RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames?

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/23/2008 1:11:33 AM

Nemo121

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Is there any reason why, if you decided to go for C++, you couldn't go for Visual C++ ( which seems a little more accessible ).

It is always interesting to get a glimpse into programming. It is SOOO different than what I am used to dealing with for work.

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/23/2008 1:33:45 AM

Veldor

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

Is there any reason why, if you decided to go for C++, you couldn't go for Visual C++ ( which seems a little more accessible ).

It is always interesting to get a glimpse into programming. It is SOOO different than what I am used to dealing with for work.

Microsoft h8ers don't like Visual C++..

But towards another previous comment C# isn't really going to stay a MS only thing long. There are non-MS compilers and what-not that are well on thier way. Open Source versions and all that.

And why? Because at first everyone had to hate C# because MS invented it (Well some people working for MS anyway).. But in the end most gave in because it just is simply that much better. From a development perspective its not only about the power of the language, its about how fast you can code in it and how easily you can debug errors with it. Thats why the C# Developers are the smart ones. We all want better wargames and its about keeping up with the jones's. Less coding and debugging time means more time and money spent on the things we care more about.

Anyway why go with a half-baked non MS product just to save a couple bucks?

No real good reason unless your a MS h8er.

Well Billy G. finally quit Microsoft anyway so now is as good a time as any to love Microsoft...

Please, for me, cuz my MS stock needs a boost.

TIA...

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/23/2008 2:17:46 AM

Perturabo

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

Is there any reason why, if you decided to go for C++, you couldn't go for Visual C++ ( which seems a little more accessible ).

Well, it won't run on my computer.

As for MS...
I stopped buying their products after I had to activate Win XP by phone on my mother's computer by phone.

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Post #: 63

RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/23/2008 1:58:38 PM

Peter Fisla

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

Is there any reason why, if you decided to go for C++, you couldn't go for Visual C++ ( which seems a little more accessible ).

It is always interesting to get a glimpse into programming. It is SOOO different than what I am used to dealing with for work.

Well Microsoft tries to follow C++ standards but of course there will always be some differences but not that big that really need to seriously think about it - if we are talking about purely C++ language. If you decide to use MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) then you will need to do some work port your app to linux but it will not be a complete rewrite. I have been using Visual C++ since 1996 and I like it, I'm currently using Visual Studio Standard 2005 (you can still find out around for about ($150 or less). You don't need Visual Studio 2008 as the focus of the 2008 was for .NET development...

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/23/2008 6:03:17 PM

pad152

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Wikipedia is a great source for info

C
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C

C++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B

C# (C sharp)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C#

Object-oriented programing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

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Post #: 65

RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/24/2008 1:05:34 AM

Veldor

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Peter Fisla
Well Microsoft tries to follow C++ standards but of course there will always be some differences but not that big that really need to seriously think about it - if we are talking about purely C++ language. If you decide to use MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) then you will need to do some work port your app to linux but it will not be a complete rewrite. I have been using Visual C++ since 1996 and I like it, I'm currently using Visual Studio Standard 2005 (you can still find out around for about ($150 or less). You don't need Visual Studio 2008 as the focus of the 2008 was for .NET development...

I liked MFC at the time but now that they've done away with it in favor of Windows Forms and the like... Id probably avoid MFC altogether if I didn't already know it. Even knowing it I now really really dislike it compared to the new stuff.

I don't know why portability is such an issue especially for wargaming. Anyone out there is gonna have had to find a way to run windows games if they are even a half-serious gamer. Certainly no one else worries about it (Matrix or whomever) so why keep citing it as an issue with MS Dev Products? Thats really a rhetorical question though since I'm sure I'm in the silent minority on this particular issue.

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Post #: 66

RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/24/2008 1:27:40 AM

Nemo121

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Unless there's something massive I'm missing I'd agree with veldor. I know people who use emulators to run Windows wargames on their computers. It mightn't be ideal but for a turn-based, 2d game the overhead of the emulator is hardly crippling.

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Post #: 67

RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/28/2008 3:04:20 AM

mbatch729

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Figured I'd add a few comments too. Skip C++. The dangers of unmanaged code isn't worth the small, and decreasing, FPS (frames per second) you can get compared to C#. I'd encourage you to explore C#, but Python can be useful for various scripting tasks too.

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 7/28/2008 8:29:40 PM

Jeffrey H.

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quote:

ORIGINAL: pad152

Wikipedia is a great source for info

C
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C

C++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B

C# (C sharp)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C#

Object-oriented programing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

C# link was incorrect, this is a correct one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_%28programming_language%29

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Post #: 69

RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/29/2019 8:12:46 PM

RyanCrierie

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It's been ten years so let's revisit this with some information gleaned from looking at the EXE files:

Operational Art of War III: Microsoft Visual C++ (based upon text saying "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library")

War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition: Microsoft Visual C++ (based upon text saying "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library")

Forge of Freedom: A Microsoft Visual Studio language (based upon C:\Projects\ACWPlato\ForgeOfFreedom.pdb in the EXE)

Advanced Tactics Gold and the Decisive Campaigns games: Microsoft Visual Basic (based upon text that says "Microsoft.VisualBasic")

Panzer Corps: Microsoft Visual C++ (based upon text saying "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library")

Strategic Command: European Theater (2002) -- Microsoft Visual C++ (based upon text saying "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library")

Strategic Command: World at War -- Pascal with Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library (based upon seeing SDL.dlls in folder, and mention of "Pascal" in EXE)

SP Camo's Steel Panthers WW2 and Steel Panthers Main Battle Tank: Borland Delphi.

As for what was used and why:

Eddy Sterckx's comment about the best programming language for wargames being "The one which you are most familiar with," explains I think some of the choices -- the programmers used what they knew best.

As for this comment by Deride:

I highly recommend XNA Studio from Microsoft.

This is the new toolset from Microsoft that they are hoping to push for new developers. You can use these tools to write programs that run on PCs or XBox. If you build a nice enough game, you can buy the professional version that allows you to post your games to XBox Live - and even make money.

That didn't age well.

as Microsoft killed XNA back in 2013.

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/29/2019 8:24:39 PM

ncc1701e

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Let's complete your list.

Unity of Command: Python
Unity of Command 2: Python
Warplan: C# and Unity3d

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/29/2019 8:28:36 PM

RyanCrierie

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A lot of things have changed in the last ten years.

IN 2014; Microsoft made Visual Studio free for hobbyists with the Community Edition, and this has:

Visual C++
Visual C#
Visual Basic

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/29/2019 8:35:10 PM

RyanCrierie

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quote:

ORIGINAL: ncc1701e

Let's complete your list.

Unity of Command: Python
Unity of Command 2: Python

I had to check it and well, there it is:

https://unityofcommand.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=607

quote:

the game is entirely written in Python (http://python.org/). We use a few external libraries to put our platform together: cairo (http://cairographics.org/), pygame (pygame.org), etc.

Doing it in python means we were able to make it sweet and bug free (it's only 50k lines of code, including the editors) but at the same time there is some pain when we move it to a new OS as we need to compile our platform ourselves first - Mac was a bit of a headache for example.

quote:

Flatwater wrote:
Would you be willing to share which program you used to create the standalone Windows exe from your Python scripts?

Hi! No secrets there, we used py2exe on windows and pyinstaller on linux.

quote:

here's what we're doing. We use Python 2.7 and Pygame 1.7 (I think, not 100% sure, but whatever is on the build machine since ~2yrs ago).

We set up a a software surface using pygame, but do not use pygame for rendering, just for input. Instead we both blit and draw onto the pygame surface using cairo. This involves some ctypes magic to set up - email me and I'll send you the code if you want. To get the performance, we use a "dirty rect" type algorithm. This doesn't really help with full screen redraws (i.e. scrolling) but we don't do a lot of those anyway.

My "head in this direction" advice is: use SDL2 (via pySDL) and do your blitting on an OpenGL context. I don't think you need to make any OpenGL calls for that, just use the SDL2 primitives (Sprite etc). Don't be put off by the work-in-progress feel of SDL2/pySDL - e.g. you may need to get the latest version from their repos and compile everything yourself.

quote:

For the next game, we will be using cx-freeze, because unlike the other exe-builders, such as those used by UOC, it supports Python 3.3 (UoC actually uses Python 2.6) and builds for all three platforms nicely!

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/29/2019 10:39:26 PM

RyanCrierie

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Been searching around; and apparently for C#; since Microsoft killed XNA:

quote:

Unity is generally considered the XNA replacement for most as MonoGame is heavily bug-laden when trying to do some of the more advanced XNA stuff (Object instancing for example)

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/30/2019 9:03:59 AM

altipueri

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Presumably the Peter Fisla who posted ten posts up - was the Peter Fisla that programmed "Tigers on the Hunt" ?

:)

And does Perturabo who posted above that, still avoid Microsoft products?

Blimey, time flies

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/30/2019 7:35:14 PM

ncc1701e

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The problem is not only the programming language. This is the 2D or 3D engine that you want to use for graphics. The choice of your graphical engine may dictate your language.
Except if you want to develop your own engine of course...

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/30/2019 8:13:21 PM

RyanCrierie

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I've been thinking things over and I think the choices are:

Visual C++ with SDL: If you want to be sure that the core technologies behind your engine don't get abandoned. SDL saw a release (2.0.10) just a few months ago; and Visual C++ is kept up to date by Microsoft.

Downside is that C++ is tougher to learn and you spend more time dealing with memory allocation bugs than usual; since C++ doesn't have garbage handling.

Visual C# with Unity: If you want to develop a game in the next 2-3 years. Unity can be used for 2D or 3D games, and Unity itself is kept somewhat up to date. Plus, C# has garbage handling for memory, so you don't have to deal with that.

Downside is that the Developers of Unity can and have depreciated things (in 2005, Boo, C# and JavaScript were supported languages for Unity. They've depreciated support for Boo and JavaScript, leaving only C# by 2019.) So if you're planning on using it to make games 10 years down the road, YMMV.

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/30/2019 8:48:21 PM

RyanCrierie

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To elaborate further on this:

Eddy Sterckx's comment about the best programming language for wargames being "The one which you are most familiar with," explains I think some of the choices -- the programmers used what they knew best.

Look at WITP:AE and TOAW III.

The game engines used by both go have a lot of heritage:

WITP:AE's engine goes back to the original WITP (2004) which in turn goes back to Uncommon Valor (2002), and in turn all the way back to 1999's Talonsoft's 12 O'Clock High: Bombing the Reich and Battle of Britain -- the last of which ran on a Pentium and recommended 64MB RAM, of which 16-20 MB were used for Win95/98.

Plus, Grigsby's experience in programming before the above games was:

Steel Panthers (1995) which ran on a 486DX and 8 MB
War in Russia (1993) which was a 386 and 640 KB
Pacific War (1992), which was a 286 and 640 kb.
Panzer Strike (1988), on Apple II or Commodore 64

Likewise, for TOAW III; the basic engine goes all the way back to 1998, when it was just Windows 95/96 and 16 MB of RAM required.

Norm Koger before that worked on:

Age of Rifles (1996), 486 DX2, 8 MB
Tanks (1994), 386, 2MB
Conflict: Korea (1992), 286 and 640KB.

Conflict Korea, if you look at the screenshots on Mobygames is VERY much the prehistoric "TOAW"; due to the similarity of game concepts you see show up later in TOAW.

You can see how when you started out doing a complex simulation of either Korea, the ENTIRE Pacific War or Russian Front on just 640 KB RAM, you'll be used to working "close to the metal" to get as much performance from the hardware at the time; and as you move forward in your career, you'll stick with the languages you know and trust the best.

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/31/2019 7:56:34 AM

ncc1701e

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I have forgotten:
Commander Europe At War: Java and I think they are just using AWT for creating the graphical interface

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RE: What's the Best Programming Language for Wargames? - 10/31/2019 8:05:57 AM

ncc1701e

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Something also to consider is portability. Do you plan your game for Windows / Linux / MacOS or just for Windows?

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