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Hypothetical Problem

Sine Nomine · 2013-02-27T13:40:23

Ok so I have this purely hypothetical problem and I would like some professional opinions on it. Basically I, oh - of course I mean a friend of mine. Is part of group of independent developers who are working on a new game, it has been recently released and now they are wanting to make it multiplayer. This involves a great many changes, as majority of the program was not built with multiplayer in mind. The current medium is C++, with much in script files. The current plan is to start the server section in C# on reasoning of "It's really simple actually, rapid development while not sacrificing any speed/power". Now my friend thinks this is a terrible idea, simply because a lot of the code the server and client uses will be the same, or similar variations. Which means we will have some mixture of cross language interfaces, code rewriting and code duplication all of which should be avoided where not necessary. I have no issue C# as a language, if we were starting again its perfectly valid choice, but the fact is we have a lot already done, a majority of which only needs adapting not completely rewritten. So I come to gamedev to hopefully get some professional objective opinions. Thanks, P.s. I put this in "General programming", as it although pertains to a game, the problem is not specific to games. Feel free to move it. Edit: I must make clear that I know it could work, i don't dispute its perfectly possible, - its more why do that why? I think there is obvious hindrance and no actual benefit.

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by SineNomine February 22, 2013 05:58 PM

12 comments, last by abeylin 11 years, 1 month ago

SineNomine

104

Author

February 22, 2013 11:35 PM

Oh I know, I also know no matter how bad I can anticipate it will be, it will still be worse.

Some parts have been built with eventual multi-player in mind, basically strong boundaries between user interaction and the actual responses. But still, i know nightmare ensues.
If it helps, assume we have an abundance of time.

What I am looking to do is reduce the nightmare as much I can.

swiftcoder

18,997

February 23, 2013 02:15 AM

What I am looking to do is reduce the nightmare as much I can.

In that case, my $0.2 is that implementing servers in C++ is a bigger nightmare than you imagine ;)

Tristam MacDonald. Ex-BigTech Software Engineer. Future farmer. [https://trist.am]

King Mir

2,506

February 23, 2013 02:31 AM

Oh I know, I also know no matter how bad I can anticipate it will be, it will still be worse.

Some parts have been built with eventual multi-player in mind, basically strong boundaries between user interaction and the actual responses. But still, i know nightmare ensues.
If it helps, assume we have an abundance of time.

What I am looking to do is reduce the nightmare as much I can.

Actually, this does point to a particular problem with switching languages for the back end: if you're going to be moving old code to server, then if would help if you don't have to translate it to a different language.

abeylin

304

February 27, 2013 01:40 PM

C# makes a lot of things simple.

I doubt you'd have a significant portion of code that is going to be shared if you do client and server in C++, so I would say rewriting few classes in order to use C# will overall speed up development time.

I'd vote against C# on basis of how you cannot control when GC happens, and how it ties your server to windows, but that's not the question you're asking.

http://www.mildspring.com - developing android games

Hypothetical Problem

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