OpenNefia VS Yue

The code for all these mods lives here, if you're curious to see what the modding system looks like right now. I think that, even if some of the mods are incomplete in their current state, they implement several of the useful features that I was wanting to port from the start, so having any amount of progress towards completing them isn't a bad thing. They're also implemented as separate mods, so if they get too buggy they can be disabled easily.

Well, it's not Elisp, but:

https://github.com/Ruin0x11/OpenNefia

It's an engine rewrite of an old roguelike I used to play in Lua. I'm trying to experiment with making a game where the engine is similar in flexibility to Emacs.

It has an Emacs frontend, and I designed it with the zealotry of an Emacs user, meaning it has advice, hooks, interactive evaluation and runtime module hotloading. You can run anything the engine can run from a REPL (and cause all the state to become broken easily).

I recently implemented nefias in my engine rewrite of Elona, called OpenNefia. Hopefully the ability to generate lots of new dungeons in addition to the ones in vanilla would make the game more interesting. Here are few I made, as part of a mod:

An engine rewrite of a Japanese roguelike I played a lot. I liked Emacs, so I decided to see what would happen if I tried writing it in the style of what Steve Yegge calls "living systems", where all the code is interactively callable in-game and reusable in mods. There is no scripting layer, the implementation and extension language are one and the same (Lua). I like to think of the engine as a massive programming runtime with a bunch of libraries and functions made for the sole purpose of modding the game. You could whip up a scratch buffer and start tinkering around with the game state or prototyping new mods fairly quickly.

The engine is not general purpose either, it's specific to the quirks of the original game. The number of weird ideas that I could graft onto it keeps increasing with each week. Yet, without feature parity and stability with the original, it's a long way away from having those things.

Another downside is going back and playing the original now isn't as fun, because I keep thinking I'm playing the rewrite and expecting bugs to pop up at ever corner. Working on a project like this for so long affects your perception of the end result in ways you can't easily unsee.

Also gets pretty lonely working on something alone for years you're not sure anyone will care about when it's playable.

[1] https://github.com/Ruin0x11/OpenNefia

For a recent project I chose Yue (https://libyue.com/), a cross-platform native widget GUI toolkit with C++, JavaScript/Node.js, and Lua. I've only used the Lua interface and macOS backend, but it has worked quite well, despite the very steep learning curve. This was also my first desktop GUI app, so I had to learn many implicit concepts that weren't obvious from the otherwise extensive documentation.

Yue was also the only option that 1) supported macOS, 2) supported Lua, 3) was sufficiently comprehensive to build a non-toy GUI app, 4) and that I could integrate into my (static) build. I couldn't even get the wxWidgets Lua interfaces to compile, and Qt and Fltk had similar stories, whereas reverse-engineering the baroque Yue build (based on Google's internal build systems) was relatively simple. Yue had some sharp edges, but I was able to work around them whilst patiently waiting for patches and fixes upstream.

Immediate mode interfaces were a non-starter for me. For a non-trivial set of otherwise typical controls and window management you have to implement too much yourself, plus being non-native they not only felt wrong (which admittedly is somewhat subjective; the younger crowd seems to think non-native, immediate mode interfaces look more state-of-the-art), but lacked other interfaces for proper desktop integration, like theme change signaling (i.e. notification that a user switch between light and dark modes in the macOS system settings panel).

All-in-all I would highly recommend Yue.

I settled for Yue: https://github.com/yue/yue It's been around for several years. The deciding factor for me was that is has well maintained Lua bindings as part of the core project alongside JavaScript (Node.js) and C++.

I didn't have much luck with libui (crashes, missing features, etc), and various immediate mode alternatives just require too many dependencies and other work that made integration too painful. Plus, Lua bindings for all these were always stale. In fact, Lua binding quality is pretty poor all around including for GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, and FLTK.

There are many more JavaScript developers than C++ developers.

Personally I like Yue, a cross-platform native toolkit library: https://github.com/yue/yue But much of project was already using Lua, so Node.js and Electron were never viable solutions.

A native GUI library https://github.com/yue/yue.

It was a disaster when I announced it on Hacker News, and I got numerous harassments from strangers.

But anyway 2 years since then and I'm still working on it.