PPC/OS X users: has anyone come across successful builds of *recent* love2d (sdl2) binaries for PPC?
i'm fascinated by the possibility that exigy could be backported to the iMac G4/G5 and OS X 10.4 if i could just figure out a good way of distributing binaries.
canadian (and international) railnerds: is there an accepted/respected book on the early history of canadian railways? i’m thinking very early - 1836 to 1875.
something highly technical would be great, if possible. even academic papers in canadian rail history - i do not know that literature.
the world needs Railroad Tycoon Canadian Edition more than ever. sid: this is the campaign you should have built in the first place dammit
update: answering my own question -
yes. the accepted historical monograph on this exact topic is:
Stevens. (1960). George, R. Canadian National Railways, Vol .1, Sixty Years of Trial and Error - 1836-1896.
It is followed up by:
Stevens. (1962). George, R. Canadian National Railways, Vol .2, Towards the Inevitable - 1896-1922.
@ExtentOfTheJam as someone that's been writing a game creation IDE/toolkit for the past year, i've often thought about this
i've had the chance to use quite a few of the existing engines out there over the years, and one thing i can say about them is that the most popular ones are a misery to actually develop games with. with unity/unreal (and even godot) tooling is built for AAA production pipelines, and really don't lower the bar of entry for the average indie developer
the biggest influence i had for developing Exigy and its underlying engine was, in fact, the handcrafted engine and IDE for Another World/Out of This World. it made no hard distinction between runtime and editing modes, so you could animate your characters in the place you were placing them on the level, while simultaneously writing the combat scripting for those same animations.
http://anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm
that kind of idea can't be found in any pre-fab engine, because it's alien to (usually, C) developers who have "it has to be compiled!" ingrained into them from day one.
that's the big opportunity i see today for building new engines: explore ideas that no other pre-fab engine can do, and let those ideas help influence the possibilities for games you can make with it
new eXiGY devlog post: A drunken walk roadmap for the next couple of months
https://www.exigy.org/plan?sort=new#2025-01-04
one question I continue to get almost daily is: when can we start goofing around with eXiGY?
The first 9 months of the project involved roughing out all of the basic functions a 2D game making toolkit would require. I managed to get some basic saving and loading (aka. serialization) set up a few weeks ago, and while it requires some re-tuning, it's in there and working.
In anticipating of a pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha coming soon, I'm spinning up a tomo shard to facilitate tester feedback, bug reports and creating a little eXiGY community. If you've never heard of tomo, I don't blame you! :) I've been pretty quiet about tomo's development over the past year, as all of my development time has been laser-focussed on eXiGY.
The short of it is: tomo is a public forum/discussion system that runs on NNTP (the protocol that powers USENET). i realized a few weeks ago that it would be the perfect platform to use as eXiGY's home for discussions about the project, get some ideas and responses on the design of the program, and so on. if you want to read more about tomo, head over to tomo's project page here for a very quick overview: https://tomo.city/project
so for the next couple of weeks, eXiGY will be on pause while I rebuild tomo to support posting, user profiles, avatars, bug reports, attachments so you can share your XGY projects, and all the fun stuff we'll need for some old fashioned bug huntin'. (tomo is brand spankin' new software too. so that means we'll be doing two pre-alphas in one!)
@osnews i just realized you posted the exigy project on osnews in december - thank you so much! :D
new eXiGY devlog post: why unity and godot suck, and the joys of kai's power tools
https://www.exigy.org/index.php?page=plan&sort_order=new&style=pastel#2024-12-28
really enjoyed this 12+ year old nyu game innovation lab talk by @ivan about the development of his game & software framework/IDE Polycode. especially enjoyed his thoughts on free software and tool development:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ0SOmfkAjA
while https://exigy.org has its roots in visual development toolkits like HyperCard/VB/Flash/Delphi, it was refreshing to see how polycode grew out of early experiences with the zx speccy/BASIC. so glad to see that both IDEs take advantage of Lua - to date, I have never found a better scripting language for making games interactively
sure do miss polycode. i was an early user of the IDE, back in the mid 2010's, when indie games were an exciting new space
exigy devlog update: Visual Programming Languages via Behaviours and Callbacks in Lua
i seriously didn't mean for this to turn into a mini programming tutorial, but in order to explain how i implemented Behaviours (like the ones we saw with Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash), I had to work out what callbacks were, and how they're used
it turned out to be a fun exploration of programming concepts, but i apologize in advance if this is all known territory for anyone else.
https://www.exigy.org/index.php?page=plan&sort_order=old&style=pastel#2024-12-21
former and current apple HyperCard, macromedia Flash/Director, and microsoft Visual Basic users: what features of these IDEs made them indispensable to you as a creative person?
i've been building a shareware development kit/IDE (https://exigy.org) that tries to be as user-friendly as possible, and i'd like to borrow the best and learn the most from other great toolkits.
yesterday marked a huge day in with the development of exigy - a design feature i've had stashed in the back of my head for years, but haven't had the programming expertise to take advantage of it: loading code into existing objects at runtime.
this was the reason I chose Lua for building the engine/tooling day one: it has several functions that allow runtime inclusion and compilation of new code. it isn't done via any special process or hacky code injection - it uses all the same functions that are used when you require/include external scripts at compile time.
so as of today, exigy is capable of doing the one thing i wanted that no other game toolkit/engine does well: let me fiddle around with code while the game is running, and seeing what happens when the code changes, *without* recompiling.
thank you to @ThreeOhFour who introduced me to the exceptionally weird Else Heart.Break(). it was the realtime in-game code editor in that game that led to this IDE design feature. below: screenshot from Else Heart.Break()
new EXiGY weekly devlog post: Point-and-click Adventures
(or, how graphical adventure games taught me how to make better drag and drop systems than any operating system has)
https://www.exigy.org/index.php?page=plan&sort_order=old&style=pastel#2024-12-14
exigy devlog update: it's okay to be ugly when you're young 
in which I do a very brief UI/UX analysis of eric chahi's Another World Editor and begin writing exigy's brutalist windowing system
https://www.exigy.org/index.php?page=plan&sort_order=new&style=pastel#2024-12-07
when i was a kid, you could build a simple game or application by dragging and dropping a few UI controls, and gluing them together with a few dozen lines of BASIC or Pascal or HyperTalk. it might take 15 minutes, at most, to get your little character walking around on the screen. this is how we ended up with a lot of hilariously good and cheap shareware you could share on BBSes in the 90s.
for the past year i've been quietly working on building a software thingie that doesn't exist anymore. i've been building a software toolkit that's kinda like Visual Basic and HyperCard and Borland Delphi, designed for making tile-based 2d games.
i've been using it to build my own little goofy games, and improving on the drag'n'drop IDE as i figuring things out. it's not done yet, and has a long ways to go before it's ready for other people to start making their own little applications and games. think PICO-8 or ZZT if they had grown up on a steady diet of Windows 3.1 and GeoWorks Ensemble instead.
i'm really, really bad about polishing turds to infinity and never releasing them. to break that habit, i've built a mini-website for the IDE/Shareware Creation Kit. it's called Exigy, named like a bad 80s metal hair band or richard garriott game.
i'll be posting weekly blog/devlog updates there, so i don't irritate anyone with them on this account. there is an rss feed button at the top right if you hate my demonic php and css.
i've been posting a lot of my shareware research lately, because i've been working on a project for the past few months with a blend of Windows 3.1 & GeoWorks Ensemble used as inspiration.
Exigy is a tile-based game creation kit that lets you make windows 3.1/95-styled games, like spiderweb software's Exile or rick saada's Castle of the Winds. hell, you could remake the Microsoft Entertainment Pack if you wanted to :)
the editor is very intentionally built to work like MS Visual Basic: you can drag and drop any GUI element into the game editor window and script in your own actions with lua. it even comes with its own built-in sprite editor, so you can create your art while you work.
games are modified in real-time with no compiling. the entire thing is built in Love2D.
think of it as ZZT for windows 3.1 if that had ever existed. 
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