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"Clojure in Unity 3D: Functional Video Game Development" by Ramsey Nasser and Tims Gardner

Strange Loop Conference · 24.5K views · 2014-09-22 · 46:22

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Overview

A Strange Loop talk presenting an open-source library that integrates Clojure into the Unity 3D game engine. It covers REPL-based live coding, macros, DSLs and persistent data structures for game development.

On Hacker News

Cited as evidence that Clojure support in Unity exists, mostly in threads about game programming and Lisp scripting.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2015–2015

Topics

Functional programmingGame programming & engines
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clojureunityreplgame engines

What people said

pella · 2015-07 · Reference

Strange Loop(2014) video:"Clojure in Unity 3D: Functional Video Game Development" by Ramsey Nasser and Tims Gardner" [VIDEO] __ and __ [LINK] HN: [LINK]

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dustingetz · 2015-04 · Reference

Not really, for interactive UI development you need to model the UI as a pure function (no state in the view). So that limits you to React or React-like approaches, and game engines: [VIDEO] For backed web development (in Clojure at least) there isn't really a lot of state in the first place - request comes in, request comes out, state is in the database not the application - so there are no framework constraints.

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krapp · 2015-03 · Reference

>Is having to learn a game engine going to be faster than starting from the ground up? Yes, pretty much by definition, since a game engine saves you the time of writing an engine. ;) Unity[0] and Game Maker[1] both come with tutorials which will show you how to build a basic game quickly. Game Maker uses its own properietary scripting language called GML, and Unity lets you do scripting in Javascript, C++, and Boo, which is basically Python. Also, attempts are being made to integrate Clojure support in Unity as well[2] On the other hand, if you like actually writing the code, there's a good chance there's a low-level framework (like SDL[3] for C++) which will let you code, but still take care of some of the hassle of cross-platform support and graphics. I've only played around* with SDL and C++ but there are quite a few tutorials for it. Also worth mentioning is Construct2[4], a game engine for html5/js. It is possible to do 3d rendering in javascript/html5[5], but as far as I know, only Chrome supports it well. Last I checked you have to change the config settings in firefox to allow opengl rendering to work and I just assume IE doesn't support it by default. If you want to work with 3D and want to get something done then Unity might be a good idea, although of course you're going to need good models, etc. Game Maker supports 3d but it's primarily for 2d. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] *I've got some of the basics for Space Invaders done,

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Sources

Video by Strange Loop Conference, played through YouTube.

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