Hot answers tagged platform
29
XNA is a good solution for a fairly confident programmer. It would be a good goal to aim for in the future.
The Unreal Development Kit is a way to get results far more quickly and easily, and might be a good place to start. Comments have indicated that the UDK is actually a pretty bad alternative, so I can't recommend it.
Unity is an alternative, it will ...
25
What is wrong with the Linux/*nix
family for games?
'Wrong' is a strong word, but I'll list a few things that hold games developers back from working on Linux.
Culture - Linux people tend more to believe software should be free - this isn't conducive to making a profit off selling your software. This may change in the future with online games being ...
20
I'm also 15, so I guess that could help? :P
I've recently started learning Python (been doing C++ for a year or so), and I'm finding it much easier to learn than C++. There're a lot fewer pitfalls, and you need little code to get something on the screen - what I find makes you want to continue.
And there are wrappers like Pygame and Pyglet over SDL/OpenGL ...
15
For game clients, it mostly has to do with culture, leading to difficult monetization strategies.
Servers for multiplayer games, on the other hand, have gotten a lot of traction for linux/nix, it is a very attractive platform for developing server technology.
There is hope that eventual release of Steam for Linux will help change that culture when it ...
11
Okay, I hate to say it, but Delphi is effectively dead. I know, I know - it's depressing. Fear not, however: even better languages have evolved that have 99% of the advantages of Delphi, but are gasp still (REALLY) supported and enjoying widespread industry adoption. You're not doing your career any favors by sticking with Delphi. I worked with Delphi for ...
11
A bit of an unorthodox answer here:
Starcraft II Galaxy Editor.
You can make almost any game within Starcraft 2.
It also teaches most programming constructs like loops and if statements in a GUI-centric way.
Once he's confident with the basics, you can have him script stuff.
If he's good at it, and finds this interesting, he will love proper game ...
11
!Since Unity 4.x has been already released, and Android went through a lot of changes you should consider this answer as a reference and not state of the art since it might be outdated!
Sorry, but Ricket is wrong: Unity provides full access via API to the Android SDK, which is also required before working on Android Games with Unity:
Before you can run ...
10
This MSDN blog about why there isn't a 64 bit Visual Studio version addresses many of the issues that also affect games. The gist of it is that going to 64 bit may actually hurt performance in many cases because of the effect on the processor's cache (more data with 64 bits, but the same size cache).
The additional addressable memory could help, but few ...
9
I would roughly divide game development tools into three broad categories:
Easy to learn and use, but limited. Game Maker, Game Salad, RPG Maker, Adventure Game Studio all fall into this category.
Powerful, but with a steep learning curve. C++ and other "hardcore" programming languages fit here.
Intermediate languages, generally scripting languages like ...
9
A truly "open console" is an oxymoron. What consoles bring to the table, for developers and users, is a standardized platform - a fixed set of well-understood hardware and software. For developers this means less time testing and less worksforme bug reports. For users this means guaranteed compatibility and a base level of stability and quality.
What both ...
9
Game platform which have most users
That would probably be Web in general.
If I don't have an iphone/ipad or android phone, am I not able to make iphone/android game?
Consider using HTML5. That would simplify deployment. However you might still want to have a device(s) to test.
I am looking for a platform which I can easily distribute the game ...
9
You have to make this decision up front, before you start on any sort of development. Until you decide what language(s) and platform(s) to utilize, you can't actually do anything but concepting, design and preproduction.
That said, you may want to allow for future ports or expansion to factor in to your decision. If you want to port to multiple desktop ...
9
Platforming and Physics
These edge cases are numerous. Good fun platformers do not behave in any kind of physically-accurate manner, and the control and behavior that players expect after years of "perfect" platformers like Mario are incredibly difficult to implement with general techniques like you get with Box2D or other physics engines. Most good ...
8
There's nothing wrong with the Linux/*nix family of OSes for game development except for perceived audience. Most devs feel that the effort to create games for Linux won't translate into copies sold of their games, especially in the AAA communities.
Even several companies that just ported even AAA games to linux (didn't even pay the upfront cost of ...
8
I have little experience about this topic but by logic and knowledge I can give a few pointers that might be worth a few pennies.
First of all: those two markets are big, I mean really big, maybe, just maybe, too big for you. This is good as you have a large target audience, but the size already has attracted many many many (you are not the only one, no) ...
7
I know this will date me somewhat, but growing up I really enjoyed P-Robots. There's a really simple goal (beat the other robots), a simple API, and a short amount of time between changes to code and seeing the results. It segues into AI, design patterns, and even larger-scale code structure (some of these robots can get pretty big -- and what about ...
7
Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "ok, I'm going to download and play that"?
No. The logic of what you are suggesting is that people see simple games which are uninteresting, and then as they see progressively more complex games, they eventually think, "aha! This is complex enough for my interests - I shall ...
6
@Gajet's answer is impossible to follow (so I'm not even convinced it will work), and what I think @The Communist Duck meant his solution to be...
block_y = ground_y + random() % (previousBlock_y + playerJumpHeight)
...will be heavily biased towards creating blocks with y-values centered around ground_y + playerJumpHeight.
The easiest way to produce more ...
6
I'm currently using Flash to prototype a game for iOS and performance is decent. It's nowhere near the speed of a native implementation and is also slower than flash running on the desktop. But that's what has to be expected...
The term "commercial" doesn't indicate how much load your game will put on the CPU. Also "fast-moving" isn't a problem if your ...
6
I use Flash to build game prototypes, and you can get some great performance out of the packager, but you have to be aware of certain things. First off, it might be tempting to think that an iOS device is just a slower version of a PC. You might think that if you make your code run fast on a desktop, then it'll run decently on iOS. And nothing could be ...
5
I'm 15 as well and I have some programming experience in FB, C, C++, Python and JavaScript. My advice is to make web-based games, like the one I'm currently making: http://yannbane.blogspot.com/
Why? Well, first of all, JavaScript is a beautiful language that will teach him all of the basic concepts of programming and you actually can make a great, competent ...
5
Well they are completely different! The Android SDK lets you write Android apps from scratch in Java. Unity is a game creation package in which you drag-and-drop, add scripts, etc. and then hit a button to export a complete Android application.
Android SDK:
Write the app from scratch
Complete control over exactly what your game does and looks like; you ...
5
Those are a couple different questions you're asking here.
The single target platform with the most users is the PC. Even counting just gamers, the biggest MMO alone (Happy Farm) had more than 200 million players at its peak. Compare that to some 70 million sold iPhones (all models, as of end of 2010), 190 million sold Android devices (as of end of October ...
5
Both. As a body moves, there is a volume that it covers over a period of time. Imagine taking a sphere that moves along a line over a small period of time. The shape that it will cover (or "sweep") over this time is a capsule.
When you run your simulation over a time step, calculate these volumes and use those in your intersection testing. This will also ...
5
There is an excellent article here about this subject:
http://www.koonsolo.com/news/dewitters-gameloop/
Normally I update my game in the same way for every update call. I have the speed at which things happen measured in terms of game loops elapsed (if you choose to update your game the same number of times per second you can still measure speed of things ...
4
Pros of using the Web as a platform:
Instant accessible distribution channel: You can easily give the URL of your game to anyone to play it.
Low entry barrier: The tools available are free or available at a low cost, and you don't need a license to develop on the web. Just a server and a domain.
Cons:
Perception of "Cheap" games: the low entry barrier ...
4
This question isn't really answerable since the ultimate answer depends on so many different variables that are specific to your needs. How many total users are you expecting to support simultaneously, how many users per server are you expecting, how much bandwidth per user do you want, what kind of development environment are your developers familiar with, ...
4
Linux gaming is a largely untapped market, in my opinion, especially for indies. If you look at the numbers as reported by Hemisphere Games for Osmos and the numbers reported by Wolfire Games for the Humble Indie Bundle (especially the total revenue for each platform), you can see that Linux users can be pretty eager to support those who support Linux.
4
Mindstorms Roboter are really cool. We got some NXT's in school, and last week we started with programming things like follow a line, and that stuff. You can get easily results.
Also i found www.3dgamestudio.de a while ago. I didn't got more into it, but it was really interesting. You can programm with lite-C which is:
Lite-C is a programming language ...
4
I strongly suspect that there's simply no market for it. (Except for a small number of geeks/developers that would be attracted to any new and open hardware)
There's plenty of devices out there that can play games very well, many of which are open, or 'open enough' for indies. We can already develop for a wide variety of computers, phones, and tablets.
...
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