I remember Ruby Motion was a thing, then it wasn't... then it was again? I started learning web dev with RoR and quickly moved to Python as the ecosystem was so much bigger. I could transfer my Python knowledge into so many different domains. I remember at the time, I really wanted a "Ruby Motion" for Python... still do actually.
I have come full circle and now think JS is eating the world and I am playing in that garden... we'll see where that ends up I suppose. In any case, GOOD LUCK... I hope for the best!
From my experience so far one big point in favor of DragonRuby is that its philosophy focuses on developer productivity, for example
- an iterative immediate feedback style of development using hot reloading
- (in the latest version) direct source code editing and updating via a HTTP Developer interface (think updating your smartphone game at runtime without re-deploying)
- Producing builds for all Desktop platforms in usually less than a minute (mobile and consoles probably take longer considering the surrounding tasks of signing apps, registering in stores etc)
- offering a centralized interface for persistent game state which is automatically dumped for error analysis in case of failure and able to be recorded/replayed/rewinded out of the box during dev
- Abstracting away File Systems/Storage mechanisms out of the box so you don't have to care about where you save on a Switch, PC or iPhone
and probably lots of other stuff I'm not quite aware of atm.
Another big plus point is the lively and encouraging Discord community
So far so good. We’ve been in business for nearly a decade now (with the game engine going onto year 3).
> Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there?
Well our ability to deploy to console eliminates most engines as competitors/options. Unreal is a fantastic engine for 3D games. Unity is... well... not that great to be honest.
Other differentiators are on the site.
I don't choose games based on their engine I choose them based on if they are fun. Same as I don't choose movies based on what camera was used to shoot them or what software was used to render the CGI scenes.
A good reason would be that RoR is still a competitive advantage for indie web devs and small startup teams working on non performance-constrained domains.
It's amazing how many successes In see in the IH world using Ruby despite far larger numbers of people building everything in JS or maybe Python.
Dev experience matters and there are some durable advantages the Ruby ecosystem has maintained despite others growing more quickly in popularity. Building DSLs is one.
You can see all the reasons
1. Their custom engine doesn't have all the features of either of those other engines. Their artists in particular are pushing to switch to get those features.
2. Their custom engine doesn't have have amount of tooling those other engines have (likely no blueprints, no shader graph, no state machine editor, no animation editor, etc..., etc..., etc...)
3. Their custom engine doesn't have tens of thousands of potential hires that already have experience with them.
4. Their custom engine doesn't have 1/1000th the amount of docs, tutorials, youtube videos, etc on how to use it so the team that maintains that engine has to provide that knowledge to every new hire
The result of the above is it limits their growth. If they want to start a new team for a new game, if they stuck with their custom engine they'd basically have to take a significant number of people off the existing game and move them to the new game otherwise no one on the new game would have any easy way to know how to use it.
For my part, I don't have enough spare time to learn one of the big engines. They're too complex, and this is a hobby.
DragonRuby on the other hand is simple enough that you can start doing stuff immediately if you know even basic Ruby. That is the appeal to me.
Whether or not it would work for a large team is totally irrelevant for that kind of use, because I have no interest in starting a studio.
It seems a lot of the people criticizing DragonRuby in this thread forgets that game dev spans from hobby development by individuals who might toy with it a few hours a week to multi year projects by major companies, and they have different needs and interests.
E.g. I value having fun over ever completing a publishable game. DragonRuby is fun.
That I could release something with it is a bonus, but to me even that is secondary.
It will via asm.js, except no one will be coding in JS anymore since everything will compile to asm, and you will have asm compiler in your kernel.
We also expose C Extensions to the end user if they what blinding fast performance for critical paths.
https://forums.eveonline.com/t/how-is-the-eve-online-client-...
> DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon.
This feels like a liability for the long term. The community is now depending on Ryan to maintain this custom Ruby implementation, if I'm reading correctly.
But the worry here is that if the main developer of DragonRuby quits, it's dead in the water. Sure, you can use the old version and it'll probably still work, but there won't be any improvements, whereas other engines are constantly improving.
Let's say he goes crazy tomorrow and decides to camp on the beaches of Jamaica. No matter what you do, particularly with a closed source engine, you're stuck.
With unity if one programmer decides to quit, we still have a game engine that gets updated.
With Godot if both of the paid maintainers quit and the project collapses, you can just fork it and keep going.
With regards to insolvency. It’s answered in the FAQ: http://docs.dragonruby.org/#--frequently-asked-questions,-co...
> camp on the beaches of Jamaica
This sounds great.
See “What is DragonRuby?” at http://docs.dragonruby.org/.
I did a Rails job once. I kept thinking that I liked the language as a kind of modern OO language in the spirit of Python (and also Lua a bit) but I really disliked the ecosystem around Rails. For instance, the project I worked on had to maintain two separate versions of Ruby because different gems worked with different Ruby versions (it's been a while so I don't remember details).
Another thing that bothered me is that everytime I searched online for help to do something slightly more advanced in Ruby my search results were inundated with "hello world" style posts from aspiring Rails devs eager to advertise their passionf or Rails. I could never find the information I wanted, so I had to do everything the hard way.
Overall I had a horrible experience with Rails though I'm sure it's far from that bad for most. Anyway it's refreshing to see a cool use of Ruby without the Rails.
I've been learning React and played around with a Rails API backend and separate React front-end and I forget just how much work Rails takes out
I really wish people didn't associate Ruby so much with Rails.
But yes, it really is a shame that Rails seems more parasitic on Ruby than not and hasn't lead to a larger general purpose Ruby community.
Unfortunately, HN tends to be full of haters. On the behalf of the rest of us, thanks for sharing DragonRuby!
I'll stick up for the community: I don't think that's true. This submission has been heavily upvoted, after all. You may be running into the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
But I don't think there's a way around that while maintaining open discussion. At least here the disagreements are mostly civil.
Part of what makes announcements like this tricky on HN, and what I think triggered the comment you replied to, is that while part of HN values "cool hacks" and simplicity greatly, part of HN evaluates everything based on whether it's useful at scale, as a product, right now, and can grow big (there's certainly a big overlap, and I'm oversimplifying), and an announcement relating to a commercial project that aims for the former crowd unsurprisingly strokes some of the latter crowd entirely the wrong way as a weird niche project seemingly massively lacking in the features they think are essential.
I think that with DragonRuby that is particularly unavoidable. What makes some of us find it awesome is an inherently alien way of thinking to a lot of people in a way that look backwards to many.
A hard yet important lesson in life is to learn to do things in spite of haters hating. For example, I'm writing a programming language, and I can almost guarantee that people will hate it... and that's ok.
What you want is for the correct people to hate it, because it's not there to serve them, and makes no concessions to 'em about it.
What's changed in Ruby since then to make smooth animation possible?
For hobbyists Gosu (https://www.libgosu.org/ruby.html) should be good enough, but is not very convenient to bundle and distribute.
> Optimized for size and speed. This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it).
> DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon. He is one of the core maintainers of libSDL
The GC has changed a lot in the past 20 years too. Here's a great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcQ-hIfiljA
The hook is you like to program in Ruby, so here is a game engine where you can use Ruby.
No offense to ruby programmers but, Ruby's not necessarily the ideal language for game programming even when it comes to scripting languages.
And...if you know ruby well enough to make a game, you could learn one of the many other languages better suited to game dev fairly easily.
What makes this worth paying for?
The "hotloading" is really nice and the community on Discord is excellent.
Coincidentally because of that use case I just remembered yesterday that I had a PR open on Ruby2D...
Looks like a great resource.
EDIT: a 3d example > https://canicvs.itch.io/wireframe-sample
http://www.rubymotion.com/news/2019/04/19/plans-for-rubymoti...
One question. Is DragonRuby, in essence, a mRuby compiler? Or is it an implementation of an mRuby interpretor that calls on a low-level API for fast game functionality?
Would be neat to have something to quickly go wow over.
Thank you!
