Name: Peter J. Stewart Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: None Preferred user ID: PSTEWART
Planned contributions: A long time ago, I used to use a Commodore 64. On the C64 I had a program called Adventure Construction Set (ACS). ACS, as its name suggests, gave you a framework for designing your own adventure. It allowed you to design maps, characters, objects, graphics, etc. Many hours of my life were consumed by ACS, whose only problem was that it was painfully slow and required you to be an octopus with as many times as you had to swap disks. I always wanted to have something like ACS again to build my own adventure games, and within the last year I decided to get off my butt and actually do it. I chose to work in Perl as it was a way to refine my knowledge of the language, as well as get things done quickly. Recently, I decided to reorganize my code into modules to make them easier to work with, and I figured, why not CPAN-ize them and see if anyone else may want to use it? This will be an ongoing project for me, so it will be some time before I realize my ultimate goal. However, I do have two modules that are nearly ready for release, after I finish test suites and documentation for them. The suggested name for the first is Games::Object. This provides a base class for game objects. It allows you to define arbitrary attributes on objects, and set up rules for updating these attributes automatically. For example, you could set up an attribute to always "tend to" a certain value. You could, say, define an attribute to represent a character's health that creeps by 1 towards its max each turn, simulating healing. It also provides a basic load/save ability, making it easy to code load game and save game functionality. There's really a lot more to this, but this is supposed to be a "brief" description of my contributions :) The second object is Games::TileMap. This allows you to create and manage graphical maps of fixed-size cells, for use in creating map displays, based upon a Tk::Canvas widget. It provides some basic memory management for images, as well as allow you to define mouse bindings on the map, scrolling viewing areas, etc. I have a third module in the wings that I am still working on called Games::Object::Map. It links the other two modules together and allows you to create maps from plain text template files. Please let me know if the names I have picked for the modules sounds good. I figured that selecting the Games hierarchy was a no-brainer. I considered Games::ACS::Object and Games::ACS::TileMap for the module names, since there are likely going to be more modules and perhaps it is better if they are grouped under a single name. My only concern would be that this would lead to awkwardly long module names. Opinions? Pete Stewart
