[Fluxus] functional reactive fluxing

[Dave Griffiths]

Hi all,

A little update on what I'm up to...

I decided to follow up on Matt's pointer towards FrTime[1] and see what a
game engine interface for the language would look like. The idea is that
it makes working with behavoural animation easier, by taking away the
problems of maintaining state for everything. Normally in a game,
characters are driven by state machines, switching state when events
occur. Writing code to do this conventionally ends up being very
complicated, as you end up doing a lot of management by hand. Using
FrTime, which is called a functional reactive language, the maintainance
of the state and event passing is all done for you.

Some background to this - in relation to Processing [2] and also games [3].

I'm not fully understanding it yet, and getting a lot of help from Gregory
Cooper (author of FrTime), but as an old games programmer I'm hoping it
will be an interesting new way of writing games, and potentially live
coding graphics more generally too.

There is some partially written code here [4] and a screenshot [5]. The
fluxus interface is here [6], again it's wip.

When I've got a bit further with it, the idea is to document it, maybe
wrap up some of the FrTime code into friendly reusable blocks, and put it
in a fluxus release.

cheers,

dave

[1]
http://lists.pawfal.org/htdig.cgi/fluxus-pawfal.org/2007-September/001047.html
[2] the original site seems to be down right now:
http://ezrakilty.net/research/2007/01/frp-meets-processing.html
so google cache:
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:LVu5FDRyl28J:ezrakilty.net/research/2007/01/frp-meets-processing.html+frp-meets-processing&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk
[3] http://prog21.dadgum.com/4.html
[4] http://www.pawfal.org/flotsam/frisbee/rocket.scm
[5] http://www.flickr.com/photos/7905273@N07/2233068235/
[6] http://www.pawfal.org/flotsam/frisbee/frisbee.ss