EPTNew TL KnowHow Article: Game Programming - Page 2
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Snuggles
United States1865 Posts
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Zaranth
United States345 Posts
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Yorbon
Netherlands4272 Posts
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Deleted User 135096
3624 Posts
Also, that ToC formatting looks strikingly familiar to something I've seen before.  | ||
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JieXian
Malaysia4677 Posts
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Weebem-Na
United States221 Posts
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inn5013orecl
United States227 Posts
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spinesheath
Germany8679 Posts
On October 25 2012 04:06 inn5013orecl wrote: Like others before me. C++ pretty ambitious and interesting choice for programming language to use to teach game programming. Granted a lot of big companies are still using it, most are making the switch to Java or C# (if they use non-proprietary game engines). That being said, C++ one of the most powerful languages out there, and if you know what you're doing, runs faster than Java, Python, and all scripting languages. I have a bit of knowledge of game programming and design concepts, but can definitely look to learn more. I will be following this. Good luck! For high end games, C++ definitely is still one of the best languages, and likely will stay that way until fast inherently parallel languages are established. Which might still take a while. But a beginner can't make good use the strengths of C++ for such cases (he won't be writing a high end game anyways), and will most likely run into problems with the disadvantages of C++. There's a lot of problems to be expected when it comes to C++ memory management, especially if you lack understanding of RAII. Pointer magic also seems to be unreasonably attractive to beginners (been there, done that, seen it from countless people). Languages like C# and Java just force you into not comitting these kinds of mistakes, and they are easily powerful and fast enough for almost any kind of low budget games. On the plus side: Once you are good with C++, any procedural language is a piece of cake. Well maybe not the esoteric ones. | ||
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Lorizean
Germany1330 Posts
And are you going to cover cross-platform compatibility as well? I think C++ is a good choice, it is my favourite language anyways Looking forward to this. | ||
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Logo
United States7542 Posts
On October 25 2012 04:23 spinesheath wrote: For high end games, C++ definitely is still one of the best languages, and likely will stay that way until fast inherently parallel languages are established. Which might still take a while. But a beginner can't make good use the strengths of C++ for such cases (he won't be writing a high end game anyways), and will most likely run into problems with the disadvantages of C++. There's a lot of problems to be expected when it comes to C++ memory management, especially if you lack understanding of RAII. Pointer magic also seems to be unreasonably attractive to beginners (been there, done that, seen it from countless people). Languages like C# and Java just force you into not comitting these kinds of mistakes, and they are easily powerful and fast enough for almost any kind of low budget games. On the plus side: Once you are good with C++, any procedural language is a piece of cake. Well maybe not the esoteric ones. Yeah I agree with this, there's just no reason to really invest into C++ unless you are interested in working on more advanced 3d graphics and/or CPU heavy games (or want to be a career programmer as C++'s concepts are important to understanding how things work in managed languages).. When you look at indie games that are on C++ and need to be there it's a short list of things like Dwarf Fortress and complex 3d games. Even games as complete and competitive as Minecraft can avoid using C++. Not that it makes the article any less useful or anything. | ||
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czaku
Poland429 Posts
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y0su
Finland7871 Posts
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ClysmiC
United States2192 Posts
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CecilSunkure
United States2829 Posts
On October 25 2012 04:41 Lorizean wrote: Just wondering, are you gonna be using libraries like SFML or do you intend to do explain everything from ground up? And are you going to cover cross-platform compatibility as well? I think C++ is a good choice, it is my favourite language anyways Looking forward to this. It's not a comprehensive article from the ground up with code examples everywhere to show how it's done. I don't have the time to write an entire novel Instead many of the topics are explained from a high-level point of view in order to provide the reader a clear sense of how an entire game project may look like. As for all the people saying C++ is ambitious, I don't really agree. Being afraid of memory management and pointers isn't something I feel a professional software engineer (especially one that wants to work on game development) should ever be afraid of. Starting to learn by running straight into both C and C++, I feel, are great ways to build a strong programming foundation. Though I do specialize in C++ and my experience come from there, the article talks a lot about architecture and concepts and ideas that aren't language specific. | ||
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Sega92
United States467 Posts
 NEED MOAR!!! i love all kinds of programming and am always eager to read what better minds have to say on the subject | ||
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Bobbias
Canada1373 Posts
I would say that C++ may require learning more of the language itself before you get to a point where you can comfortably create something a bit larger than the usual starter programs, but when you get to that point, you may have a better grasp of overall programming concepts than someone who just jumps into C#/Java. I started off learning C++, and moved to Java and C# later on. I'm thankful I learned some C++ to begin because although it was a bit harder for me to understand at first (I was 14 when I started learning C++); the understanding of what a pointer was and how they worked really made it easier to understand some of the inner workings of C# and Java and gave me a better overall view of things in the first place. One of the aspects that nobody mentioned yet is that C# and Java don't have all the libraries that C++ has. There are certainly some ports, but sometimes the ports may be relatively different from the C++ port, may be unfinished, or may require some.... interesting... code to interface with it (example: calling unmanaged functions from C#, specifically, ones involving pointers and such). C++ has an extremely mature set of libraries for damn near anything you would ever want. All in all, I think that the only barrier to applying knowledge from one programming language to another is how well a person truly understands something. If you truly understand what is being done, there is no reason you should have much trouble doing it in another language. Learning one language shouldn't suddenly make you only program in that language. I've dabbled in Python, PHP, Assembly, C#, Java, Turing (lol), Haskell, and VB... I'm also currently learning to design hardware in VHDL... I have little trouble switching between languages once I learn the syntax of the language I'm working in. After that, the only stuff you really need to learn is little stuff (say the language you're learning is strongly typed, and you came from a weakly typed language, and suddenly you need to learn how to convert between types.... that is pretty minor compared to learning what a for loop is.) The sort of thing I'd like to see in a TL-Knowhow on programming a game is more generalized things like structural approaches, how to create a decent resource management system, maybe how and where to integrate pathfinding, and other architectural design stuff. I know that stuff is rather advanced for the topic of creating a game, but there are very few articles covering things like that while also dealing with actual code, and sometimes it's nice to see a slightly more concrete implementation of a generalized idea. | ||
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imJealous
United States1382 Posts
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imPermanenCe
Netherlands595 Posts
I myself have learned C#, together with the XNA engine it's really easy to make games. In C# you don't have to understand what's under the hood, you can just focus on making a game/program. Whereas with C++ you have to take care of multiple things yourself, such as garbage collection (removing pointers that aren't reachable anymore etc.). So, as people have said before, when you want to make simple games that don't require much resources (CPU/Memory) C# is the better one to use. But if you're working on really big games (such as game companies do), you want to optimize your game as much as possible. And this can only be done (properly) with C++. I don't know how in depth this guide is, but can't most things be explained in pseudo code? In that case there shouldn't be too much difference between a C++ and C#/Java background. Although, some concepts may be very much related to the programming language you're using, such as making a game engine. | ||
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Rollin
Australia1552 Posts
Looks amazing, although it would probably be geared at people that have some prior experience with programming already, no? Seems kinda like a split between gamemaking / intro to programming article to me (but I'm not complaining). On October 25 2012 11:03 Bobbias wrote: I'm also currently learning to design hardware in VHDL... Um what exactly do you use that for, I'm curious. I had to do a unit with it, and it seemed rather esoteric and not really useful outside of designing your own chips (not practical outside of large scale). | ||
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Vronti
United States111 Posts
Looking forward to this! Glad to have insight from someone who's had some experience. | ||
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