In this talk I want to explore R's capabilities for fast, interactive graphical applications. This exploration is driven by my ongoing port of the 1991 action adventure game "Another World", but these capabilities also open up possibilities for new visualisations and applications in R.
The porting of this game is a 'moonshot' project as I try to discover the techniques and tools needed for fast (>20fps) interactive (keyboard + mouse) rendering to R graphics devices. A further constraint is that I want all this to be done in plain R - avoiding any C or javascript as much as possible.
I will discuss three of the key challenges faced: graphics device speed, fast double-buffered rendering and event-driven programming for interactivity.
I will showcase the capability of R to render 5000 moving sprites using the nara package, an interactive drum machine with the eventloop package, and my progress with the 'Another World' game engine with animation, keyboard control and synchronised sound.
Talk materials are available at
https://github.com/coolbutuseless/RStudioConf-2022.
