra for a couple of months now after having worked on it for a few weeks. Although “a couple of months” should be seen in the perspective of someone with a full-time job, a wife and a kid.

While researching avenues to do games and graphics programming from CL and while working on Okra I often had this Usenet thread from comp.lang.lisp on my mind: C++ to CLOS mapping.

I’ve saved executable images of SBCL and CCL on Windows and they’re available as http://www.xs4all.nl/~euqirea/downloads/okra-20090910.zip from the Okra project page.

This should make it easier for people on Windows to start playing with Okra since it comes with all the necessary libraries. Just double-click okra-sbcl.exe or okra-ccl.exe and you should be looking at a Common Lisp REPL with Okra installed. If you enter:

Since I was finally able to figure out why CEGUI wouldn’t work on Linux SBCL (thanks to pkhuong on #lisp) and since the Flock demo is more or less finished[1] I tagged the latest checkins of Okra and clois-lane and pushed them to Github.