tl&dr: switch for performance but miss Ruby
cough ObjectiveC
Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as a huge fan of Ruby, I think it's absolutely the wrong language to write games in, because games are enormously sensitive to runtime fluctuations, and as you found out, Ruby has them. In particular, a stop-the-world GC is just never going to give you satisfactory performance, unless every GC pass happens in That said, you might consider Lua as a primary scripting engine for your game. It's got a lot of you…
I'll look into LUA. Never used it back in my games dev days as it was just coming into vogue.
Mike Pall's LuaJIT[0] is excellent from a game dev perspective--incremental GC (so you can spend a fixed amount of your frame budget in it) and JIT with a huge number of optimisation make it fairly compelling to write the top 50% of your game in (and not a terrible choice for the bottom 50%).
I think you were absolutely right to switch from Ruby, I can't see the problems that you had getting any better unless Ruby lets you manage object allocation (in which case you could allocate to a per-frame memory buffer and just nuke it at the end of every frame).
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#33This post should be titled, "Why I fucked up by choosing Ruby to write a game." - Or "What the fuck was I thinking" I love Ruby, I spend a lot of time writing it. I also write kids games for iOS. I would never consider Ruby(in it's current state) a good language to write a game in. Anyone who would has clearly; never written a game before; or never used Ruby for anything serious before. I agree with the other posters…
Heh :) I'll take the bait :)
I've written lots of Ruby for things that are serious (large websites with lots of traffic), and I've worked as part of a team that built on commercially available games in C++ that sold lots of copies.
Ruby has come along enormously recently, especially with 1.9.3 and the other flavours that are out there now. I thought it might be worth trying it and advancing the state of the possible. Eventually I decided that actually shipping something was more important.
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#34This sounds very "link bait-ish"… Why were you trying to write a game in Ruby to start with? You didn't "switch back to C++", you simply realized you were trying to use a wrench to tight a philips screw… -.-
I suppose it does: but it's the honest truth. I have two months of ruby code that's rusting now, and it was quite a difficult post to write.
That was not the point of my comment. It was a realization of how it came across (aka how I got here).
My main point, however, and this in reply to your post (that I have no doubt it was honest and on the back of some tough thinking) was that you simply started using the wrong tool for the job and then, realizing this, found a more appropriate tool. Nothing wrong with that, but your post came across as "Ruby sucks so I'm going with C++".
Having said that, I'm glad you "saw the light" and I do wish you the best of lucks in your development endeavors! :)
And remember: your next endeavor might be in Ruby, C++, whatever… Just do some thinking beforehand and choose the right tool for the job to avoid "rotting code", which we all know is incredibly frustrating! ;)
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#35I'd be interested in HNers' views on whether I made the right call.
Of course you did, and I say that as a self-described Ruby programmer. What I really want to know is what gave you the idea that it might be a good idea to use Ruby for a project so obviously not suitable for Ruby?
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#36This post should be titled, "Why I fucked up by choosing Ruby to write a game." - Or "What the fuck was I thinking" I love Ruby, I spend a lot of time writing it. I also write kids games for iOS. I would never consider Ruby(in it's current state) a good language to write a game in. Anyone who would has clearly; never written a game before; or never used Ruby for anything serious before. I agree with the other posters…
While what you say may be 100% true you might be shocked by the number of Ruby and Python devs I talk to who tell me that Ruby can do anything that C++ does if you're even a half-decent Ruby or Python dev. I've literally asked people, "What about something like Gran Turismo 7?" And I've literally been in rooms where every dev there (none game devs, all web devs) basically said if they were writing it in Ruby it could be done, but they wouldn't trust Sony devs to be able to do it.
This may not be the case for all Ruby devs, but I think having these stories out there is still useful.
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#37I'm using SDL for writing a DJ application and have it cross-building on Linux, Windows, and the target platform (HP TouchPad).
For the Windows build I'm using the excellent http://www.mingw.org/ Mingw32 environment. I compiled SDL and my other needed libraries myself and there's pretty much no code differences.
The only downside to mingw32 is that my target platform has full POSIX and mingw32 doesn't, so sometimes I have to choose carefully to use stdlib functions and not a POSIX function.
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#38This post should be titled, "Why I fucked up by choosing Ruby to write a game." - Or "What the fuck was I thinking" I love Ruby, I spend a lot of time writing it. I also write kids games for iOS. I would never consider Ruby(in it's current state) a good language to write a game in. Anyone who would has clearly; never written a game before; or never used Ruby for anything serious before. I agree with the other posters…
While what you say may be 100% true you might be shocked by the number of Ruby and Python devs I talk to who tell me that Ruby can do anything that C++ does if you're even a half-decent Ruby or Python dev. I've literally asked people, "What about something like Gran Turismo 7?" And I've literally been in rooms where every dev there (none game devs, all web devs) basically said if they were writing it in Ruby it could…
For what it's worth, I help to organize a fairly active Ruby group, and I am certain that, if not zero, nearly zero of us would make this proclamation. In fact -- and I mean not to attack you, but just to illustrate how incredulous I am -- I tried to think of a reason there might be for you to fabricate or exaggerate that story. I don't really think you did, but my mind went there.
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#39Nice write up. I wrote my own 2d game engine in C++ a while back. Switching to Ruby was great, but I never made any games. I did make a couple of JavaScript HTML 5 games. But here again speed is a limitation, and so am looking into C (and eventually Objective C) to eventually do some iPhone game making. As great as it would be to make games soley with scripting/interpreted languages, I don't think we're there yet.
what about lua/love/corona?
Re: Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
#40Nice write up. I wrote my own 2d game engine in C++ a while back. Switching to Ruby was great, but I never made any games. I did make a couple of JavaScript HTML 5 games. But here again speed is a limitation, and so am looking into C (and eventually Objective C) to eventually do some iPhone game making. As great as it would be to make games soley with scripting/interpreted languages, I don't think we're there yet.
what about lua/love/corona?
I've thought of using Lua and if I recall correctly, work has been done to develop iPhone games with Lua as well? Ah, where is the time?