Quote:Original post by TTK-BanditMore sloppy with memory management and less focused on memory management. If your goal is writing a game, then a garbage collector allows you to focus more on writing a game and less on memory management, and thus you can be more focused on your goal.Quote:Good point, although I'd say this is also one of the things that confuses beginners the most. Having a garbage collector taking care of this for you not only simplifies many cases, but also helps you focus on the actual task at hand.
Yeah, but having a garbage collector doing all the work for you makes you work more sloppy and less focused.[...]
Game Design: Which Programming Language First?
yeah, go to hell with performance and stability, the gameplay makes up for it..
That's why a lot of games today require more cpu & ram than it should for the visuals you get for it.
That is in fact developing bad habits..
But meh, we're getting offtopic here.. Topic author has got to find out what way to take.
we can't decide for him.
That's why a lot of games today require more cpu & ram than it should for the visuals you get for it.
That is in fact developing bad habits..
But meh, we're getting offtopic here.. Topic author has got to find out what way to take.
we can't decide for him.
Surprisingly, I would point to javascript as an interesting alternative for first-timers:
- You already have an interpreter on your computer (your web browser).
- Firebug (a Firefox plugin) is an excellent debugging environment.
- You don't need complex install/setup/link steps for getting a graphics library on your computer.
- The language is sturdy enough that you can ignore 50% of programming difficulties (memory, scope, explicit types) until you're ready to handle them.
- When you're done playing with javascript (say, after one or two months of learning), you can move on to C++, C# or ActionScript (all three are reasonably close languages in terms of syntax and general semantics) based on what your initial feeling was about the language.</ul><br><br>While we're at it, I wrote <a href="http://nicollet.net/blog/php/75-tutorial">this small game programming tutorial</a> in javascript the other day.<br><br>I tend to consider C an interesting language to start <i>general</i> programming in. Not because it teaches you anything unique (all of the concepts, including manual memory management, are equally taught by many other programming languages that would be more adapted to learning how to program <i>games</i>, such as Python+PyGame), but rather because it defines a small set of semantic actions that are fairly consistent with each other, restrictive enough to avoid the "Too Much Freedom" one encounters with Lisp yet providing elementary functionality for getting elementary things done. I still consider C as the best language for learning array manipulation (although it's of course utterly useless for learning anything of a higher level than that).
Quote:Original post by TTK-BanditIf, by stability, you mean robustness to errors, my experience is that less complicated code is more stable, and that higher level languages generally result in less complicated code because the framework handles details so you don't have to.
yeah, go to hell with performance and stability[...]
As far as performance, I think more people would produce reasonably performant games if fewer people worried about performance. Time spent prematurely optimizing is time not spent on game development.
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