I learned Odin
TThePrimeagen@ThePrimeagen · 550K subscribers
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0:00–0:26Approximately 1 year ago, I spent 7 days in a tower with a bunch of my friends including legendary pixel artist Adam C Eunice where we built a video game in effectively 7 days in Lua using Love 2D. Uh later that year, we actually went back to the tower, had everybody come back, had a bunch of people be able to do, you know, some build some cards and really explore out this idea of a pretty fun tower defense. During this, I built
Structure
Approximately 1 year ago, I spent 7 days in a tower with a bunch of my friends including legendary pixel artist Adam C Eunice where we built a video game in effectively 7 days in Lua using Love 2D. Uh later that year, we actually went back to the tower, had everybody come back, had a bunch of people be able to do, you know, some build some cards and really explore out this idea of a pretty fun tower defense. During this, I built the UI system in which is how we kind of organized the world to be able to do all the menus, to be able to have expanding or reducing menus, not to have everything hard coded. And it was a lot of fun to really understand how to build a more robust UI. Also, Teage, I never got the chance to do this, built the animation system which was apparently super awesome to do. We had a pretty, you know, getting near, hey, this is looking like a game game. Like all projects, after putting a lot of heart and soul into it and getting pretty dang far, I just haven't touched it for a while. And then, as time went on, I you know, I don't I don't really love Lua when Lua becomes 70, 80,000 lines of Lua. Like that's a lot of Lua and a lot of things go wrong. But then, I kind of had this crazy idea. What if I just tried to rewrite this game? I know, the perpetual never be done project. But instead of using Lua, what if I used a language that was a bit more conducive to game programming? And behold, I've chosen Odin. And when I say run, look at this. This is level two. You can see it's correctly rendering. Yes, there's a bunch of stuff about it that's not quite
Watch from 0:00done right. But I have the Perlin noise auto generated background along with all the pathing and everything, loading all the data from the JSON files. And I did this because I really just wanted to learn Odin. I think that it's a pretty compelling language and I have a lot of respect for Ginger Bill and a lot of the things he says. So, I figured, hey, why not just give it a try? If you've never used Odin, it's pretty fantastic. It's a lot like C. Um as or as they like to say, it Odin is the C alternative for the joy of programming." And there's a lot of things about it that make it designed specifically for game programming. Now, I haven't used a lot of these features. I don't quite understand them cuz I've never been a game programmer myself, but I do really hope that this project will allow me to do a lot more inside of this game programming world. And as you can see right here, this is effectively C-like programming. Now, I'm going to kind of yap a little bit about Odin and kind of the things I really, really liked about it. Now, first, one thing I really like about Odin is that it has this vendor part of importing. If you want to use SDL 3, go ahead, use it. You want Raylib? You want Lua in there? You want to interact with curl, with all sorts of different stuff that's kind of built in? It's just right there for you to use it. Meaning that it's really easy, specifically to build like a 2D game cuz you have Box2D and Raylib. Like that makes it pretty dang simple to just get off the ground and running right away.
Watch from 1:30And for me, that means I can build a game with effectively no dependencies. I'm going to have nothing. I have JSON that I'm going to be able to take from the core. I have Raylib to be able to do all the kind of the controls, to do the frame rating and everything, and to be able to do the drawing, and give me all the conveniences, which by the way, Raylib, holy cow, so much better to use than love. This it the Oh my goodness, the interfaces are just so much better. Like one thing that I really like about Raylib is that you can just take a texture, draw to the texture, and then you can draw that texture to a source rectangle. So, if I flip the source rectangle upside down, guess what? It's upside down. If I make it smaller, it's scaled down. If I make it bigger, it's scaled up. So, honestly, it just makes it really easy to reason about because then you're just producing source and destinations, and that's it. Now, I've barely scratched the surfaces of Odin, and one of the things I can see right away that I absolutely love is this code right here. Effectively, this is function overloading. Now, generally, function overloading gets kind of a bad rap, but this one's really nice cuz it's very explicit, meaning that I can say, "Hey, this function and this function are the two functions that can be overwritten for cell index." That means if I pass in a coordinate or I pass in a row and an int, it will automagically just go and do the right thing. For me, this is like a perfect version cuz it's explicit function overloading. You're not just putting a bunch of functions with the same name. No, you actually have to like say, "Hey, these three functions are the only ones allowed to
Watch from 2:50be overwritten to the singular function name." It's really a good design. I actually did not think I'd like it as much as I do, but I love it. Another thing I really like is this idea of using. You can say using coords coordinates. So, coordinate is just a row and a column. Again, it's a tower defense-based game. So, each row and column is just one of the squares out there. And so, if I say using coords, I can just use these properties within the cell. But, even more than that, if I have something that says takes in a coordinate, I can also just pass in a cell to this. Like this right here. Cell index is either going to be passed in by coordinate or by row and column. This is a cell, which remember, cell actually has using inside of it. It doesn't actually is it's not a coordinate itself. So, when I just passed it in, it can be automagically converted to me to be a coordinate. Again, that's actually pretty dang cool, pretty dang convenient. I'm really liking a lot of the basic design things. Now, some of the things I haven't got to, swizzling, I haven't got to that. Structures of arrays versus arrays of structures. I haven't got to any of that kind of fun stuff, but I assume I'm going to get to them here pretty soon because once I actually get into the game programming of moving enemies and all that, then maybe I can swizzle with the best of them. But, for now, I've just only scratched the surface of Odin. And so far, what I'm seeing, I really, really like it. I I've been in it for about, I don't know, maybe 20, 30 hours, and it was extremely easy to pick up. If you have a basic mental model of how manual
Watch from 4:20memory management works, this should be almost no problem for you to pick up the language effectively immediately. Obviously, the big hot topic these days is AIs. Does the AIs work well with Odin? I've had absolutely no problem with it. Does the AI still produce crap code? All the time. Now, you could call that a prompt skill issue for me, but hey, it works just fine. It does not seem to get confused. It's not trying to put in some different language. It works just as I would expect it to work with any other language. I was able to prompt out a feature to read all the JSON from the different level data files and convert it into stuff that should fit into this game. And it did it in almost no time using composer too fast, too furious. It was pretty dang, I guess, seamless. Now, I had to refactor all the code completely different, but nonetheless, it worked out just fine. Now, this video is probably a little bit different than you're used to. And that's because I'm going to make a change channel cuz I had the Vimage in, which was at like 93,000 subs. And now I have the Prime gen just sitting here at like 540. Now, I'm sure most of the accounts are dead and this channel's not going to go anywhere, but hey, if you like this, if you just want me to kind of yap about this as I make my way through this game, I would love to have a dev log. And so, if you like it, hey, say, "Yeah, this is fantastic." Give me a thumbs up. I don't know. Press the subscribe button if anybody even watches this. And a personal goal of mine is that as long as I'm not traveling and I don't have access to a computer, long as I can actually do some work, I'm hoping to release like a video once a week, every other week, just kind of yapping about what I'm doing and where I'm getting to this. I might also rebuild
Watch from 5:51this again in Jai Jonathan Blow's language, J Blow Lang, as I've heard it, Blow Lang. I've heard all the different terms, J I J Jai. I don't know what it Jonathan AI. I'm not really sure what the language is called at this point, but I might also like co uh linearly co-co-collaterally co-co-develop both of them by hand and kind of see like, "Okay, this is where this language is really cool at." I mean, Jonathan Blow's language, obviously, is significantly more expressive. It allows for, you know, it is literally the best language ever written for macros. It could be pretty cool to kind of co-develop them. So, I'm not in any sort of rush to finish this game. It's more I want to explore stuff and build stuff and just kind of go back to coding for the joy of coding because, um, you know, I'm going to be real with you guys. There was a bit of a time there that I felt like some of my joy of coding kind of got sucked out of me and that's because I've just been trying so dang hard to understand this damn AI programming world and I just I've honestly just I I keep on trying to push into it because I just keep seeing all these promises of the greatest thing ever. And yes, like, if I don't care too deeply about anything, I can move pretty fast. But if I actually like care about the thing, I find that I have to greatly slow down. And I just haven't got the same, you know, speed up that other people are seeing. And so, I just keep on thinking, "Okay, I must be holding it wrong." And over these last like 6 months to a year, honestly, kind of just killing my my passion for programming. I just well, I didn't feel the same. I just didn't have that same drive because
Watch from 7:22it's just hard to love something when I don't know, when I just am not the one creating it, you know? Like, I just felt like I was just like a I felt like I was the co-pilot. You know what I mean? Like, I was the one sitting there being like, "Hey, maybe you should turn left. Maybe it turns right three times to turn left." I don't know what's happening on the inside. And for me, that's like, "I got into this for the love of the game." You know, it's not that I was out here being like, "Oh my gosh, I can't wait to get a job and get paid tens of thousands of dollars a year." because that's what it was when I got started. Like, programming wasn't a necessarily high-paying job. And so, this kind of shift that happened, it means that I I just got into it for the sake of doing it and I love it. And so, I wanted to kind of go back to the roots and that's what this whole I want this what this channel's about. This was the longest-winded way of saying, "Hey, you know, I really appreciate all of you for sticking around." I know that I know you guys like it when I yap about news articles or make fun of stuff or talk about AI or security and stuff, but you know, my first love is programming. The name is the game programmer gen? Is it happening? Is the arc happening?
Watch from 8:54Full transcript
- 0:00
Approximately 1 year ago, I spent 7 days in a tower with a bunch of my friends including legendary pixel artist Adam C Eunice where we built a video game in effectively 7 days in Lua using Love 2D. Uh later that year, we actually went back to the tower, had everybody come back, had a bunch of people be able to do, you know, some build some cards and
- 0:22
really explore out this idea of a pretty fun tower defense. During this, I built the UI system in which is how we kind of organized the world to be able to do all the menus, to be able to have expanding or reducing menus, not to have everything hard coded. And it was a lot of fun to really understand how to build a more robust UI. Also, Teage, I never got the chance to do this, built the animation system which was apparently
- 0:43
super awesome to do. We had a pretty, you know, getting near, hey, this is looking like a game game. Like all projects, after putting a lot of heart and soul into it and getting pretty dang far, I just haven't touched it for a while. And then, as time went on, I you know, I don't I don't really love Lua when Lua becomes 70, 80,000 lines of Lua. Like that's a lot of Lua and a lot
- 1:05
of things go wrong. But then, I kind of had this crazy idea. What if I just tried to rewrite this game? I know, the perpetual never be done project. But instead of using Lua, what if I used a language that was a bit more conducive to game programming? And behold, I've chosen Odin. And when I say run, look at this. This is level two. You can see
- 1:27
it's correctly rendering. Yes, there's a bunch of stuff about it that's not quite done right. But I have the Perlin noise auto generated background along with all the pathing and everything, loading all the data from the JSON files. And I did this because I really just wanted to learn Odin. I think that it's a pretty compelling language and I have a lot of respect for Ginger Bill and a lot of the things he says. So, I figured, hey, why
- 1:47
not just give it a try? If you've never used Odin, it's pretty fantastic. It's a lot like C. Um as or as they like to say, it Odin is the C alternative for the joy of programming." And there's a lot of things about it that make it designed specifically for game programming. Now, I haven't used a lot of these features. I don't quite understand them cuz I've never been a game programmer myself, but I do really
- 2:09
hope that this project will allow me to do a lot more inside of this game programming world. And as you can see right here, this is effectively C-like programming. Now, I'm going to kind of yap a little bit about Odin and kind of the things I really, really liked about it. Now, first, one thing I really like about Odin is that it has this vendor part of importing. If you want to use SDL 3, go ahead, use it. You want
- 2:31
Raylib? You want Lua in there? You want to interact with curl, with all sorts of different stuff that's kind of built in? It's just right there for you to use it. Meaning that it's really easy, specifically to build like a 2D game cuz you have Box2D and Raylib. Like that makes it pretty dang simple to just get off the ground and running right away. And for me, that means I can build a
- 2:51
game with effectively no dependencies. I'm going to have nothing. I have JSON that I'm going to be able to take from the core. I have Raylib to be able to do all the kind of the controls, to do the frame rating and everything, and to be able to do the drawing, and give me all the conveniences, which by the way, Raylib, holy cow, so much better to use than love. This it the Oh my goodness,
- 3:13
the interfaces are just so much better. Like one thing that I really like about Raylib is that you can just take a texture, draw to the texture, and then you can draw that texture to a source rectangle. So, if I flip the source rectangle upside down, guess what? It's upside down. If I make it smaller, it's scaled down. If I make it bigger, it's scaled up. So, honestly, it just makes
- 3:33
it really easy to reason about because then you're just producing source and destinations, and that's it. Now, I've barely scratched the surfaces of Odin, and one of the things I can see right away that I absolutely love is this code right here. Effectively, this is function overloading. Now, generally, function overloading gets kind of a bad rap, but this one's really nice cuz it's very explicit, meaning that I can say,
- 3:54
"Hey, this function and this function are the two functions that can be overwritten for cell index." That means if I pass in a coordinate or I pass in a row and an int, it will automagically just go and do the right thing. For me, this is like a perfect version cuz it's explicit function overloading. You're not just putting a bunch of functions
- 4:15
with the same name. No, you actually have to like say, "Hey, these three functions are the only ones allowed to be overwritten to the singular function name." It's really a good design. I actually did not think I'd like it as much as I do, but I love it. Another thing I really like is this idea of using. You can say using coords coordinates. So, coordinate is just a row and a column. Again, it's a tower defense-based game. So, each row and
- 4:37
column is just one of the squares out there. And so, if I say using coords, I can just use these properties within the cell. But, even more than that, if I have something that says takes in a coordinate, I can also just pass in a cell to this. Like this right here. Cell index is either going to be passed in by coordinate or by row and column. This is
- 4:58
a cell, which remember, cell actually has using inside of it. It doesn't actually is it's not a coordinate itself. So, when I just passed it in, it can be automagically converted to me to be a coordinate. Again, that's actually pretty dang cool, pretty dang convenient. I'm really liking a lot of the basic design things. Now, some of the things I haven't got to, swizzling,
- 5:18
I haven't got to that. Structures of arrays versus arrays of structures. I haven't got to any of that kind of fun stuff, but I assume I'm going to get to them here pretty soon because once I actually get into the game programming of moving enemies and all that, then maybe I can swizzle with the best of them. But, for now, I've just only scratched the surface of Odin. And so far, what I'm seeing, I really, really
- 5:40
like it. I I've been in it for about, I don't know, maybe 20, 30 hours, and it was extremely easy to pick up. If you have a basic mental model of how manual memory management works, this should be almost no problem for you to pick up the language effectively immediately. Obviously, the big hot topic these days is AIs. Does the AIs work well with
- 6:03
Odin? I've had absolutely no problem with it. Does the AI still produce crap code? All the time. Now, you could call that a prompt skill issue for me, but hey, it works just fine. It does not seem to get confused. It's not trying to put in some different language. It works just as I would expect it to work with any other language. I was able to prompt out a feature to read all the JSON from
- 6:23
the different level data files and convert it into stuff that should fit into this game. And it did it in almost no time using composer too fast, too furious. It was pretty dang, I guess, seamless. Now, I had to refactor all the code completely different, but nonetheless, it worked out just fine. Now, this video is probably a little bit different than you're used to. And that's because I'm going to make a
- 6:44
change channel cuz I had the Vimage in, which was at like 93,000 subs. And now I have the Prime gen just sitting here at like 540. Now, I'm sure most of the accounts are dead and this channel's not going to go anywhere, but hey, if you like this, if you just want me to kind of yap about this as I make my way through this game, I would love to have a dev log. And so, if you like it, hey, say, "Yeah, this is fantastic." Give me
- 7:05
a thumbs up. I don't know. Press the subscribe button if anybody even watches this. And a personal goal of mine is that as long as I'm not traveling and I don't have access to a computer, long as I can actually do some work, I'm hoping to release like a video once a week, every other week, just kind of yapping about what I'm doing and where I'm getting to this. I might also rebuild this again in Jai Jonathan Blow's language, J Blow Lang, as I've heard it,
- 7:26
Blow Lang. I've heard all the different terms, J I J Jai. I don't know what it Jonathan AI. I'm not really sure what the language is called at this point, but I might also like co uh linearly co-co-collaterally co-co-develop both of them by hand and kind of see like, "Okay, this is where
- 7:46
this language is really cool at." I mean, Jonathan Blow's language, obviously, is significantly more expressive. It allows for, you know, it is literally the best language ever written for macros. It could be pretty cool to kind of co-develop them. So, I'm not in any sort of rush to finish this game. It's more I want to explore stuff and build stuff and just kind of go back to coding for the joy of coding because,
- 8:07
um, you know, I'm going to be real with you guys. There was a bit of a time there that I felt like some of my joy of coding kind of got sucked out of me and that's because I've just been trying so dang hard to understand this damn AI programming world and I just I've honestly just I I keep on trying to push into it because I just keep seeing all these promises of the greatest thing ever. And yes, like, if I don't care too
- 8:29
deeply about anything, I can move pretty fast. But if I actually like care about the thing, I find that I have to greatly slow down. And I just haven't got the same, you know, speed up that other people are seeing. And so, I just keep on thinking, "Okay, I must be holding it wrong." And over these last like 6 months to a year, honestly, kind of just killing my my passion for programming. I
- 8:50
just well, I didn't feel the same. I just didn't have that same drive because it's just hard to love something when I don't know, when I just am not the one creating it, you know? Like, I just felt like I was just like a I felt like I was the co-pilot. You know what I mean? Like, I was the one sitting there being like, "Hey, maybe you should turn left. Maybe it turns right three times to turn left." I don't know what's happening on the inside. And for me, that's like, "I
- 9:11
got into this for the love of the game." You know, it's not that I was out here being like, "Oh my gosh, I can't wait to get a job and get paid tens of thousands of dollars a year." because that's what it was when I got started. Like, programming wasn't a necessarily high-paying job. And so, this kind of shift that happened, it means that I I just got into it for the sake of doing it and I love it.
- 9:31
And so, I wanted to kind of go back to the roots and that's what this whole I want this what this channel's about. This was the longest-winded way of saying, "Hey, you know, I really appreciate all of you for sticking around." I know that I know you guys like it when I yap about news articles or make fun of stuff or talk about AI or security and stuff, but you know, my first love is programming. The name
- 9:52
is the game programmer gen? Is it happening? Is the arc happening?
Description
Twitch : / theprimeagen
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