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What could have been a good career in game development

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Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#11

Post by VinzO »

That sounds exactly like my story... in 1995-1996 I started to develop a clone of Football Manager That I had on C64. I used Turbo Pascal and the game was running under DOS. Like you I had no internet connection at a time and I found only a small book about a few graphic functions. I was never able to do a fluid animation of my games. It was too laggy only to draw the ball on the screen ! Then I dropped and unfortunately continue my studies as Electronic Engineer. I wish I could turn back... Now, like you I would like to continue the work I started, but I couldnt find backups of my source code :(

I wonder if I should start a new degree in CS, but I am 30, I have a child, and I am not sure if it's better to learn by myself or if it's worth doing a degree. Can online studies be a good idea? Or do you guys think it's just a waste of time?

Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#12

Post by VinzO »

rtf wrote: post #5

First of, I second the others. By the time I got around to seriously learning programming and specifically game programming I was using Python/Pygame on a 1 gigahertz machine and it gave me about as much power as a 486 would running optimized C code. (more in some instances, less in others) If you're after concepts and not retro-technical details this is a good route to go. But as for the questions: 1. Threading is n…

What are the advantages of an interpreted language for game programming? My idea is that it is probably much slower. I can't see the advantage. Is it that there are a lot of usefull libraries or else? ( I almost don't know python/pygame ).

Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#13

Post by Tichy »

xirium wrote: post #8
Tichy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say JavaScript for games, presumably what you have in mind is ActionScript and Flash?

Knowledge of JavaScript is transferable to ActionScript but I was quite specific about the use of JavaScript. There's a large amount of code and documentation which is ideal for the task.

Any pointers? I have considered creating games in JavaScript (OK, arguably my boobs memory is a game in JavaScript), but I still would not consider it the obvious choice for action games. For a beginner, I would rather suggest something classical, where you have a screen/bitmap/whatever that you can draw to?

Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#15

Post by marvin »

VinzO wrote: post #12
rtf wrote: post #5

First of, I second the others. By the time I got around to seriously learning programming and specifically game programming I was using Python/Pygame on a 1 gigahertz machine and it gave me about as much power as a 486 would running optimized C code. (more in some instances, less in others) If you're after concepts and not retro-technical details this is a good route to go. But as for the questions: 1. Threading is n…

What are the advantages of an interpreted language for game programming? My idea is that it is probably much slower. I can't see the advantage. Is it that there are a lot of usefull libraries or else? ( I almost don't know python/pygame ).

The distinction interpreted/compiled is largely moot these days, since most popular interpreted languages are actually compiled (or at least bytecode-compiled) before they are run.

The real question is whether you would want to use a modern, abstract, weakly typed language like Python instead of a strongly typed and machine-code compiled language like C++. The latter is, usually, considerably slower. The decision all depends on how serious you want to get. For small-scale experiments, Python is just fine because it takes half the time and half the effort to write and test a piece of code. Unless you are pushing the limits on how fast you want something to run, Moore's law works in your favor and you can very quickly create something which does what you want and is fast enough. If you need the speed, you will know, but at least then you will have a simple prototype which will keep you from falling in any stupid traps on the way.

So to answer your question, development speed is the factor that makes people want to use these languages. You don't have to jump through hoops unless you need run-time execution speed.

And yes, Python has excellent library support for doing just about anything that doesn't have to be blazingly fast. This, along with better language constructs (more dynamic classes and methods, weak typing, versatile and easy-to-use lists and mappings, list mapping functions etc), is what makes development much faster. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that you can dynamically test the things you've written, if you want to.

Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#16

Post by marvin »

VinzO wrote: post #11

That sounds exactly like my story... in 1995-1996 I started to develop a clone of Football Manager That I had on C64. I used Turbo Pascal and the game was running under DOS. Like you I had no internet connection at a time and I found only a small book about a few graphic functions. I was never able to do a fluid animation of my games. It was too laggy only to draw the ball on the screen ! Then I dropped and unfortuna…

There are plenty of guys (and girls) over 30 in my undergraduate CS class. A few over 40, as well.

Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#17

Post by VinzO »

marvin wrote: post #15
VinzO wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the advantages of an interpreted language for game programming? My idea is that it is probably much slower. I can't see the advantage. Is it that there are a lot of usefull libraries or else? ( I almost don't know python/pygame ).

The distinction interpreted/compiled is largely moot these days, since most popular interpreted languages are actually compiled (or at least bytecode-compiled) before they are run. The real question is whether you would want to use a modern, abstract, weakly typed language like Python instead of a strongly typed and machine-code compiled language like C++. The latter is , usually, considerably slower. The decision al…

Thanks for your reply. One more question, I am maybe old fashionned, but weak typing kind of scared me. I am more used to strong typing and I find it weird when I look at python variable declaration. In my point of view, strong typing helps avoid bugs and write cleaner programs. What advantages do you see in weak typing?

Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#18

Post by nostrademons »

VinzO wrote: post #12
rtf wrote: post #5

First of, I second the others. By the time I got around to seriously learning programming and specifically game programming I was using Python/Pygame on a 1 gigahertz machine and it gave me about as much power as a 486 would running optimized C code. (more in some instances, less in others) If you're after concepts and not retro-technical details this is a good route to go. But as for the questions: 1. Threading is n…

What are the advantages of an interpreted language for game programming? My idea is that it is probably much slower. I can't see the advantage. Is it that there are a lot of usefull libraries or else? ( I almost don't know python/pygame ).

Most games nowadays use a two-tiered architecture: they write the graphics, rendering, collision-detection, and other processor-intensive parts as C libraries, and then do the game mechanics, AI, physics, and other highly-changeable parts in an interpreted scripting language. That way, they get the maintenance advantages of a high-level language without paying the speed penalty.

Also, many people don't realize just how much faster computers are now than they were 10 years ago. As part of the prototyping for my startup, I wrote a couple games in JavaScript, which is roughly 1000 times slower than C. They were generally quite playable, except on Firefox/X-windows where an odd Canvas bug seems to be adding a lot of latency without pegging the CPU. I'd still use Flash if I were doing a production game (JavaScript's timing is inconsistent, with occasional long pauses presumably for garbage collection), but as long as you stick to 2D it's quite feasible to do games entirely in interpreted languages.

Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#19

Post by jcromartie »

xirium wrote: post #4

Firstly, skip all of the low-level, platform-specific details and learn JavaScript. This will give you all of the colours and performance that you require for sprite based games. I've seen a very good version of OutRun done in JavaScript. A 2D platformer can definitely be implemented. Also, if you implement in JavaScript then you'll also get a wide audience for your work without requiring anyone to install anything.…

I would say that JavaScript is not exactly the best language to learn for creating games. Aside from the Canvas tag there is no good way to do graphics with JavaScript (at least no simple way that isn't a bunch of arcane HTML tricks which wouldn't make any sense to a beginner).

And, if you're using the Canvas tag you're excluding IE users. If you're only going to reach a limited audience anyway, why not use Flash and reach a much bigger limited audience?

On the other hand, I guess Canvas teaches you about drawing to buffers, while Flash teaches you about more abstract things.

Re: What could have been a good career in game development

#20

Post by whacked_new »

pistoriusp wrote: post #6
dhouston wrote: post #2

wow, time warp. (i think it was int 10h though, for the video bios, and you had to poke around different ports to change the vga palette :)) things have, um, changed significantly -- nowadays libraries like directx abstract away the details of direct hardware access and handle graphics, sound, input, timers, etc. if you're just looking to play around with games, pygame is perfect for you -- http://www.pygame.org . if…

I completely agree with you but I would rather recommend Pyglet ( http://www.pyglet.org/ ) than pygame.

pygame obviously has better coverage (10-to-1 hits on google)... this is the first time I saw pyglet. What's better about it?
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