Quote:Original post by Excors
A correction from a long way back in this thread (I hope I didn't miss any responses to it in the past few pages):

Quote:Original post by Emmanuel Deloget
(BTW AOE3 was not written in C# - its game logic used C# as a scripting tool. I'm unable to find the source, but I remember having seen that on either sweng-gamedev or gdalgo mainling lists).

As far as I'm aware, which I like to believe is reasonably far in this case (from having poked around rather a lot in the AOM/AOE3 engine [both are basically the same except for the graphics]), there is no C# anywhere on the client side.

It has a custom scripting language called XS, which looks a bit like C, for doing a few things - mostly random map scripts, AI, and triggers in scenarios (hidden behind a graphical editor). The game logic is all in the engine, in C++ - the game is data-driven as opposed to script-driven, with units being defined in XML files and given long lists of properties and types and flags which activate bits of logic in the engine.

The .exe is full of hundreds of strings like "HCShipCrossbowmen2German" and "FortFrontier" (and "Age 2 Anubis" - I guess they forgot to remove all the AOM-specific code). The data-driven design does let them tweak a unit's stats without recompiling, but it seems to have failed at allowing much more than that...


I wouldn't be surprised if they used C# for the server-side multiplayer system, though. (AOM used ASP.NET and lots of SOAP via zone.msn.com, though I'm not sure what language(s); but I believe that was all rewritten for AOE3). That's possibly a more interesting place to use C#, since the issues of portability and deployment and GC pauses and general performance don't matter so much, while productivity and security and reliability and reducing memory leaks do matter more.