Helm, a functionally reactive game engine | Hacker News Reader

Helm, a functionally reactive game engine

helm-engine.org

122 pointskaishiro12 comments

I actually just started playing around with this today, after seeing the reference via Chucklefish's blog: http://blog.chucklefish.org/?p=154

TL;DR - Apparently they're stepping away from it with their latest game, primarily because of its focus on 2D rendering. It's heavily influencing their newest internal toolset though, called Cove (not opened up yet, as far as I can tell).

I used Helm for a simple 2D simulator/prototype for edge detection and orientation. Link to code below (it was my first Haskell program). While it was not a game in any sense, I found it quite fun and easy to use. https://github.com/rgleichman/sense/blob/master/AngleGripper...

Would love to see examples of the engine working. Poked around a bit and couldn't find any demonstration games. Am I missing something?

I found 2 demo projects in their github account: https://github.com/switchface/helm-demo-colors and https://github.com/switchface/helm-demo-gradients .

They do have some examples of the engine working in the "guide" pages [1], but I don't really know enough about the technology to be impressed. "It's just a black triangle."

[1] http://helm-engine.org/guide/gradients/

Those don't really show much of the FRP style programming, it's how pretty much all haskell graphics libraries work.

The language that Helm was inspired by, Elm (http://elm-lang.org/), does have multiple examples to show the power of FRP.

The resources surrounding Elm are the best set of FRP examples I've seen so far.

That's the biggest problem with pure FRP: people like to talk about it and make libraries for it, but non-trivial game implementations are rare. I am still not sure what is supposed to be a unit of re-usability (like components/systems in ECS) in FRP?

Might be off topic, but I love the logo.

I haven't been able to figure out how to get this to compile on Windows. It seems to have something to do with its dependency on GTK.

Yeah, I haven't had much luck with OSX either, lots of the glib dependencies seems somewhat busted due to

https://github.com/gtk2hs/gtk2hs/issues/1

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