Project: Groogy's Development Environment
This is an open-source development environment to help out with developing rbSFML applications. It includes some debugging utilities and various features to make development easier. Feel free to add your own additions to the library. Thumb rule being that it is to help out with developing applications in Ruby and not take over it so it can't develop into framework, everything should be optional to use.
So far the library adds seven parts. A eight part is planned and on the way.
The library comes with a logger pre-setup to STDOUT for any messages for the developer. The library itself uses this logger as well to output various failures.
The library comes with a message class that lets you display messages graphically in its own window.
A thread run in the background monitoring the loaded files for changes. If a file is changed while the application is running then that file will be reloaded into memory updating the code currently running with the new changes. This gives us the possibility to have an application running while we are developing and see the changes tread into effect at the moment we save.
So far this handles any syntax errors that might arise but it's still in early development stages. For instance if we define a method in a module and then remove it this method will still exist in the ruby interpreter.
A few console classes that act pretty much like the IO operations of Kernel. The difference is that it's made to act like the way you'd expect a console to. Two classes were added that directly output the text into a graphical context like window or texture.
A module that will load resources in another thread and which you can query for progress information. Pretty handy if you want to load things in the background and not get a huge pause from the load time. Can be used in conjunction with a loading screen or in-game to load the next level while playing.
NOTE! Does not speed up loading in any way! It should make it more or less slower because of Ruby's GIL.
Should come up with a better name but for now it's called Debugger. What it lets us do is print common data to the screen at real time showing us the performance of the application. So far it is capable of showing us the FPS and the memory usage by ruby.
It is now possible to create a thread that forces the garbage collector to be run from time to time. Because of the GIL we will loose a tiny bit of performance when using this but if you are creating a lot of temporary objects then this is more or less necessary to keep a steady memory usage.
Haven't started on this yet but will be based on the console. It will allow the developer to specify the environment to watch a specific variable for any changes and report back through a console window. This will let the developer see various values in real-time without clogging up the main application window.
GDE is completely free to use for open-source and closed-source projects. Like SFML, it is licensed under the very permissive zlib/libpng license.
You can download the environment from the GitHub page located here. Feel free to participate in the development of the environment by submitting code or letting us know what you would like to see.
Here's a simple example to get started:
# main.rb
load './src/gde/gde.rb'
GDE.init( "Example 1" )
GDE.load( "print.rb" )
for index in 0..500
print_message()
sleep( 1 )
end
GDE.exit()# print.rb
def print_message()
puts "Hello world!"
endIf the print message method in print.rb is changed while running then it will be updated by the environment and a new message will be shown instead.
