Home Forums General Discussion Which is the easiest to program for?

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    • #2794
      Jamie Mc
      Keymaster

      Aphra, can you move this to the Game Development forum? I posted it to the wrong one

    • #9294
      Aphra K
      Keymaster

      I can move it but perhaps it is better here as all the sections in game development at the moment are platform specific…

      where do you suggest?

      Aphra.

    • #9297
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      My motivation for selecting GBA:

      1) every GBA is the same, no different hardware to cater for
      2) you can download the entire development environment in one zip file
      3) it is very well documented, and the architecture is very well thought out

      4) arm assembly is soooo much nicer the x86 (althought it’s not neccesary to know either)

    • #9298
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      and everyone that votes PS2 should be shot ;-)

      what a horrible machine to develop for, but what a challenge as well ;-)

      I really should invest some quality time with my ps2 linux kit ;-(

    • #9334
      Anonymous
      Inactive
    • #9336
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      You mean that PC games can be ported easily to XBOX? :-)

      I’m not sure whether ps3 will be that much easier.. if it really is cell based, then there is a massive amount of parralel programming going on, which only makes things harder..

      just imagine having one cpu for collision detection, one for physiscs, one for IA, one for triangle submission, and one for the actual rasterisation..

      The management would be a nightmare :-)

      Willem

    • #9337
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      According to this month’s EDGE magazine, (the Half-Life 2 issue) the Playstation 3 will be even more difficult to program for than PS2 and this is partly deliberate. Apparently Sony don’t want developers without a certain level of skill and talent creating content for their new hardware. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

    • #9339
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Ah right, thats where i read that!

      I really don’t understand the logical reasoning behind that

      Why would you want to make it hard to be able to get good results??

      I’d think that it’d be much better for sales and games, if it was easy to get great graphics out te system, so they can focus on making good gameplay!

      Ah well, who knows what goes on in their minds ;-)

    • #9341
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      You mean that PC games can be ported easily to XBOX? :-)
      [/quote:d8f909360f]

      Yea I was half a sleep when writing that :)

    • #9350
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Easiest to program is probably the wrong way of putting it !

      Size (like all things in life!), support docs/SDKs and closeness to the hardware are good indicators of how difficult it will be to program a particular game system.

      The other factor is time. For commercial programming, you never have enough ! plus your programming experience. General programming principles apply to all software programs – most full time game programmers specialise in a core area (gfx, ai, online,physics) over time

      BM

      where is the makeGame() method ?

    • #9351
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Thats another reason why the GBA clearly is the easiest to prgram for :-)

      Good documentation, and a single programmer can achieve considerable results in a relatively short time

      There is no need to specialise in a certain area of the GBA, you can be an expert in all (thought REALLY mastering sound and multiplayer does take time)

      Willem

    • #9368
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      According to this month’s EDGE magazine, (the Half-Life 2 issue) the Playstation 3 will be even more difficult to program for than PS2 and this is partly deliberate. Apparently Sony don’t want developers without a certain level of skill and talent creating content for their new hardware. Hmmmmmmmmmm. [/quote:381fa6e1a0]

      Yeah I saw that quote too, but it really makes no sense to me. No one intentionally makes a platform difficult to develop for – that’s a huge risk to take considering all the millions of dollars it takes to get a consumer electronics device like a console all the way from design to the retailers on the high street. So I don’t buy that misguided quote in Edge too much… If the PS3 is a pain in the arse to develop for, it will be because Sony chose another wacky architecture that most vanilla games coders won’t be able to figure out for years, and coz Sony won’t have the time to put together decent examples and docs.

      I voted for Java mobiles – with a caveat. Learning Java and the MIDP spec is fairly easily – the MIDP 1.0 spec is very small, as is the CLDC spec. However in practise, taking a product and supporting dozens of devices, in lots of languages, and taking into account devices-specific implementation bugs, ropey VMs, memory fragmentation erros, API bugs, device limitations and quirks… its an awful lot of work (just laborious – not especially difficult).

      In all honesty, I’d probably say Xbox is the easiest.

    • #9371
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      I heard somthing about a quote like that a while back.
      I think the gist of it was that Sony are hardware developers. They make shit-hot hardware. They don’t care too much about how hard it is for you to develop for it as long as you can do it. If they were primarily software developers things would be different, but they’re not, they are hardware manufacturers first that foremost. They’re hardware works and works well assuming you know how to use it.

      Damian.

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