
Conspire: A Programming Environment for NOWHERE - Impossible
http://blog.duangle.com/2015/01/conspire-programming-environment-for.html
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hansjorg
Leonard Ritter is a very talented guy. Looking forward to NOWHERE.

He's known as paniq in the demoscene and did the music, 2d engine and graphics
for the awesome Masagin:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQhgEJuExY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQhgEJuExY)

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keyle
I can't help to be amazed with what they're pulling off. First of all, the
game prototype looks amazing, although it may be one of those forever-early-
access games, because it can't be just a game. Then you see how Blender
widgets are used. Wow. Then you see how he's imitating UE4 Blueprints, again,
wow.

But then the reality kicks in. Shouldn't you be making a game?

~~~
binarycrusader
Leonard actually addresses that in a few a places, though I don't have a link
handy right now. The short version is they're creating a game that's almost
entirely defined by procedural content.

To even attempt such a thing requires a lot of good tools because they not
only need those tools to build procedural content for the game but for their
userbase to be able to as well.

He seems well aware of the trap here and is trying his best to avoid it.

~~~
mmarx
This forum post[0] is one of those places where he addresses that problem:

> Right now is, hands down, the worst part of development. There are no fancy
> graphics to show off, no intricate gameplay, no surprising AI, no badass
> music, just unglamorous system design that interests no one so we can get
> all the aforementioned stuff in a manageable form that doesn't keep becoming
> a sluggish and unserviceable mess. […] The importance of tooling can not be
> overstated. There are no tools out there for the kind of game we're working
> on, and it comprises 90% of what makes the game, as nearly all of our
> content is procedural in one way or another, and not handmade. If there's
> currently a lack of procedural content out there, it's precisely because of
> the lack of tooling.

[0]
[http://nowherians.com/discussion/comment/254/#Comment_254](http://nowherians.com/discussion/comment/254/#Comment_254)

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dmix
I was sold on the game video, then the article talks about SICP and LISP -
nice! Sounds like great fun and possibly some real innovation here. I hope
it's beta for a few years like Minecraft with a strong developer community
around it.

Reminds me of the lofty goals of
[http://lighttable.com](http://lighttable.com) and EVE [http://www.chris-
granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/](http://www.chris-
granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/)

~~~
Arcanum-XIII
There's Smalltalk env too, like Pharo/Squeak, the long forgotten Lisp Machine,
Max/MSP and their descendant... A lot of giants on which shoulder we can see a
bright future !

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personjerry
Wow, this (and the game videos) looks awesome!

I'm a CS student and I'm very interested in procedural generation. I was
wondering if there are any particular resources you'd recommend for a
beginner?

~~~
dkhar
If you want knowledge from the same pool Ritter's drawing from, check out this
blog post[1] about _fr-041: Debris_ by ryg. Now, keep in mind, Ritter didn't
do work on _Debris_ as far as I know, but he's spent a lot of time with the
people who did, and some of the ideas in NOWHERE have their origin in that
scene (a lot of it is totes original, but you're asking about procedural
generation, and procedural generation is definitely a demoscene thing).

Before game dev, Ritter was known as a musician and a demoscener (if you don't
know what the demoscene is, do some googling -- it's deffo worth it). The
demoscene group he was part of broke exciting new ground in the mid 2000s by
releasing some productions that packed ridiculous amounts of content into a
very small size by procedurally generating lots of things, like textures and
geometry. The greatest of these demos is called _Debris_ [2], and some
consider it the best demo ever. Ryg's article is basically a big index of
articles explaining how parts of _Debris_ were written, as well as how they
work.

[1] [https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/debris-opening-
the-...](https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/debris-opening-the-box/)

[2] Watch it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxfmxi-
boyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxfmxi-boyo)

and keep in mind that everything you're seeing was rendered in real time by a
single executable 177kb in size.

[3?] Also worth looking at:
[http://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm](http://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm)

~~~
personjerry
Awesome, thank you!

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SquidLord
I'm just waiting for the inevitable realization when he realizes he can cut
out Lua from the architecture and go straight in with Scheme.

~~~
lritter303
Actually, I very much wanted to do that, the problem is that there seems to be
no Scheme implementation available that offers such a tight and convenient
libffi integration. LuaJIT parses preprocessed C header files with very few
adjustments. Terra, which links LuaJIT with LLVM, goes the full mile and
directly uses libclang to generate interfaces.

If you know a Scheme implementation that does this (including supporting a
LLVM back-end in addition to a regular, possibly JIT'ed interpreter), please
do not hesitate to mention!

~~~
Arcanum-XIII
Gambit and Chicken are near your goal, but I don't know how far you can go
with it. And there's of course GNU Guile.

~~~
lritter303
Neither is suitable. Guile has the wrong license, none of these three has
bindings for a no-JIT code generator like LLVM.

It's no big deal though. The Scheme -> Lua compiler is small (300 lines) the
dialect is better suited for hash tables and the dynamic part is mostly a
driver to generate/execute machine code at runtime.

At this point, a switch to Scheme would service purism more than pragmatism.
Lua is already a good Scheme VM (has been strongly inspired by Scheme, in
fact) so it'll do. At least I hope it will. ;-)

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TD-Linux
Hey, this is neat, I've always liked the Blender node editor, and now a clone
of it is split out into its own library.

I'm also happy to see the tools open-sourced, which is sadly not common enough
in the game development world.

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eveningcoffee
What is this what looks like flow style programming environment? I could not
find anything about it.

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signa11
previous submission:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8848714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8848714)

