Retro ice hockey

[Thorium]

I wanted to compare Nu vs MonoGame vs WinForms when implementing a small 2D-game, so I made a project of "FsHockey", a retro ice hockey game:

https://github.com/Thorium/Nu/tree/retro-ice-hockey/Projects/FsHockey

[bryanedds]

Whoa fascinating!

I see maybe one or two things I'd make more idiomatic to Nu, but this is really an interesting port!

I'm going to dive into this!

[bryanedds]

Looking deeper, I would say the primary issue here is that this code didn't take advantage of ImSim or really any of Nu's unique semantics. In practice, it looks like you ended up merely replacing simple render calls with Nu's doStaticSprite and doText function calls. This is okay but, without making any actual use of inline event handling (such as with if World.doButton ... then or match World.doRigidBody ... with, you won't experience the unique powers of ImSim. Instead of surfacing that, you ended up using mutation and imperative event handling to transform game state as ported over from the other implementations. This obscures way too much of what Nu has to offer! One of the big advantages of ImSim is how you can express these things more directly and more naturally and without the complexity baggage of mutation. And beyond that, when you use Nu / ImSim in its built-in immutable style, you gain access to its unique powers of live gameplay undo and redo in the editor for free.

I hope you're willing to look at the unique capabilities of Nu and ImSim in detail to further inform your comparison! Cheers and thanks for all the work you've done so far!

[Thorium]

Thanks for the feedback, I updated the project.

[bryanedds]

Whoa that was a lot of work! What's weird about this game is that it was originally a little demo that intentionally designed around not requiring any of the advanced semantics advanced game engines like Nu, Godot, or Unity offer. That's why there's relatively limited utility in making it conform to Nu's idioms other than to add some basic mouse interactable buttons via World.doButton.