C++ or Java for game developing?

>Is C++ or Java the better language to use and why?  My biggest concern will be game performance, and a professional
>looking game.  I don't mind if one is much harder to learn over the other.

Had there been a silver bullet, other languages would have been out of the trade :o)
What is best depends on what you need it for ? If you are planning a small web browser based game, may be you can program it lot more efficiently in flash ... If you are looking for something like warcraft or half-life or quake, neither of these languages alone is sufficient to help you ... Generally a library like opengl or direct3d is used in order to provide high quality efficient graphics ... google will find you plenty of resources for either of them.

What you are embarking on is an interesting field where sky is the limit ... take it step by step and you will soon be there.

good luck

Thanks for both of your replies.  

The thesis in the link www.rolemaker.dk/articles/evaljava is VERY weill written and will help me answer my questions. So far, I have read about 33% of it.

Happy new year!

Erwin

I dont know for sure but I think that commercial games(half life, quake...) are all written in C++ using the OPENGL or DIRECT X libraries and other stuff.
If you want to make this type of games, go for C++ of course.
Also all small games and old games like dave, pacman etc.(working out of the explorer) are written fully in C++.
All console games as well, C++ is THE language to make modern programs and games, not java.
Take Java only if you want to make explorer, internet games.

The SUN Java3D SDK (OpenGl & DirectX !) may prove to be useful when wanting to develop games in Java.

Ofcourse, C++ (combined with eg. OpenGL) still is the best language for as far as I know.
I though this was because Java doesn't allow you to directly locate memory (since it has no 'real' pointer system). There was a backdoor to this, but then the stability the Java platform provides would disappear.

Myself, I'm looking into making maybe some sort of a platform game, or some sort of a 'scorched earth' like game in Java. The language just feels better to me, compared to C++

Actually a lot of last generation games programming was done in a mixture of C (or C++) and assembler. The assembler was usually written by hand so as to give the hardware driving portions (particularly graphics) of the engine as much of a boost as possible. The original Quake worked this way. Nowadays, a lot of the graphics, sound etc are driven using DirectX or OpenGL, which generally separate the programmer from the specific details of the hardware. I don't know if there's still a lot of call for the assembler stuff, though it wouldn't surprise me if most of the big game companies keep at least one competent ASM guru in reserve for code optimisation and so on. Anyway, my point is that from a speed point of view, C and ASM would be the best combination. C++ is helpful if you can make it work for you, but it's not really necessary. I tend to see OOP as important only really from a 'serious' (ie not fun) software point of view.

I am a professional game developper and in our industry C++ is king.
In game development you the maximum performance as well as a perfect control over the memory allocations. Java does not address any of those.

On the playstation 2 we also use assembly to code the vector units. But C and C++ are the main languagues. In fact even C is fading out because of the superiority of C++ to handle large code bases as well as big programming teams.

For the graphics API directX is rules for Xbox and Pc platforms.
The ps2 and gamecube have proprietary api's to access their graphics chip.

Hi nuno89,

what C++ vendor would you recommend me using?
I'm guessing the choice more depends on the features and ease of use of the development tools that the vendors provide than the actual compiler, since they should in theory all compile the same.

Thanks for your advice!

Erwin

Hi nuno89

maybe a bit off-topic, though last I read an interesting interview with SUN's Chief Gaming Officer, Chris Melissinos.
Especially this passage:

"Benefits of moving to the Java platform from C++ include accessibility to more platforms, decreased development time, automatic garbage collection, and not having to track down bugs and memory leaks. These benefits allow a faster time to market and enable you to run your game on more than one platform. And again, the key point is that the performance is there. Roughly 90% of all the PC games that were released in the past year could have been done with existing Java technologies."

Sadly I don't know anything about game development, so I can't say whether he's right or you are right, or nobody really is right here.
Though it might be interesting to hear a comment from you on this.

Best Regards,

Ansur

To Erwin
I would use the latest compiler from microsoft for pc and xbox develpment.
For the PS2 use SN systems and for the Gamecube Codewarrior from metrowerks.

To Ansur
SUN is trying hard to push the java platform into as many areas as possible...so it is normal that they present it like the "dream platform". Unfortunately this is far from beeing true. His message is clearly aimed at non professional game developpers since when you do it for a living the platforms that you develop for are PC, XBOX, PS2, Gamecube. Since java is not available on all of this machines the "accessibility to more platforms" argument does not make any sense. Honnestly the only area, java for games, might be a good alternative is to create small web games that you want to run on pcs and macs. But even then....flash, Wildtangent or virtools are probably a better option.

Then his next argument:
"decreased development time" : why does it decrease dev time? because it is an easier language than c++ and does not have pointers? This is a small part of the language and C++ offers you the possibility to abstract them. In practice, when you create a game you have a development framework than  (should) provide you with smart pointers, memory managers, high level functions...Only a small group of people worksd on the infrastructure while others focus on the game logic. Java does not really have a big advantage here.

"automatic garbage collection, and .... and memory leaks."
This is a false argument. While garbage collection is a nice feature to have for general programming, it takes cpu time which causes drops in your frame rate. So you absolutely need to control how the memory is managed and when you are going to allocate and free memory blocks. Also do not forget that you can have memory leaks even in java.... dangling references.

"...not having to track down bugs..." well I guess I really do not need to discuss this one. No language provides you with that. Java might limit some type of bugs but might also introduce new ones.

Also there are problems with Java for games that Chris Melissinos does not address:
- access to graphics API is not easy.
- access to low level for high performance tasks is not easy in java.
- how do you use 3rd party commercial middleware? (sound, physics, AI, animation, etc) they are all interfaced with C/C++.
- Java support from machine to machine changes. You have to deal with different behaviours on different platforms...so the develop once and run everywhere is not yet a reality.


Regards,
Nuno89