tperry2x wrote: ↑Fri Jul 01, 2022 10:12 am
I was just wondering, did Box2D ever make it into Livecode Community?
https://www.mail-archive.com/use-liveco ... 02253.html
I was just wondering how far it ever got.
Especially when you consider they raised £417,000
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/17 ... sts/415346
Not only would it make game creation far easier if we had a physics engine, but it may actually make in-roads into decent 30fps / 60fps card redraw rates.
As mentioned elsewhere in this forum, what I would love to see one day is a command such as:
and then...
Code: Select all
put MaxCardRefresh
max screen refresh achievable: 30.4 fps
Hopefully this means that anyone doing animation, game creation, or simulating physics with Box2D integration, had a consistent experience across older and newer hardware.
On slower machines, to achieve this, other tricks could be used such as loading the entire stack into RAM and warning if a GPU is unavailable:
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set MaxCardRefresh to 30
error: Refresh rate specified is not possible, no compatible GPU hardware detected.
The only thing I saw relevant to that 'stretch goal' funding campaign item was Monte posted a GIF of geometric objects bouncing off of each other on GitHub's chat thing Gitter.im but that was years ago when Extension Builder was first starting to get interesting. He never posted any code or anything like that.
I would certainly like to get to wrapping some more libraries like Box2D (
https://box2d.org) or Love (
https://love2d.org/wiki/love) or even all of the SDL framework into builder extensions.
Maybe after an initial public release (SOON!) we can organize some sort of plans for moving far beyond the legacy LiveCode Community Edition base, as collaborative team.
It's a lot of work just wrapping anything beyond a very basic foreign code library. I could REALLY use some help! I'm willing to teach Extension Builder xTalk-ish 'dialect' to people if need be. For Foreign Code Libraries it's mostly all about creating these FFI 'binding strings' for the libraries exported (public) symbols (commands/functions). Once you get the hang of creating those for the target (there's different binding string format depending on if the Foreign lib is JAVA,JS,C or ObjectiveC based). I've been adding more and more binding strings and type conversions for Objective C / Foundation/NS* frameworks, a bunch of that NS* stuff (NS = NeXTStep) some of which might be usable for cross-platform if we wrapped the GNUStep binaries. Lots of very useful functionality available there. The NSURL protocol alone could be really nice, doing async background downloads (also we could then we can remove the outdated embedded OpenSSL) for example.
It would be nice to wrap Box2D as a gesture (a certain hand gesture
), completing unfulfilled promises of the various funding campaign goals reached by the community.
I consider the state that the IDE's UI was left in as another unfulfilled promise for a 'sleek and modern' IDE UI. That's one goal that I've been slowing working on in between other things.
Still not sure about adding refresher rate syntax in that context. I mean what you're talking about is the 'Frames Per Second of graphic rendering, vs. a screen refresher rates which are frequency attributes of display monitors.
There is already a 'frameRate' property for 'VideoClips'
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set the frameRate of videoClip to timeDelay
There's also:
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set the syncRate to number
-- Specifies how often the display is updated during visual effect, drag, and move commands. Default is 20
If we are adding any new widget or library objects that need a property similar to something else already in the engine, we should make the property name the same for consistency (Note: I've had problems 'Shadowing' certain built-in properties with my own widget properties)