Blorx2 Wrote:I might squirm my way into Ruby

You should take a look at my 21 days entry. It's not an example of an elegant or highly reusabel way of using Ruby in a game, but it shows how easily it can be done.

Not that I'm trying to push Ruby or anything...

>That was the first language I ever learnt,
PowerMax, So Spanish is your second language?

>This is a poll we should update every 3 months for...ever.
I don't think much would change in 3 months, but I do agree... perhaps twice a year.

>Funny that there are more Cocoa devs
Not really, it could be that the ones who didn't also vote for Obj-C voted for Cocoa assuming it was "Cocoa Kids Programming System by Apple"

>5 Ruby Game developers? Who? Other than myself and OSC
The other 3 want to be in your cool club. i.e. Coolness by association.

So, in looking at this poll and the last one, are there any trends?

I never voted Ruby. I thought about it but, said to myself that I hadn't squirmed my way in yet. I probably will end up using it, though. As for Cocoa, I've used it a few times and confused myself beyond belief...I'm better off just using C++. I think the thing with alot of Cocoa and OpenGL programmers is that the tutorials either don't take 1 month to complete and the books 2 months to read like my C++ book...learn C++ in 21 days? meh, that's a lie...it took me 2 months to read throughall that code and all those quizzes!.

@Skorche: are you suggesting that a look at it? or at the code?

Carlos Camacho Wrote:>5 Ruby Game developers? Who? Other than myself and OSC
The other 3 want to be in your cool club. i.e. Coolness by association.

I wish...

Carlos Camacho Wrote:Cocoa assuming it was "Cocoa Kids Programming System by Apple"

Haha, I remember that, it was some kind of creation software where you could have sprites and such, but only move them in blocks. I think there is a commercial app which is very much alike, and the name starts in S or something.

Sorry for going a bit OT.

@Daniel_Lurie:
@Erazer: It's not that bad to go off ot, you're no being watched by the mods on the Hyperboy forums or something
@Skorche: I'm probably going to get into Ruby when I get the G4 back to normal...I think it just needs a break from running 24/7 so, be prepared to help out

ERaZer Wrote:Haha, I remember that, it was some kind of creation software where you could have sprites and such, but only move them in blocks. I think there is a commercial app which is very much alike, and the name starts in S or something.

Sorry for going a bit OT.

I believe you are referring to Sk8, there's a few resources out on the web, found a few screens here: http://www.lemonodor.com/archives/000028.html
There's also a little info here if you scroll down half way: http://monday.sourceforge.net/wiki/index...ylanEulogy

I suppose the modern variant is here: http://www.squeakland.org/ the demo movie shows how useful this is, especially for kids (squeak.org seems to be offline for now, for further information go here: http://swiki.squeakfoundation.org/squeakfoundation).

Reminds me of a variant called Agentsheets: http://agentsheets.com/

Hope this rekindles some neurons...

Cheers,

noerhcana.

Some simple questions --

To the 28.17% using Carbon, why?! Get with the times, folks!
To the one person using Cocoa without ObjC, which language are you using? Python?
To the 47.89% using Cocoa with ObjC, have you considered Python instead? Mmmm, garbage collection...
To the 46.48% using C++, you do realize C++ is Evil, don't you?
To the 28.17% not using OpenGL, what on earth are you using?!
To the 2.82% using Allegro, why, oh why?!
To the 91.55% not using Ruby, what's your excuse?
To the 4 silent Ruby users, who are you?

Just to skew the results a bit, we've got 2 people using Unity full-time going up to 5 in August as part of our next game project.

cheers - the OTEE guys

Quote:To the 28.17% using Carbon, why?! Get with the times, folks!

* Mac OS 9 support maybe. Even though that system is dead.

Quote:To the one person using Cocoa without ObjC, which language are you using? Python?

* Seems rather odd.

Quote:To the 47.89% using Cocoa with ObjC, have you considered Python instead? Mmmm, garbage collection...

Java has garbage collection aswell. But I prefer having control over memory. If you abuse the garbage collection I would think your application would run slow and generally cause a bad user experience.
I don't know Python, though I've heard of it, but it would seem to me that that language is better for scripting and not so good for application development. I may be wrong ofcourse.

Quote:To the 46.48% using C++, you do realize C++ is Evil, don't you?

* C++ is not evil if you use the parts that aren't evil, classes for example. If you move to using templates then I agree entirely. That's what I love Objective C. It's a much better language.

Quote:To the 28.17% not using OpenGL, what on earth are you using?!

* SDL, but then again SDL may already use OpenGL behind the scenes. Quartz 2D if you are on Panther, in Tiger Quartz uses OpenGL.

Quote:To the 2.82% using Allegro, why, oh why?!

* No idea

Quote:To the 91.55% not using Ruby, what's your excuse?

Doesn't apply to my domain

Quote:To the 4 silent Ruby users, who are you?

*

* = doesn't apply to me

Who are the other Java lurkers? (Apart from Sillysoft )

Cas

Taxodium.
The advantage of Python over Java is that it's far more flexible. Java is less flexible than Obj-c, and Python is a little bit more flexible. For most of your high-level code, using a slower language like Python wouldn't affect the speed more than a few percent, but would certainly make the programming easier. Once you have something working, profile the code and rewrite the classes or methods that take the most time in Obj-C or C. You can pretty much freely mix Obj-C and Python code. The same is true for Ruby to some extent, but the Ruby-Cocoa module doesn't seem quite as mature.

I wonder how Ruby (or Python etc.) doesn't apply to you. They really do make things easier to write. Unless you're writing some performance intensive blitter or heavy math code, that's a good candidate for C. Using a higher level language simply makes development easier. Why else do you think that writing in assembly has mostly died out? Sure maybe it would be a few percent faster than C for a large program, but it would take forever to write and be a nightmare to debug.

We originally implemented the GooBall gamecode in Python... Not Engine, just rolling the ball around updated at 100 FPS

We had GooBall running under python using 60% CPU just for the ball & a few timers. Lack of type safety was a pain, but bearable. We ported to C# in one month and saw our CPU usage drop to .5% for the ball controller.

Never again.

A lot of people think that not having type safety is a good thing for productivity. (self included)

100 updates a second seems somewhat aggressive for most games, I'd assume you need that because you are using ODE. Admittedly, a high performance game engine running a fancy game is going to take more of an impact from using an interpreted language. Although even C# is higher level and easier to work with than C/C++, so that still helps to prove the point. (unless you picked it for some other reason...)

A couple of friends and I are working on a side-scrolling shooter that currently is still implemented almost completely in Ruby. Only the collision detection is written in C so far. It easily makes tens of thousands of GL calls a second for the lighting and particles. It certainly didn't have any problems running on any of our machines at 60fps. (down to a 1.4Ghz Athalon or 1.25Ghz G4)

(edit: Wait... What kind of timers and ball control were you using that it took you a month to port them? )