Getting Into Games -- A Follow-up | Hacker News Reader

Getting Into Games -- A Follow-up

entertainingcode.com

35 pointssliced_lime7 comments

Not necessarily the case.

This may be true for building console and hardcore PC games.

I've spent the past year working on a kids MMOG, which means it's browser-based. Flash/Flex front-end, Java back-end. Flash is no walk in the park, but it's more accessible than C/C++.

We're an indie shop, so we work startup hours, but not the abusive game industry crap you hear about. Pay is on par with any other startup I've seen. Crunch time happens, again, similar to any startup.

Casual and kids gaming are growing segments of the games industry, and mean you don't have to sentence yourself to a routine of 80 hour weeks, horrible pay, and fighting with low-level languages.

That's good to hear. As an aspiring indie game developer, the article is depressing but your comment inspired a little hope.

So working on weekends, getting smaller salaries, having to code in C++ instead of some high-level language... I don't know, as cool as it would be to do games, I think I rather do lame business software (which can have challenges too!) and do something fun in my spare time.

Hunh. The emphasis on C++ over Lua surprises me. Maybe the indie guys I tend to talk to are a bit more Lua than the industry as a whole. I'd love to hear some thoughts from people inside.

While there are many language choices for writing gameplay code, C++ is still the dominant implementation language for game engines themselves.

(I was a lead engineer on The Sims 3.)

Generally a big-budget game will have its engine written in C++ and a scripting language used for gameplay logic (sometimes the AI too). The gameplay logic is often written by level designers who aren't necessarily programmers by trade so a high-level language is often required, and so visual programming languages like Unreal3's Kismet are starting to take over from traditional scripting languages like Lua. Whatever the choice of scripting language, the amount it's used is a balancing act with productivity and flexibility on one side and raw speed on the other.

I think you're correct in saying that indie studios use scripting languages more than the industry as a whole. Indie games typically don't need to push the hardware so they can usually afford to use higher-level languages, or they use a C++ engine but do a whole lot more in the scripting language.

It shouldn't really be that surprising.

C/C++ are generally still the "fastest" languages in terms of final application performance. And, I am pretty sure that all of the DirectX/OpenGL APIs are still tied pretty tightly in with C/C++ libraries.

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