Re: My thoughts on C# and gaming.

On 18 February 2010 19:18, Jon Watte <[email protected]> wrote:

> Are you going to tell me Naughty Dog they are idiots for using Lisp?
>
>
> Actually, they themselves have publicly doubted the sanity of doing that...
> Especially when they were in the situation of only one guy being able to
> maintain the runtime environment/compiler.
>

Doh!  http://www.gifbin.com/983925

Well, to be fair, it was good

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naughty_dogs_jak_and_.php?page=2

and bad

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naughty_dogs_jak_and_.php?page=3

and I believe they are still using it in Uncharted. So if they are, it can't
be that bad.

I think the point is that the risk-reward ratio for GOAL on J&D was very
high, but it paid off. But it paid off because they had a brilliant Lisp
programmer; their domain specific knowledge was limited in personnel, but
broad and deep.


> Nice thing with C# is that there are many, many people maintaining
> frameworks, compiler, runtime environments and debugging tools. For Lua, the
> number is less, but still sufficient. Not-so-nice thing about C# is that
> most maintainers don't have low-latency real-time applications foremost in
> their minds.
>

The language interoperability of the CLR is appealing, but marshalling speed
is a concern. C# is also becoming interesting because its syntax is evolving
sugar to perform popular functions, like LINQ. It would interesting to see
Lua develop such syntax extensions to perform things like AI, e.g. state
machines. Given that it has a symbol filter and this is possible I'm
surprised it hasn't been more widely used. Or perhaps it has and I'm out of
touch.

I expect Javascript (not a million miles from Lua) will become popular as
the HTML5 Canvas matures.

Nick




>
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Nick Trout <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 12 February 2010 01:42, Brandon Van Every <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> So to reference the original chain of thought in this thread, you're
>>> saying that those 10 guys all know **C#**, so that's why you're gonna
>>> use it to script?  Didn't we just get done establishing that C# is not
>>> so popular in the game industry?  You have 10 "tools guys" lying
>>> around that used to do biz apps or something?  Meanwhile, Lua is the
>>> dominant scripting language of the game industry by a wide margin.
>>>
>>> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkDeLoura/20090302/581/The_Engine_Survey_General_results.php
>>>  Seems to me this whole "waste of money" idea is a strawman.  Unless
>>> your studio really does just churn out C# titles all day long.
>>>
>>
>> What's popularity got to do with it? How are you going to innovate if you
>> follow the herd? 10 years ago noone had heard of Lua. Are you going to tell
>> me Naughty Dog they are idiots for using Lisp?
>>
>> I think the fact that EA might have 10 engineers with jointly, maybe 20-40
>> years of C# experience probably has a big effect on the decision. There are
>> lots more C# fanbois than Lua fanbois (although I'm not saying this is the
>> case here). If you have a lot of domain specific knowledge, why would you
>> disregard that and start with nothing?
>>
>> If we followed your logic we should all be writing games in Java.
>>
>> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
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