VS: I dunno about you, but I found a great pleasure in making Emacs do
things that aren't really text editing related, like - graphics.  I've
already looked for things to do that haven't been really done yet,
like, networking, such as making torrent clients or doing audio stuff,
but I've settled on graphics because that's the easiest of them and
because it has some research, but not really much of it and as you
maybe know you can actually insert text, add properties to it that
tell that it is associated with an image and then make the display
engine display it.  So, I've done this - three times already for three
different games using three different types of image types and, yeah,
the first is a demonstration of the classical Conway['s] game of life.

So, I've done it with the code here and… do this, then I have a
demonstration of Conway's game of life.  So, yeah, there isn't really
much to say about this except that I can also try other figures or
have a glider going on and yeah, this is done with the monochrome type
in Emacs where you just have an XBM graphic[s] and can toggle bits and
this is what I'm doing with an timer and yeah, this is done
periodically and it only reacts to input events and that's pretty much
the most basic thing you can do in Emacs.  But, I thought that kind of
thing isn't really enough, so, I did take a further step and went for
a game that's a bit more popular at the moment, namely 2048.

So, we go for the same thing here and evaluate 2048 - which is a clone
of the very well known 2048 game.  It doesn't have any animations, but
it uses SVG to just insert a full board with all tiles on it.  I've
added a bit of game logic, but otherwise it behaves just like the
same.  It's a bit confusing because you can't really see all the
pieces slide together, but I intend to fix that once I figure out how
to do transitions properly.  And so, yeah, this is very fast, I could
probably put it at 60 FPS, but I couldn't figure out anything really
interesting to do for it, so I went for a third demonstration
meanwhile which is a classic Tetris - [which] is actually at 60 FPS.
And that thing put me for some challenges, like say […].

So, […] here's the game play.  You can see a NES Tetris with a piece
moving down and everything like that, it responds to events and, yeah,
I had to build quite a few things to make it happen.  I would [like
to] explain these in a hangout with Sacha Chua and, yeah, there's
quite a lot to say about the technical things because as you might
have already imagined, Emacs is quite not up to par for that.

Oh.  You can't actually see it.  Well, I can see it on the […]
preview, I dunno what's going on, seriously.  But, uh, yeah.

SM: Yeah, the screen froze a bit and - oh, we see it now.

VS: OK.  I'm not sure [why] it's frozen, maybe because I don't have
enough upload?  I dunno, honestly, but anyways. […] Do you have any …
[questions]?

SM: I don't know if you can see in the audience, but everyone's jaws
just hit the floor.  This is really cool.

VS: Well, it doesn't have any actual game features yet, like, I mean,
beyond rotation and everything.  So, lines aren't cleared yet, but I
intend to fix this because the most stumbling blocks have been
cleared.  So, any further questions about this before I go into actual
detail tomorrow?

SM: Uh, yeah, we have some questions.

??: What's the difference between this and the built-in Tetris?

VS: This is bitmaps.  No text at all.  It plays at 60 FPS actually, I
can implement animations and, yeah, I can do a lot of the things the
original can't yet, like actually making it play like a real Tetris
because the original has for someone like me, an enthusiast of the
game, quite a few differences, like, uhm, you don't even have
soft-dropping in it or blocks individually and that is quite
[bothersome] for me, so I thought I'd reinvent it some day and this
happened that day.

SM: Cool!  This is really cool.  Other questions?  In the audience?
This is really, really cool.  Let me check IRC if there's anything
there...

VS: But don't expect any shooters or anything like that because, uhm,
I'd need to get quite a bit more creative for this.

SM: Yes, so on IRC, mbork wants to know if you'd be working on… a
mario clone?

VS: Maybe! Maybe, but it's a lot more effort because you have to
create worlds and more logic and elisp is quite, I dunno.  It feels
very verbose to me and, like JavaScript basically.  There is a nice
blog post from Steve Yegge about it, how verbose JavaScript is, but
how it has grown beyond its roots - while Emacs Lisp hasn't.  And
yeah.  So he's expecting that the browser will some day eat up Emacs
and solve this problem.

SM: It's been like a couple years since that post.  But yeah… any
other questions?  This is really cool.  Thanks for, like giving us
[the] talk.