WadC v2.1 Released

Version 2.1 of WadC has been released. WadC is a functional programming language for generating Doom maps. Version 2.1 brings support for Doom 1, Heretic, Hexen and Strife as well as several new example maps, a load of bug fixes, some new libraries for managing Boom features and lots of improvements to the GUI. You can read more and grab the latest version from the WadC homepage. To complement version 2.1, there is now a work-in-progress WadC tutorial and gallery of examples. Version 2.1 of WadC is dedicated to the memory of Professor Seymour Papert (1928-2016), co-inventor of the LOGO programming language.

Nice! Good to see this bold experiment in level design is still alive.

One thing, though: the "Here's a zip" download link does not work because the link erroneously begins with a "(". Without it, it works fine.

How annoying would it be to compile an exe version of it that doesn't need a JVM installed? I believe GCJ can do that.

Gez said:

How annoying would it be to compile an exe version of it that doesn't need a JVM installed? I believe GCJ can do that.

I don't know, but I believe GCJ is being deleted from the GCC collection going forward.

There are other wrapper/bundler tools that basically either bundle a JVM or embed an installer, but stuff your app inside a .exe either way.

Is your objective to avoid having a system wide JVM, or a JVM at all?

The Green Herring said:

Nice! Good to see this bold experiment in level design is still alive.

One thing, though: the "Here's a zip" download link does not work because the link erroneously begins with a "(". Without it, it works fine.

Thanks for noticing, I think I've fixed it now.

Jon said:

avoid having a system wide JVM

Mostly that I guess.

Also my Internet connection is tightly metered so I try to avoid doing 50+ mb downloads (like the JVM actually is, since the online installer is just a downloader). I have unlimited download past midnight, but by then I always forget that I wanted to download this or that... So it's been my case with WadC every time the WadC community project thread was bumped. "Oh yeah, I want to take a look at this, see if I can make cool stuff with it... Ah, got to download the JVM first? Okay, I'll do that tonight..." Then midnight comes and WadC and the JVM have both totally disappeared from my thoughts.

Basically it'd be more convenient for me if there was a small WadC executable. (So a wrapper that merely bundles it with a full-fledged JVM isn't what I'm looking for at all.) I acknowledge that my use case is quite specific and also that setting a different compilation environment to make a non-cross-platform build of a Java program can be more trouble than you'd want to bother with.

Gez said:

Basically it'd be more convenient for me if there was a small WadC executable. (So a wrapper that merely bundles it with a full-fledged JVM isn't what I'm looking for at all.) I acknowledge that my use case is quite specific and also that setting a different compilation environment to make a non-cross-platform build of a Java program can be more trouble than you'd want to bother with.

I'll take a look at this. I was thinking about bundling in terms of a BSP and IWAD anyway, to make it really frictionless to give it a go; but I'll look at the JVM/EXE stuff too. It'll take me a while, and I don't have access to Windows very often so there will be gaps before I can test it, but good things come to those who wait :)

Looking forward to it!

Wow, I've never heard of this project before. LOGO was actually my first exposure to programming, and I read two books about it.

I might give this a go some time.

Gez said:

Looking forward to it!

I took a quick look at http://launch4j.sourceforge.net which wraps the .JAR in a .EXE and in theory claims to be able to support a bundled JRE. But on closer inspection, all it does is set up the environment so that the JAR is launched referencing a bundled JRE... the "bundling" is up to you. If I were to do this, I would have to basically ZIP up an installed JRE folder from my Window machine and put it alongside the EXE-wrapped-JAR in the ZIP; you would then have to ensure that the extracted EXE-wrapped-JAR was always co-located with the extracted JRE folder on your own machine or it would fail to execute.

After all that, you would have a static installation of the JRE somewhere, and not get any security updates. Although nothing would use it except for WadC anyway.

That didn't sound terribly useful to me, but let me know because I could do that anyway if it would be.