Reinventing the wheel?

General Discussions
#1

Like most of us I face the difficulty of getting good art, in my case 3D models and animations. I have looked at Blender but quickly came to conclusion I don’t have enough fine motor control, or the patience for all that twiddling with a mouse. And my hardware is not up to the demands of Blender. And I don’t want to craft dozens of similar models - I want to mass-produce them programatically!

The obvious solution is to write my own declarative 3D modelling/animation language called PoppetScript :slight_smile: I’ve just finished the first draft of the compiler, and the project is at the stage where I feel I am a genius - of course, I will come down to Earth with a loud bump. And I suspect I am reinventing the wheel big time…

But I have had a few lifetime ambitions in programming. The first was to write a working chess game, which I finally managed a couple of years ago, and the other is to write a complete language. So I am having fun, even if my efforts are misdirected. If it all works out I will create PoppetScript plugin for Eclipse with a built-in JOGL-based viewer.

So my question is: what is the biggest wheel you’ve reinvented, and did you have fun doing it?

#2

you know xtext?

#3

Now I do. But my language is very simple - my home grown parser/compiler is up to the job. For some perverse reason I quite like processing text files and building wacky state machines.

#4

I wrote a script parser as part of a visual novel engine. It even supported nested functions (showText(toString(variable)) for example). I’m sure I could’ve done it in a simpler way, but for simplicity (lol) I wanted it to call normal Java functions through Reflection. Well, in my defense it was a 1-year project, and I needed to kill some time… xD

#5

Visual Novels, that’s a niche genre

Reminds me of Melty Blood
Damn, that was an epic game. Too bad there’s no english translation yet :confused:

#6

THREAD HIJACKING DETECTED!!! (for VN you better use RenPy)

You know nvPY? I want to use it but the installation is painful so I decide to make my own. Currently state is implementting serialization.

Everything we do now is reinventing wheels. What does make you really think that you’re the first?

#7

ReBirth, English is not your native language is it? Don’t worry. I am American and it really isn’t mine either. Gibberish it meh native tongue.

At poster: I always feel like I am just recoding stuff people have done hundreds of times over again. But hey, if you enjoy it you enjoy it. Baseball is the same game every time but you still enjoy it right?

#8

Yes clearly not. If you dont mind sir

[quote]What’s make you think that you’re the very first person who invent something?
[/quote]

#9

Blargh.

Aaaaaw… That reminds me of my C++ programming classes during high-school. I fired up PCSX2 and we played that game a lot, though only the versus mode. The best part was when our teacher came by and was like “Nice game, can I try?”.

#10

To teach my self OpenGL, engine design, and Scala I started making an “engine”. I’ve had a blast doing it and if I get out of uni and get a job in the gaming industry I would want to be an engine developer.

#11

LOL ;D Welcome to the club, where we get lots done but none of the right stuff! :slight_smile: