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

  • From: "Jason Clark" <jclark@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: <gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 10:12:10 -0800

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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