Game Itch
I have an itch to program on my Mac at home. Something in a game kind of way.
ObjectiveC and XCode are right out the window. If I wanted to program with technology that felt 5 – 8 years old I would stick with C++ on Visual Studio 6 on Windows 98. Thanks, but no thanks… the Interface Builder rocks. Totally rocks. But XCode itself makes it pretty plain to me that Apple doesn’t love its developers—mayhap they even hate their developers. C’mon Apple: go find out how to make a real IDE and give us something useful! And, BTW, don’t make developers use a language that doesn’t have namespaces for God’s sake: don’t make me preface all of my type names with DRH and make me feel like I’m still using Emacs (Escape Meta Alt Control Shift) and gcc. Sheesh!
There’s always Ruby using TextMate. That’s a little painful though: I find myself posessing a rotted mind and missing my little auto-generated code and my Intellisense. I’m not proficient in Ruby enough to get the OpenGL bindings or, even, the FXRuby bindings to work. They don’t quite compile on the Mac… and many of the pages I find about RubySDL are in Japanese.
There’s also Python, of course… after all, Google uses Python... and I like the language. I even downloaded some Python game libraries that allow some pretty cool stuff with not much code. The pyGame library offers exactly what I’d want for a game programming library: reasonably fast, very productive, straightforward and well-documented with tons of examples. Fantastic! Definite possibilities here… except for my unfamiliarity with the language which would quickly be solved by starting a home project. Hrm.
But what about proce55ing, which Sean is totally obsessed with these days (his fertilization simulation efforts are coming along nicely)? I think I’ll have to put this one a distant third for now… something about the format doesn’t quite click with me… although the easy conversion of all your work to an applet is pretty frickin’ cool.
Of course, I could totally just put my old PC back together and make a managed DirectX game… what’s this I hear about DirectX 10 not being backward compatible? Whoa.
So how ‘bout Java with a little JOGL on the side? Then I get to use Eclipse which wouldn’t be so bad… but, I don’t know, Java?
Then there’s Mono alongside some incarnation of Tao to handle graphics… but what IDE to use? Ah, yes… what about fucking Monodevelop which has earned the dubious honor of being the hardest program I’ve ever tried to compile (including the Linux kernel!). Fink has been faithfully plugging away trying to update my GTK# libraries for the past three hour so I can even, maybe, possibly think about compiling Monodevelop myself. Blech.
But, all in all, it’s kind of fun.
December 6th, 2005 at 4:52 am
That link about DX10 is some of the worst reporting I ever read.
Yes DX10 isn’t backwrds compatible, but vista ships with DX9 that is so all the games will work and your managed directx code will continue to work too. Its not through any kind of emulation, nor will there be any kind of slow down. Watch the PDC talks on msdn about Direct3d if you want the full scoop.
December 6th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
Proce55ing is neat for a number of reasons, like the IDE is self-contained and you don’t have to worry about build files or project management issues. It also always starts you off in “Sketch” mode, which is how I think when I’m doing artsy stuff- I’m going to experiment and prototype and I intend to have lots of throw-aways. Sketch Mode doesn’t force me to commit to names for evertyhing or even a place to store files on disk. Just load and code.
That said, I would recommend first deciding what kind of game you want to write. That will guide your decisions regarding the most appropriate implementation language/platform.
On the other hand if you just want to experiment with new languages/api’s with the primary goal of becoming more proficient or broadening your horizons I say do lots of little projects in each one of these languages.
p.s. fuck objective-c.