From: M Jared Finder
Subject: Lisp GUI Tutorials
Date: 
Message-ID: <2ufs3cF2a49d4U1@uni-berlin.de>
I'm starting to feel comfortable enough with Common Lisp that I'd like 
to write something bigger than my one-file command line-esque programs. 
  I'm thinking of writing a board game, and enforcing all the rules of 
the game.  This seems complicated enough to be non-trivial, but still 
simple enough that I could get it done in a weekend assuming I knew the 
tools.

A board game also seems to be a great thing to write with a GUI, 
allowing people to move the pieces around with the mouse instead of 
having to give commands.  From looking at Cliki.net, the popular 
toolkits appear to be GTK and CLIM.  I chose CLIM because it seemed to 
be more finished.

I've been using CLIM for a little over a day now, and I can draw 
primitives and get input from menus.  However, I can't find any 
instructive tutorials that go beyond that, to things like mouse input 
and pixmap rendering and adding interaction options to the "interactor". 
    Could any more experienced Lispers here point me in the right 
direction toward instructive examples or tutorials?  Or if CLIM is not a 
good toolkit to use, could you point me in the direction of a better one?

   -- MJF

From: Frank Buss
Subject: Re: Lisp GUI Tutorials
Date: 
Message-ID: <cluh6n$hjp$1@newsreader2.netcologne.de>
M Jared Finder <·····@hpalace.com> wrote:

> I've been using CLIM for a little over a day now, and I can draw 
> primitives and get input from menus.  However, I can't find any 
> instructive tutorials that go beyond that, to things like mouse input 
> and pixmap rendering and adding interaction options to the
> "interactor". 

I've tried CLIM, too. There is a nice tutorial from Franz:

http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/6.2/doc/clim-ug.pdf

but it doesn't cover much about low-level mouse handling and the like
you need for games. Looks like not much people are using CLIM for games,
at least to my questions last week were no response: 

http://groups.google.de/groups?selm=clemv4%24nvk%241%40newsreader2.netcologne.de 

But you can take a look at two of my sample programs. It's not a
tutorial, but it show how you can use CLIM for writing a board game: 

http://www.frank-buss.de/lisp/clim.html

>     Could any more experienced Lispers here point me in the right 
> direction toward instructive examples or tutorials?  Or if CLIM is not
> a good toolkit to use, could you point me in the direction of a better
> one? 

Another good toolkit is LTK:

http://www.peter-herth.de/ltk/

But it depends on the type of game you want to write. For a board game
CLIM might be more useful, because you don't need to handle much of the
low-level stuff like reacting on a mouse for a widget, but you can
concentrate on game logic. But I don't think that it is useful if you
want to write an action game. 

For this sort of games it should be easy to write a wrapper for DirectX,
which provides some basic functions, like surface handling with drawing
functions, switching to fullscreen, sound output and game controller input,
but I don't have the time to do it. 

-- 
Frank Bu�, ··@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
From: M Jared Finder
Subject: Re: Lisp GUI Tutorials
Date: 
Message-ID: <2upvacF2d2423U1@uni-berlin.de>
Frank Buss wrote:
> M Jared Finder <·····@hpalace.com> wrote:
> 
>>I've been using CLIM for a little over a day now, and I can draw 
>>primitives and get input from menus.  However, I can't find any 
>>instructive tutorials that go beyond that, to things like mouse input 
>>and pixmap rendering and adding interaction options to the
>>"interactor". 
> 
> 
> I've tried CLIM, too. There is a nice tutorial from Franz:
> 
> http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/6.2/doc/clim-ug.pdf
> 
> but it doesn't cover much about low-level mouse handling and the like
> you need for games. Looks like not much people are using CLIM for games,
> at least to my questions last week were no response: 
> 
> http://groups.google.de/groups?selm=clemv4%24nvk%241%40newsreader2.netcologne.de 
> 
> But you can take a look at two of my sample programs. It's not a
> tutorial, but it show how you can use CLIM for writing a board game: 
> 
> http://www.frank-buss.de/lisp/clim.html

Thank you for these examples.  They have pointed me to the right 
documentation for what I wanted to do.

   -- MJF
From: Paolo Amoroso
Subject: Re: Lisp GUI Tutorials
Date: 
Message-ID: <87k6t874a2.fsf@plato.moon.paoloamoroso.it>
M Jared Finder <·····@hpalace.com> writes:

> A board game also seems to be a great thing to write with a GUI,

This page:

  http://mcclim.cliki.net/Application

lists a few CLIM games.


> I've been using CLIM for a little over a day now, and I can draw
> primitives and get input from menus.  However, I can't find any
> instructive tutorials that go beyond that, to things like mouse input

That's one of the reasons why I started my blog, and I keep boring
comp.lang.lisp regulars by plugging it:

  Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log
  http://www.paoloamoroso.it/log

It is aggregated by:

  Planet Lisp
  http://planet.lisp.org

You may start here:

  http://www.paoloamoroso.it/log/040912.html

By the way, which CLIM implementation are you using?


Paolo
-- 
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Recommended Common Lisp libraries/tools (see also http://clrfi.alu.org):
- ASDF/ASDF-INSTALL: system building/installation
- CL-PPCRE: regular expressions
- UFFI: Foreign Function Interface