next »

[poohshoes]

I like C# because it's just so easy.  I learned in C++ and I don't even remember how to do it anymore : P

[Geti]

Python makes for a good glue for scripting. I do remember reading how the company that runs the servers of Call of Duty use a mix of Erlang and Python (well and probably umpteen other things, but those 2 are the core), for example.

As I mentioned, we use it for our web API for serving lists of game servers, player account info, that sort of thing. Erlang is pretty popular in services where there isn't meant to be any downtime due to hot-reloading being built in at a language level; they use it a lot in the WoW servers as well.

Though I'd say it's main strength is in physics and mathematical simulations where performance isn't as important as accuracy and easy handling of large numbers

Fwiw big numbers are possible in "lower level" languages too (C++, Java), and is possible in C++ with native syntax with operator overloads. Most of the numerical computing I've seen done with python relies on Numpy for speed in the more mathsy calculations - accuracy is of course paramount or your results are meaningless, but you don't want the computer to take days computing your data either.

The reasoning I encounter for scientists using python (more often than accuracy, tbh) is it was easier for them to learn and doesn't require any complicated tooling like compilation, which I would say is the main strength of python.

This is why my favourite programming language depends on what I'm doing. Different tools for different tasks

Of course. Noone should really be doing their shell scripting in C


@nikki: of course, but with compilation you complicate embedding python for scripting and complicate the toolchain for less tech-savvy people. I view cython/pypy as python's -O3 equivalent, except -O3 is just a compiler flag cause the tooling is already complicated for C/++

[eigenbom]

Oh don't get Geti worked up. These discussions have been done to death since the dawn of time (1 January 1970). Instead of silly benchmarks let's talk about the other important aspects of languages. : )

Something I do in Moonman is I have a big excel spreadsheet with a table of the events in my game (e.g., MeleeAttack(who,what,how)). I save this as .csv and then use a Python script to output c++ code, which is then compiled into the game. So Python and C++ are good buddies, see. ; )

Has anyone mentioned Haxe yet? It's such a great langauge, and I really want to see it succeed in gamedev, but I think its strength (multiple targets) is actually also its weakness (because its libraries are fragnented between targets). Mind you, I haven't looked too closely at it in the last couple of years. OpenFL looks like it could be a great boost for Haxe's popularity in gamedev, but I think something like Unity for Haxe would be much better.

I also really liked the idea of LightTable. Does anyone have any experience with that, or with using Clojure or something similar for gamedev?

[Geti]

Yup, in the early pages a few people said Haxe and pointed the AS3 people at it. Haxeflixel is pretty nice as a framework by I agree that the retargetability is also a weak point for Haxe; even the standard libraries have a lot of platform specific stuff.

I dont have experience with LightTable; know about it but never bothered to use it since the ecosystem around it seemed lacking to say the least. Would be very interested to hear from anyone who uses it in earnest (I only know one person via twitter who does).

[SolarLune]

Haxe is very cool, but I always seem to have trouble setting it up - I always end up dealing with dependency versions causing issues (Haxe needs to be x version, while OpenFL also needs to be a specific version, etc).

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Has anyone mentioned Haxe yet? It's such a great langauge, and I really want to see it succeed in gamedev, but I think its strength (multiple targets) is actually also its weakness (because its libraries are fragnented between targets). Mind you, I haven't looked too closely at it in the last couple of years. OpenFL looks like it could be a great boost for Haxe's popularity in gamedev, but I think something like Unity for Haxe would be much better.

We have indeed, Haxe is awesome. If you haven't used Haxe/OpenFL in the last year or so it's a totally different beast. With the haxelib command line tool it's super easy to get everything setup now. First time I tried it 18 months ago I couldnt get any target except flash to run. Now I can get almost every target to work easily. NekoVM has surprisingly good performance too.

the only one I havent gotten to run is andoird and that's mainly because I'm resisting installing all the java/android sdk crap. So bloated

[eigenbom]

Oh I see there's a few different haxe specific IDEs around now, that's pretty cool. I also forgot that Papers Please and Rymdkapsel were both built with Haxe.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

The crazy thing about rymdcapsule is that it was released on playstation mobile and that's not even a supported platform. It's a hideous custom implementation of mono. Grapefrukt did his own haxe -> PSM conversion


It's up on github but last I talked to him he said he basically did exactly what he needed to get the game to run. Not a complete working conversion.

[eigenbom]

Ah wow, thats pretty cool.

[Belimoth]

The Haxe community is nice but I don't like how it's literally actionscript 4.

[bobbysworld]

My favorite language has to be C++. It allows me to do all the things I want without getting too much in the way, and I always go back to it when I try other languages. That being said, C++ can be a dangerous language if you do not know what you are doing. You do have to worry about memory management if you are using dynamic allocations, or a library that requires you to call cleanup functions, and god help you if you are writing network code in C++; network security is something I try to stay far away from. The main reason why I like C++ over most other languages is because I am not a big fan of garbage collection and scripting languages that allow you to create new variable names because of a typo.

[Stals]

I think for me it is c++ for games and Python for scripting.

[bombjack]

I worked previously in C++ but my day job is in Java.
Anyway my current favorite for gamedev is C#/Unity because you can acheive great result in very small time.

[raquo]

I'm an iOS developer by day so Obj-C has been my thing for a long time, I'm really liking Swift so far though.

For cross-platform game stuff I can't stand most of the options available. Go is really coming along with tools to do more game development though, it's mostly wrappers around the proven stuff too, sdl, opengl, etc. I think I'm going to start working on my next thing in Go, I feel really productive when using it.

[Sushi]

I'm new in the forums, only found today that there is lots of interesting topics here, I'll try to stay 
My favorite language is object-pascal, and I've spent the last years making a 3D MMORPG with it (that is finally coming to Steam yay!)

It the past I got lost of problems because there was a very strange mentality that only C++ could be used for games. People used to make fun of me for my choice, but I never really cared much, I knew that the end result depended more on me than the language. It seems that now with Unity things started to change and people understand that many languages can be be used for games.

I really don't like C++, for me, it is the most unproductive language ever, especially for big projects. I had jobs where I worked with it, hated wasting so much time with compilation...

C# in the other hand is also one of my favorites, and I'm currently using it for my MMORPG server. If I started now I would probably also do the client in it, with Unity, but really, I'm not going to throw out years of work when I got something working, and that I dont have to pay licenses for.

[kamac]

A 3D MMORPG written in pascal, and the server written in C#?

 

Link.

[Sushi]

A 3D MMORPG written in pascal, and the server written in C#?

 

Link.

There's nothing special about it really, they are all turing complete languages 
I just opened a devlog here, as the game is not 100% finished and people might have interest seeing the progress, check it:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=42415

[Geti]

Soldat is also written in (some mish-mash of) Pascal (dialects) - I think Delphi moving over to Lazarus/FreePascal.

The current main developer also has feelings against C++, and I hear you on the compile times... That said, you can design things so that compile times are kept low (separate structure and implementation, for example) while still getting the best performance possible.

Either way, Pascal is one of the choices that I generally wont argue with, since you still get acceptable native code out (if not quite as optimised) and it's generally quite memory efficient, so at the end of the day I feel that one comes down to developer preference.

Every time I've tried to do something serious using Pascal though, I've found myself missing C/++ libraries. I'm not interested in wrapping that stuff myself if I just want to write games

[Sushi]

Yep, when I was young I was introduced to Delphi and the instant compile times got me hooked, and ditched C++ that day.
However you are quite right about libraries, that is the advantage of C++ over all other languages, the number of libraries available simply don't compare

C# is quickly becoming a new favorite though, also has instant compile, plus a very powerful language overall.
I originally wrote my game server in pascal and ditched it for a C# version, took a week to port but the server codebase was reduced by a lot, especially the multithreading code improved a lot in terms of readibility 

[InfiniteStateMachine]

How does c# compare to delphi? That would be interesting to know considering the same guy designed both languages.