July 3, 2013

Kerbal Space Program + IKVM + Scala

Lately, most of my time has gone towards Kerbal Space Program. At first the game is very frustrating and has a very high learning curve, but you should expect that when the point of the game is rocket science. Minecraft is making significant progress towards its modding with the recent release of 1.6.1; however, it still has a long ways to go before I will consider actually attacking it with my ideas. KSP on the other hand already has full support for modding, but the game has Unity limitations (32-bit/single threaded), which is unfortunate but also offers large benefits of rapid development because of all the tools and assets provided by the engine.

The kicker is I would need to develop in C# to make a mod. There is nothing wrong with C# and infact it has some huge improvements over Java in many of the language related points. However, Scala makes C# look pretty bad (okay LINQ is still kick ass) and why spend the time monkeying around with C# when I could simply use Scala?

The bridge between Java and C# is called IKVM, there might be others but that is the one I know is used by projects such as LibGDX for compling to non-Java platforms (iOS). It does work pretty well and I know IKVM can be used with Scala without any real hiccups.

The big question is how well can I minify all this into a plugin for KSP?

Even bigger question is will it even work and will it work relatively well?

I expect issues, hiccups and probably making myself want to give up. I will end up reporting progress and information here as I work on it, although I admit I seem pretty bad at that.

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