[gameprogrammer] Re: Fast development over multiple platforms, which language?

  • From: brianevans <brianevans@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 12:53:03 -0600

I guess I'm this list's Torque proponent.

The Torque engines are cross platform with windows, linux, and mac (I've 
heard rumors about Xbox and FreeBSD too, but I've not confirmed them).

They have built in GUI editors, scripting, a very robust and capable 
network library, and they come with complete source code.  These things, 
along with platform independence, were my big requirements for choosing an 
engine.

The original 3D Torque Game Engine is complex and powerful.  But people 
complain about the complexity and the art path.  The new Torque 2D that has 
just been released, solves a lot of the complexity that comes with 3D 
games/art and enables very rapid prototyping, from what I have both heard 
and seen.  People have released pretty much full featured demos (Arkanoid, 
Missile Command) a few days (up to a week) after the engine was released.

You can also get ahold of it for $100 bucks with no royalty or publishing 
obligations.

I haven't seen anything that really compares, free or reasonably commercial 
( <$1,000 ).

Systems these days run multiple apps at a time, so people probably won't 
want to reboot just to play your game.

brian.


At 12:12 PM 3/7/2005, you wrote:
>I know that OS, language, and platforms can be an almost religious subject 
>to some, but I am interested in hearing some opinions.
>
>I have a few ideas for small, yet hopefully entertaining games. I am 
>trying to decide what I should write them in however. I am completely 
>agnostic on the subject and always looking for excuses to learn new 
>things, so open to any suggestion.
>
>What I do know is that the vast majority of users will be on windows, with 
>some on Mac, and very few (who would pay a penny) on *nix OS. That said, 
>using the web as the medium of choice would be easiest for players and the 
>abilities of SVG would be great...  that is if it currently had much support.
>Java would be great because of its wide distribution (as opposed to Python 
>and many other scripting languages) but even with all the advances in 
>their RTE Java is still very slow and not particularly what I am looking for.
>I love to write C/C++ recreationally, but once you have a compiled 
>language you have to test and build on all kinds of platforms, and with 
>the constant changes to Windows and such, it doesn't seem that you would, 
>without paramount effort, be able to keep the games going.
>I know nothing of Flash, so I can't comment on that.
>
>I remember way back when you would include an OS (or at least it's 
>fundamentals) in your game, so that you could throw in your disk and just 
>boot on it, not worrying about it. I wonder if that isn't a doable option 
>nowadays, though for what I'm thinking, I doubt the users would want to go 
>through that much effort.
>I can see the use of setting up your own run time environment, or creating 
>a core system you can distribute, but that is like reinventing the wheel, 
>something I'm trying to avoid.
>
>Does anyone have any success or failure stories for particular languages 
>or build/distribution processes that you'd be willing to share?
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