Show HN: Cleven – a Common Lisp experimental volume graphics game engine

Cool! I'm trying to do something similar. I really think the time is ripe for a lisp-based game engine.

I'll have more time to look into your work later, but I wanted to say (a) very cool! Keep it up! (b) check out Lumen (https://github.com/sctb/lumen). It compiles into Lua, and can be powered by LuaJIT. The benchmark performance is off the charts, on par with LuaJIT itself, because it compiles to code that mimics the way you'd write in Lua without any of the hassle.

My current plan is to add support for running Lumen via luvit, which provides many libraries for LuaJIT, some of them useful for gamedev. If you're interested in some kind of a collaboration, shoot me an email or something. But regardless, best wishes and good luck!

By the way, thanks for making this available under a permissive license. It's not always an easy decision, but the gamedev industry in particular will be improved by choices like this.

Here's how to get started with Cleven on OS X:

  brew install rlwrap
  brew install sdl2
  brew install sbcl
  wget https://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp
  shasum -a 256 quicklisp.lisp  # c.f. https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/
  sbcl

Within SBCL, run the following:

  (load "quicklisp.lisp")
  (quicklisp-quickstart:install)
  (ql:add-to-init-file)

Press enter. Exit SBCL by running:

  (exit)

Then run

  cd ~/quicklisp/local-projects/
  git clone https://github.com/afainer/cleven.git
  cd cleven
  rlwrap sbcl

Inside SBCL, run:

  (ql:quickload "sdl2")
  (ql:quickload "cleven")
  (load "sandbox.lisp")
  (in-package #:sandbox)
  (run-sandbox)

It pops up a window! But I ran into an error at this point:

  debugger invoked on a SIMPLE-ERROR in thread
  #<THREAD "Render thread" RUNNING {1006D70EF3}>:
    Shader compilation failed.  The info log is:
  ERROR: 0:24: '' :  version '330' is not supported

I tried switching computers, but I got the same error. I'm running an AMD Radeon R9 M370X on Yosemite.

Unfortunately I'll have to stop here, since I'm a bit pressed for time. This project is way cool, so I'll look into it more later. If you have any ideas how to debug it further, please let me know here or by email.

Those steps might work for other people on OS X, though. There's probably some kind of driver issue on my end. (Ah, the life of gamedev...)

Edit: Created issue https://github.com/afainer/cleven/issues/1

Thank you, guys! I really appreciate your feedback.

also we have a bug in description:) You need to load "cl-fad" lib just type in: (ql:quickload "cl-fad")