Star Trek revisited

In this talk Kenji shows you how to design a concurrent game program in Erlang with an example of Star Trek text game, which has been popular since 1970s written in BASIC and other languages. Kenji first describes how the game is traditionally designed, referring to the example of BSD Star Trek in 1993, written in C. Kenji then explains how the game can be redesigned with the Erlang's concurrency perspectives and the OTP libraries.

Talk objectives:

The objectives of this talk are: to understand the programming style difference between C and Erlang; to show how Erlang's lightweight process model is effective to describe entities in a game program; and to show how an old game can be renovated with a new perspective of Erlang/OTP.

Target audience:

The target audience will be: C and other imperative language programmers who wants to have a hint of programming in Erlang; Erlang beginner programmers who want to build some games as their projects; and those who want to play the Star Trek on the Erlang shell.

Slides
Video

About Kenji

Kenji Rikitake has been writing Erlang code since 2008. His recent open source work includes XORshift+/* code contribution to Erlang/OTP rand module, Erlang random number libraries of SFMT and TinyMT algorithms, and a hardware random number generator based on Arduino UNO R3. Kenji writes code since 1974. He has become an independent professional engineer since 2014, after working for various computer industry and academic/research organizations since 1990, including Digital Equipment Corporation, Kyoto University and Basho Technologies.

GitHub: jj1bdx

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