Using Open Source Software

[John Smith]

I was wondering if you taught about using Torque 3D for the game engine http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d and Blender for creating models and animation. Plus Krita for http://krita.org/ drawing and Audacity for recording

Right now you have enough money to add linux and mac support to Torque 3D.

[Gallaecio]

The game uses its own engine, specifically build for this type of game. I don’t think moving to a different engine would be such a good idea, it would take a lot of time, and might not be the best performance wise.

Regarding the tools to create artwork and souds, as far as I know contributors are free to use those, and I believe at least some of the artists are doing so already.

[Lion.Kanzen]

That is make the game again. XD other 8 years

[Nolanjoker]

very bad idea.

[John Smith]

Then how about converting the game code to python to make it easier to program?

[FLHerne]

Then how about converting the game code to python to make it easier to program?

That's...an even worse idea.

It has all the previously-described downsides of abandoning years of work and restarting from scratch, unlike your previous idea doesn't even have the merit of using some pre-existing work, and then you want to do it in an interpreted language? Imagine the JS problems, but magnified enormously and affecting the entire game, with no possibility of reaching native performance even if done well.

Reality (or knowledge) check urgently needed...

Too harsh, maybe?

[sanderd17]

There is no performance problem with the languages. There is a problem with the algorithms we use though. Some of the algorithms (like the short range pathfinder) were just implemented to get the game to work. But now they have to be improved because it's a real performance problem.

Switching to a different language would just cause us to re-implement and re-design all algorithms (also those that work well). And switching the engine to something like the Torque engine would also require us to implement lots of algorithms (those engines don't have pathfinding f.e.).

[RedFox]

Hello John.

I understand that projects written in C++ seem a bit over the top for hobbyist programmers or CS undergraduates at first. However, C++ is a perfectly productive language if you know it through and through. It's true that it's harder to master than any other language out there, but the performance it offers is something you can't really compare against with scripted or GC based languages.

I've worked on several game projects in the past few years and in every case we wished we would have used C++, because GC based languages such as Java or C# would cause GC cleanup spikes that really killed the performance. Using script-based languages such as AS3 was even worse, because it's anywhere around 100 times slower than C++, meaning we put insane amounts of optimizations into the 3D engine. In the end we spent months of optimizations on something you can get straight out of the box with C++ and OpenGL.

If you want to make all the same mistakes senior developers have already done, go right ahead and try to write a huge game like this in Python. There's a reason no AAA game is programmed in Java, C# or god forbid Python.

P.S. - Torque is Windows only and written in C++.