IDE's used in game development

When I was doing PS2 dev we used Codewarrior.
XB360 and PS3 dev has all been VS2005.
I hear that Wii dev uses Codewarrior as well.

In short; afaik VS is basically the dominate IDE used in professional dev. in the C++ world and given how much better it is than any of the IDEs you listed in that area that really isn't surprising.

Also, the SDKs from MS and Sony intergrate directly with the ide which makes life easier.

If you're doing Windows, or Xbox Visual Studio.
If you're doing Playstation 3, probably Visual Studio (but not necessarily).
For most other consoles, CodeWarrior.
For Mac OS X/iPhone, XCode.
For Linux...something that doesn't destroy your make/automake files, I guess?

Check out Code::Blocks. It is open source and runs on a lot of platforms. Nice thing is it is really easy to point it to use different compilers. For instance I have a project setup on a PC running windows using the VC 9 compiler, on linux it uses gcc.

It also has a lot of settings, like eclipse for auto-formatting etc..

Quote:

Original post by phantom Also, the SDKs from MS and Sony intergrate directly with the ide which makes life easier.

That seems odd to me that Sony would write tools that plug right in to Visual Studio with MS being their competition and all.

Thanks for the replies. I can work with Visual Studio that is no problem, but I'm looking for an alternative that works on linux.

What's the 2nd best?

Quote:

caseyd Nice thing is it is really easy to point it to use different compilers. For instance I have a project setup on a PC running windows using the VC 9 compiler, on linux it uses gcc.

What caseyd said, I would really like that.

I think I just might have to download them all and see what feels most intuitive.

[Edited by - Dolf on April 5, 2009 3:32:57 AM]

You guys used CodeWarrior as an actual IDE? My work found it a little hard to work with, so at work we use Visual Studio the whole time, but have the build process set up to create the elf, and whatever else, then we use CodeWarrior, Radix, etc, to run it on the hardware. It does work fairly well, since most of the time we don't have to fight with a particular IDE version, it's just VS the whole time.

Quote:

Original post by Endar You guys used CodeWarrior as an actual IDE?

Yes, we did... so much hate for that IDE [sad]

That said, the PS3 debugger makes me want to go face stabby on people at times, as does the insanity I discovered last week around filenames on the PS3... *grumbles*

I'm quite a fan of insanity, and my company is just getting our PS3 tech up and off the ground. Is this something you can mention without making Sony want to go stabby all over you (read: break an NDA)?

Quote:

Original post by stupid_programmer Quote: Original post by phantom Also, the SDKs from MS and Sony intergrate directly with the ide which makes life easier. That seems odd to me that Sony would write tools that plug right in to Visual Studio with MS being their competition and all.

Not really, it'd be a bit childish and odd of them not to, kinda like if Xbox 360 didn't work or wasn't tested on Sony TV's because they're competitors in a different space.

Sony care about developers making games for PS3 and will do what they can to make that easier (...more games or higher quality). A small part of that includes supplying development tools that integrate with the IDE and run on the OS that most of their [external] registered developers use. People aren't making PC or Xbox games with those tools, they're making PS3 games with them, no loss for Sony...

There is also a historical reason for the support, Sony bought SN-Systems (http://www.snsys.com). SN made development tools (notably ProDG) for many console platforms over the years, including PS1, PS2, PSP & PS3 (, N64, GameCube,...). ProDG VSI (Visual Studio Integration) existed long before Sony bought the company. The compiler and other parts of the integration are only a small part of the PS3 tool set provided by SN, the rest of the tools (target manager, debugger, profiler, etc) exist as standalone tools.

Quote:

Original post by S1CA Not really, it'd be a bit childish and odd of them not to, kinda like if Xbox 360 didn't work or wasn't tested on Sony TV's because they're competitors in a different space. Sony care about developers making games for PS3 and will do what they can to make that easier (...more games or higher quality). A small part of that includes supplying development tools that integrate with the IDE and run on the OS that most of their [external] registered developers use. People aren't making PC or Xbox games with those tools, they're making PS3 games with them, no loss for Sony... There is also a historical reason for the support, Sony bought SN-Systems (http://www.snsys.com). SN made development tools (notably ProDG) for many console platforms over the years, including PS1, PS2, PSP & PS3 (, N64, GameCube,...). ProDG VSI (Visual Studio Integration) existed long before Sony bought the company. The compiler and other parts of the integration are only a small part of the PS3 tool set provided by SN, the rest of the tools (target manager, debugger, profiler, etc) exist as standalone tools.

I guess it does make sense to use the IDE that most of the rest of the world uses and is familiar with.

Also, the Ps3 msvc integration tools are pretty poor. Unless there is something somewhere I'm not aware of, the 'integration' is as basic as MSVC being able to launch the ps3 compiler, and msvc being able to launch sonys crappy debugger. Effectively the 'integration' leaves msvc as simply an editor and a means to maintain a project. Useful but still not as ideal as if they had it use the entire debugging pipeline in msvc.

Quote:

Original post by stupid_programmer Quote: Original post by phantom Also, the SDKs from MS and Sony intergrate directly with the ide which makes life easier. That seems odd to me that Sony would write tools that plug right in to Visual Studio with MS being their competition and all.

Not really, Sony doesn't compete with Microsoft when it comes to IDEs and since MSVS is one of the most popular IDEs in the industry it makes sense to support it properly.

Quote:

Original post by Dolf I used to be a visual studio user and I quite liked the IDE. Now my pc is running Ubuntu and I would like to know what other IDE's are used by professional game developers?

Who cares what professionals use? IDEs are generally not all that different, so if you know how to use one, picking up another is not too difficult. Most professionals don't develop on Linux either, but that doesn't mean hobbyists can't. Also, as the replies show, professionals often must use tools they hate (CodeWarrior) for external reasons. The nice thing about hobbyist development is that we can choose the tools we like.

Quote:

Original post by Dolf After some research these seemed pretty viable options to me: Eclipse, Netbeans and Code::Blocks.

Code::Blocks is most like Visual Studio, so that will probably be a comfortable fit. Eclipse and Netbeans both support a lot more languages and are very powerful. Both are also primarily geared for Java, but support other languages as well. I like Eclipse a little better personally. Back when I used Ubuntu, the version of Eclipse in the repositories was ridiculously outdated, so be sure to check for that and install it direct from the site if need be.

Quote:

Original post by Dolf I also want to know how to turn VIM into an IDE with some sort of intelli-sense, but I guess that's more of a linux question instead of a game programming one.

I heard of one called Omni that supports a few languages like C++, but I don't think many vim users use. I just drop into cscope when I need to look something up.

Quote:

Original post by DrEvil Also, the Ps3 msvc integration tools are pretty poor. Unless there is something somewhere I'm not aware of, the 'integration' is as basic as MSVC being able to launch the ps3 compiler, and msvc being able to launch sonys crappy debugger. Effectively the 'integration' leaves msvc as simply an editor and a means to maintain a project. Useful but still not as ideal as if they had it use the entire debugging pipeline in msvc.

Yep. There are a few other things like the breakpoint support, the project wizard, SN-DBS integration, etc.

In terms of functionality rather than niceness of UI and ease of use, there are a few things the Pro-DG debugger can do that I wish were possible in the MSVS debugger.

As an aside I've always wondered whether the default ProDG key mappings were deliberate [smile]

Quote:

Original post by DrEvil Also, the Ps3 msvc integration tools are pretty poor. Unless there is something somewhere I'm not aware of, the 'integration' is as basic as MSVC being able to launch the ps3 compiler, and msvc being able to launch sonys crappy debugger. Effectively the 'integration' leaves msvc as simply an editor and a means to maintain a project. Useful but still not as ideal as if they had it use the entire debugging pipeline in msvc.

I heard that Sony deliberately make the PS3 hard to develop for: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10173656-17.htm

make the bastards earn their money ;)

For PC and XBox Visual Studio is spot on, integrated development and debugging.

For PS2/3/P you can use Visual Studio as your development IDE but for debugging you need to use ProDG.

For Wii/DS you get CodeWarrior, and like other people have said in here, its not nearly as nice to use as Visual Studio. It does give you an integrated debugger similar to Visual Studio but nothing works quite as slick. They did release Radix for Wii development in order to try and update it but it lacked so much functionality that CodeWarrior already had it was scrapped and CodeWarrior went back to being the standard IDE.

Quote:

Original post by Endar You guys used CodeWarrior as an actual IDE? My work found it a little hard to work with, so at work we use Visual Studio the whole time, but have the build process set up to create the elf, and whatever else, then we use CodeWarrior, Radix, etc, to run it on the hardware. It does work fairly well, since most of the time we don't have to fight with a particular IDE version, it's just VS the whole time.

Yes, CodeWarrior is used for DS, DSi and Wii development.

And I have so much hate for it that I can't really express it in mere words. The Wii version is better, but still has all sorts of annoying bugs (Including the "Hey, let's randomly change one of the project settings for no reason and cause Steve hours of headache trying to find out 1. why the code doesn't work any more and 2. what setting was changed" bug).

I can vouch for Eclipse and NetBeans on Ubuntu, both work really well and are quite fast. Don't know what professionals use (Visual Studio would have been my guess before reading this thread), but one thing you do not want to do is use vi, vim, pico, jed, emacs, or any other text editor pretending to be an IDE. Use the best IDE you can get for the language and target platform you are developing for. Syntax highlighting, context API lookup, auto-completion, refactoring, compilation workflow, visual forms editors, project explorers, code outlines, collapsible code blocks, task management, version control integration, easy navigation among multiple source files, automatic code generation, code formatting and cleanup - using a specific IDE has many advantages.

I've only used QtCreator on windows, but so far it seems great. The debugger(launching gdb) is slower than visual studio, but so far the transition seems to be relatively smooth.