I posted this yesterday on my personal site and realised it might just act as a reasonable "getting started" type article for SDL with Perl. Further articles in the series probably won't have this level of detail, so I'll keep them on my own site. Anyway, on with the show.
So I decided to play around with Perl's SDL bindings.
A game appears to be happening, so let's play around with this dev log idea too,
documenting the process and pitfalls of making some stuff move around on screen.
It turns out you don't need to know a whole lot to make this happen, in the
simplest cases at least. Let's see what we have so far:
OK, so we're not going to set the world alight just yet. Anyway, we have a guy
and some bullets. We are missing enemies, scoring, action, pew pew noises and
any incentive to play. These come later, I hope.
FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) is a useful kernel module with an API which allows file systems to be implemented in user space applications, mounted and fully integrated into the system's VFS. Originally implemented for Linux, FUSE API-compatible kernel modules are now available on *BSD, OpenSolaris and MacOS. That said, this was written on a Linux machine so there may be assumptions made about the tools available, their output etc. Feel free to submit info on other *nix-like systems for inclusion if you encounter any inconsistencies. This also goes for corrections and suggestions - if I get the details plain wrong or the code stinks and so on...
Some examples of popular FUSE file systems are ntfs-3g, which provides full NTFS support for the Linux kernel, and sshfs, which mounts remote directories over SSH with SFTP support. FUSE also powers ambitious projects, such as the distributed filesystem, MooseFS as well as providing easy access to proprietary protocols such as MTP.
We can combine this power with the power of Perl using the excellent FUSE API binding.
Software Developer (mostly Perl) in Dublin.