[lisp-game-dev] RFC: Blackthorn Starter Pack

[David O'Toole]

Hi Elliott, this is great! I will download the Starter Pack and check
it out ASAP. I would like to make a script of some kind (possibly
elisp) to define  new starter kits that include whatever prerequisites
and engines are in a given kit's configuration.

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 12:15 AM, Elliott Slaughter
<elliottslaughter at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> Earlier today on #lispgames, David hosted a discussion on how to create a
> nice standalone installer which would make it easy to develop games in
> Common Lisp. Here's my answer:
> Introducing the Blackthorn Starter Pack, a standalone collection of
> libraries which can be used to develop with any game engine that uses
> lispbuilder-* and/or cl-opengl. The installation procedure goes something
> like:
>  * Install your favorite Lisp implementation.
>  * Download and extract the Blackthorn Starter Pack for your platform.
>  * Load setup.lisp (e.g. for SBCL, run "sbcl --load setup.lisp").
>  * And you're ready to go! (Well, not quite. You need a game engine. But you
> have all the dependencies installed so that should hopefully be easy.)
> Caveat: The system was originally written with SBCL in mind, but porting it
> should be pretty trivial, at least for everything which isn't Lispworks
> Personal Edition.
> Second Caveat: For Unix flavors, you'll need to install SDL yourself,
> because it's pretty much impossible to provide binaries for every possible
> Unix, and package managers do a better job of that anyhow.
>
> So that much of the system is working right now. Of course, there are other
> things which might be nice to have too, including:
>  * An easy way to dump binaries on implementations that allow it.
>  * An easy way to turn binaries into full-featured installers for Windows
> and apps/dmg files for Mac OS X.
>  * Glue code that will automatically find and load dlls/sos/dylibs before
> your app starts up so that you don't have to worry about where those files
> are on the end-user system.
> For Blackthorn, I've currently hacked these things into a Makefile which I
> distribute with my engine. But I think it would be not too difficult to
> provide this functionality as a part of the Starter Pack rather than keeping
> it in my engine.
> Oh, and finally: licensing. Blackthorn is under the MIT license. Which makes
> it possible to use for literally anything. (Of course, the libraries are all
> under their own licenses and I can't change that. But at least the glue code
> is under the MIT license.)
> Thoughts? Anyone interested in using such a system?
> --
> Elliott Slaughter
>
> "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict
> the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay
>
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