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ANN: Roguestar 0.6.0.0

Christopher Lane Hinson — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 02:04:34 +0000

Roguestar 0.6.0.0 is now up on hackage. You can install and run with:

$ cabal install roguestar roguestar-glut roguestar-engine
& ~/.cabal/bin/roguestar

The latest version brings:

New monsters: Hellions and Dust Vortexes
Underground dungeons
Power-ups (hidden in the aforementioned dungeons) that serve to level-up the player’s character.
Improved walking animation.
It’s no longer possible to spawn with zero sight range.
Fixed some of the worst of the user interface glitches.

Under the hood, I’ve also split RSAGL into a few topic-specific libraries and implemented value recursion in rsagl-frp. There is an experimental GTK-based client, but I don’t recommend it just yet, which is why it isn’t on hackage.

I’ve also migrated the project to github, which includes source code, the manual, and the issue tracker.

Paintable User Interfaces

Christopher Lane Hinson — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:32:54 +0000

It seems like it should be possible to have some kind of GUI library in which user interface elements can be painted onto the screen frame-by-frame, instead of the common practice of assembling an object-oriented hierarchy of widgets.

I’m thinking of something like (rough ECMA-like pseudocode):

static var clicks = 0;

drawRectangle( 0, 0, 100, 100) drawText( 0, 50, "This button has been clicked " + clicks + " times" ) drawClickListener( 0, 0, 100, 100, function() { clicks++ } )

Now we should be able to wrap this “button” inside affine transformations and clipping operations. We would call and draw the button during each frame of animation, and the button would cease to exist on the first frame in which it stopped being called.

I’m not looking for a revolutionary GUI paradigm; I just want the ability to do some specific, weird effects when the situation calls for it. For example, a car driving by with a clickable button on it’s side. If the button is behind a tree in the same scene, then it shouldn’t be click-able.

In fact, ideally, drawing user interface elements would use the same path as drawing visible shapes, but would pass in an event handler instead of a color or fill pattern. I could even imagine that there would be one or more channels of callback information alongside the RGB channels.

This is in the category of “things that I can’t possibly be the first person to think of but haven’t actually ever seen done.”

ANN: priority-sync

Christopher Lane Hinson — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:28:53 +0000

Provides cooperative task prioritization.

The priority-sync package on hackage.haskell.org.

$ cabal install priority-sync

$ git clone http://www.downstairspeople.org/git/priority-sync.git

Feedback will be greatly appreciated. This package is a spin-off from my work on roguestar, where I need to do significant background processing while retaining enough resources to perform smooth animation.