I'm fairly familiar with higher level programming languages, and have enjoyed using them throughout the years. My knowledge and planning for the fine-tuning of a game, or rather the engine itself, is what I would consider on a fairly high level of understanding. Below of the requirements of the engine that I'm going to be writing.
- OpenGL rendering engine.
- 3D Voxel based game-engine.
- In-house physics system, will be fairly simple. (Think Minecraft)
- Stable FPS under decent loads.
- Cross-platform compilation.
Obviously when it comes down to FPS there are a lot of factors, not only that will depend on myself, being the developer of the engine, but how much is being handled by the engine at the same time, as well as small rendering optimizations, graphical quality, etc.
However, my concern is more with the programming language's capability and performance when it comes to OpenGL. The following are my two favorite programming languages:
- Java
- C#
I understand that these are higher level languages, and will lose a little performance over using something like say, C++. There are plenty of libraries for both of the languages listed above that involve using OpenGL, such as:
- LWJGL
- jOGL
- SharpGL
- OpenTK
- etc..
I'm far more comfortable with Java than I am with C++ mainly because I over-all enjoy the way programs are written. Some people argue that they're not much different from each-other, but I can argue with them until I'm blue in the face. The end-result is for a miniature application similar to that of the game Trove to be created, and run at a stable frame-rate. Obviously, as said before, this will be highly dependent on myself, but I'm more curious about the graphical limitations of the languages.
I will be using Mono for C# cross-platform development, if I go that route.
Please recall that I am not using any pre-made game engines and will be writing my own, as this is a personal project I have interest in.
