working title
A simple 3d game similar to Minecraft, with a custom engine written in ReasonML (OCaml) using the Raylib library
Controls: WASD, Left Control to descend, Space to ascend, Esc to quit, Left Shift to "sprint"
I've made good progress with this, but I've run into a blocker. The OCaml bindings for Raylib are built ontop of CTypes, I believe I've run into a situation where the OCaml garbage collecter is cleaning something that has been passed to Raylib's C code, causing a segfault
I have been thinking about getting comfortable with C++ and this has provided some impetus, so I'm moving on for now, though I'd like to solve these issues and come back to this project
Edit:
Having reproduced this project in C++ I've encountered the same problem, or one that manifests in the same way, just got to understand the memory footprint better
Drawing cubes to show basic terrain generation and chunk-loading
And the next step, generating a mesh to make it a single draw call, also back-face culling
https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Install.html
Install opam globally on your workstation and run opam init, clone the repo
In the project root run the following commands
opam switch create . 5.0.0
eval $(opam env)
opam install . --deps-only
dune build
This will create a virtual environment for the current folder using OCaml 5.0, update your PATH for the language version, install dependancies, then run a build to see if it works
To run the game
dune exec blockgame_raylib
Or
./_build/default/bin/main.exe
Should be exactly the same as above, Raylib does support Metal iirc and should work properly, Rosetta might be required for apple silicon
I haven't tried this and I wouldn't recommend it
It might be challenging to install OCaml on a Windows workstation, I wouldn't attempt it right now, I would wait for 1st class support for the latest language versions with the installer
There are instructions from OCaml website https://ocaml.org/docs/installing-ocaml
Note that the Diskuv OCaml (DKML) installer does not yet support OCaml 5.0.0, at time of writing anyway, this codebase should work on OCaml 4.14.0? I haven't tested it
I will have to work this out eventually for production builds, though it might actually be easier to cross-compile for Windows instead
The only requirement is ocaml-lsp-server, I know this works for Vim and Emacs though I haven't tried it
It's easiest with VSCode or VSCodium with the ocaml-platform plugin, you might need to run eval $(opam env)
and dune build -w before opening the editor for the plugin to use the right language version
I have been using Reason to write JavaScript apps for a while, I want to get more comfortable writing native apps and the developer-experience is great. OCaml syntax is still kinda intimidating to me, I'll stick to Reason
The performance can be near C-like if you need it to be, this way of writing OCaml is what I want to learn, when and how to switch the safety off
https://github.com/tjammer/raylib-ocaml
These are simple bindings to the Raylib C library, high-level and easy to use. There are not a lot of options for building games using OCaml, this one is pretty great
A drawback of this library is that it cannot target wasm, support for compiling OCaml to wasm is in early stages still, and raylib-ocaml is built on CTypes which also presents issues for targeting wasm
https://github.com/raysan5/raylib
The Library of choice is Raylib, not only because it has OCaml bindings, it's well documented and battle-tested, it can produce builds for a variety of production environments including the browser with wasm
One drawback is that it's OpenGL and doesn't support Vulkan
A benefit is that is has diverse build targets