Is that the case? and if it is, why are they the best for the job they do?
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Anonymous2010-07-13 0:03
Wrong. Xbox 360 has official support for C/C++ and C#, but the games can really be written in any language. The Xbox 360 OS is written in C/C++. I have no idea about PlayStation 3 as I've never written a game on it.
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Anonymous2010-07-13 0:14
i dunno, i know Xbox 360 has that XNA thing for C# but i geuss anything can be written in anything for anything.
C# is very rare for console games, but XNA is a newbie friendly API compared to others, so it's well-known. By no means should that be taken that it's a major platform, it's just a possible platform.
Most games are written in C++, due to it being high-level enough to build complex abstractions and low-level enough for C-like optimizations. It's not really the best language for the job, but it's one proven to work fine for their tasks. If you were an experienced programmer knowing many languages and understanding the issues you'll be facing, you'll probably be fine with whatever you picked, providing you can tweak the compiler, libraries, possible gc or anything else you might need to solve what performance/optimization problems lie ahead of you, if you choose a higher-level language.
As with most such questions, I would give the traditional /prog/ solution to your problems: Read SICP, learn enough languages, libraries and platforms, algorithms, and most importantly, reasoning skills. If you understand general-purpose programming, you can understand game programming. Trying to specialize too early can be your downfall.
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Anonymous2010-07-13 0:51
Garbage-collected languages like C# are undesirable for games because they introduce unpredictability into what is essentially a real-time system. They have however been successfully used as scripting environments at least as far back as the original Playstation.
Jamie Fristrom has written about some of the problems they went through developing Schizoid (the first Xbox 360 Live Arcade game wholly developed with XNA Game Studio).
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Anonymous2010-07-13 1:05
>>4 Trying to specialize too early can be your downfall.
I always think of this when I hear of "Game Development" courses to make myself feel better for doing Computer Science. Specifically, can you elaborate on why specialization is bad in this instance to sooth my cognitive dissonance?
>>10
A good lot of gameboy/color/advance were written fully or partially in ASM.
I expect the parctice still continues today even for normal games where optimizations are still required. Truly high-performance applications have functions which are a bottlenecks/called very often, come with asm variants (see x264 for a typical example). One provides a slow, but portable function and then one does platform-specific optimizations where general ones cannot be done.
>>6
Games development courses I've seen are a joke.
They don't teach you a good amount about data structures, algorythms, optimisation and shit.
They cater to the lowest common denominator of "I PLAY HALO ALL DAY ThEREFORE I WILL BECOME EPIC WORLD FAMOUS GAMES PROGRAMMER" and several of the ones I've seen have even taught C# or Java as the main language.
I find it hard to believe any serious game developers would hire anyone with these degrees, and the only people I've ever seen working in games development have all had real CS degrees.
"I PLAY HALO ALL DAY ThEREFORE I WILL BECOME EPIC WORLD FAMOUS GAMES PROGRAMMER"
It's amazing how widespread that belief is, when, in general, they can't name any WORLD FAMOUS GAMES PROGRAMMERS themselves