C# as game development language

[Mario]

I tried Visual studio and XNA games. It looks great and startup is easy, but
I'm curious does C# is a right choice, if we looking in the future of game
development ? Do you think that number of 3D games will increase
drastically, in the future ? Do you think that games creates in C#,. will
be ready (out of box) for other platforms like linux or solaris?

 

[not_a_commie]

I think C# is just fine as a game development environment. We're doing
some real time graphics in it where I work. XNA is a nice API. So is
SlimDX. Irrlicht's C# wrapper has fallen a little behind, but it could
be renewed with a professional effort. The Tao Framework and Mono.SIMD
are also useful things to look at. To code games in 3D you need to
have an intimate understanding of the garbage collector and scoping
rules and how these relate to value types and reference types. One of
the biggest difficulties we've faced doing serious work in C# is the
thread scheduler. It's easy to starve threads for 300ms if you have
other threads doing serious processing. It takes some forethought and
design to work around that issue. In general, though, I believe coding
in C# is faster than coding in C++.

If you code the game with the Tao Framework or Irrlicht (both OpenGL)
then I think you have a good chance of making it run on multiple
platforms.

 

[usenet]

I tried Visual studio and XNA games. It looks great and startup is easy, but
I'm curious does C# is a right choice, if we looking in the future of game
development ? Do you think that number of 3D games will increase
drastically, in the future  ?  Do you think that games creates in C#,.. will
be ready (out of box) for other platforms like linux or solaris?

Games running in a managed environment will always have a performance
penalty when compared to an equivalent written in in an unmanaged
environment.

The benefits of managed environment are pretty significant, however.

Regards,

 

[Ben Voigt [C++ MVP]]

I tried Visual studio and XNA games. It looks great and startup is easy,
but I'm curious does C# is a right choice, if we looking in the future of
game development ? Do you think that number of 3D games will increase
drastically, in the future ? Do you think that games creates in C#,. will
be ready (out of box) for other platforms like linux or solaris?

It's very unlikely for an ordinary user to be able to run C# games on any
platform except Windows and X-Box in the foreseeable future.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Games running in a managed environment will always have a performance
penalty when compared to an equivalent written in in an unmanaged
environment.

It does not have to.

It may have with todays compilers and runtimes.

Arne