Experimenting with mruby

By misbehavens Date 2013-08-21 04:52

Hello. I was just wondering if anyone has tried experimenting with Gosu and mruby. I'm excited to see a smaller, faster, embeddable Ruby but don't have any experience with C (or C++ for that matter), I'm interested to hear what people have learned about it, or created any interesting demos. I thought I saw someone made an iOS game using mruby, but I could be remembering wrong.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2013-08-21 13:14

You're right, I've done a small "proof of concept" on iOS. It was just after the mruby announcement, and it was both crashy at runtime and frustrating to compile. I actually want to try RubyMotion next to see if it's any better - I can't imagine that mruby is stable by now :)

By misbehavens Date 2013-08-22 23:26

RubyMotion is a dream come true. It's pretty awesome. There's a pretty cool library for creating games in RubyMotion called JoyBox. Obviously not cross-platform like Gosu, but the JoyBox API has given me some ideas while working on a new Ruby game framework of my own.

By shawn42 Date 2013-08-24 15:45

I've been watching Joybox for a bit and it looks really nice. I'm curious what the ideas are? Maybe you could put your efforts toward improving Gamebox, Chingu, or Metro (some of the bigger frameworks that are already written).

By misbehavens Date 2013-08-25 20:55

Shawn, Joybox has given me examples of class names and code samples. Their documentation is really nice. Not necessarily something I will imitate but just another perspective. I have played with Chingu, Metro, and Gamebox (which I know is yours =] ) and appreciate the work that has been done, but don't feel that they work exactly how I would like my game framework to work. Also, I don't think that any of them are built to be modular. My idea is to create a framework of individual components (like how Rails split ActiveSupport into its own gem) so you can pick and choose the gems that you want to use in your own project.

By misbehavens Date 2013-08-22 23:35

I imagine that mruby has come a long way since you last tried it. It's under very active development. I'm interested in how it lets you compile and obfuscate your ruby source code. I think it could be useful in creating games that you don't want to open-source.

By shawn42 Date 2013-08-24 15:41

One thing to note is that mruby is missing a lot of standard Ruby features / libraries and adheres to the official Ruby standard (based off of 1.8.7).