Writing a Vi-like Graphics Editor in Racket

http://jeapostrophe.github.io/2013-05-13-vi-post.html

by p4bl0 • 13 years ago

88 22 13 years ago

jeapostrophe.github.io

_pmf_• 13 years ago

Dr. Racket is one hell of a development environment. The things we could do if we were using Scheme+Racket instead of Java+Eclipse ...

nnq3• 13 years ago

Racket is a Scheme dialects that adds quite a lot to vanilla scheme as far as I know. The racket IDE is not praised that much and the lispers/schemers I know prefer Emacs/SLIME (though I believe you that it's better than Eclipse).

...so saying "Scheme+Racket vs Java+Eclipse" is really comparing apples to pineapples :) (maybe Clojure+Lighttable is closer to what you'd mean...)

callmecosmas• 13 years ago

I'm a grad student that works in Racket and fwiw I find that I prefer emacs for editing but DrRacket for testing and debugging. It has great tools for documentation, locating errors and macro expansion and of course it all works out of the box. I also use Geiser, but I've found it buggy and unreliable (including instantly shutting down my OSX machine if I tell emacs to kill it when I quit, plus I still haven't figured out how to limit its memory consumption).

p4bl0• 13 years ago

Just to be nitpicky, Racket is not a Scheme dialect (hence the name changing from PLT Scheme to Racket a few years ago (already!)). It's not because it not only adds a lot to Scheme but also has somewhat important differences. For instance, `cons` pairs are immutable in Racket: there's no `set-car!` or `set-cdr!` as in Scheme (you can have mutable cons pair using `mcons`, `set-mcar!`, and `set-mcdr!` though). Also the macro systems that Racket uses (`syntax-parse` and co) is quite more advanced than the current Scheme rNrs one.

moron4hire7• 13 years ago

Why don't you? It's easy enough to pick up. I was doing C# for quite a long time (and actually liking it), and just decided to start doing Racket. I've got a project going right now that is 100% custom racket. Once you get the macros down, the code flies. It's pretty amazing.

nnq3• 13 years ago

You have a client project in Racket? Cool! Care to share what area / what are you using it for?

unwind• 13 years ago

I missed screenshots, it seems this editor has a fairly unique (or at least unusual) concept but it's much harder to quickly get it from the textual description.

It's intriguing that it talks about very simplistic sprite definitions (8 colors), but yet seems to expect the sprites to be rendered using 3D hardware (talk of normal maps and lighting).

goldfeld• 13 years ago

Same here. And it's even more intriguing for me that it seems to match a lot of my own current game design aesthetics (namely the idea of simple, very low pixel graphics but with high-end light and particle effects). What's more, when browsing for the simplest (yet powerful) sprite editor for my own use, I found Pixen to be the best available option but still I dreamed of a vi-like pixel pusher (I was thinking in terms of having buffers with, say, small reusable sprites which then I could compound to make variations and animations, all accessible through a CtrlP inspired browser.)

jeapostrophe2• 13 years ago

This is the author.

I agree very much with both of you. I assemble all the tiles into texture atlases (and earlier post discusses the technique) and then use a fairly simple shader to render. If you look in the gb/graphics directory [1], then you can see the GLSL code. It was originally coded for OpenGL 3.3 with geometry shaders but I switched to OpenGL 3.00 as a stepping stone to ES 2.

The whole model is based on the concept of "SNES Unbound": I want to have effectively infinite numbers of sprites with many layers and any Mode 7 effects with arbitrary scaling and rotations. This is a very small level of expectation of a modern GPU, so I can get about 1,000 FPS on my laptop with millions of sprites, because I only use a single OpenGL draw call per layer.

Anyways, I'd be happy to comment or chat more with you. Maybe I should post some screenshots of the editor.

Jay

1. https://github.com/get-bonus/get-bonus/tree/master/gb/graphi...

BMarkmann• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why, but I love that Racketeers write their docs in Scribble. The application docs look like the platform docs... it makes everything have a very cohesive feel. So much more powerful than something like JavaDocs, too, since you get the full power of the language.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/

gcr• 13 years ago

Scribble is excellent.

My favorite part about Scribbled documentation is that everything from code samples to function names in text is clickable. Even the function names in the five-line code samples on the front page of http://racket-lang.org/ are clickable; you can just jump straight to any function's documentation from the home page of the language.

Writing a Vi-like Graphics Editor in Racket

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