Re: frameworks to develop audiogames
Visualstudio, that is true, but in the end I think the choice of weather or not to use a language like C# .NET verses C++ comes down to ease of use more than any consideration of installing any necessary dependencies for most developers.
First, .NET is becoming far more mainstream these days, and chances are high that end users will already have the necessary components and frameworks in stalled. Just in the audio games community alone we have had a number of games come out over the last few years that are written using .NET based languages such as Rail Racer, Entombed, Tactical Battles, 3D Velocity, and so on. Consequently the more games that comes onto the audio games market using .NET the more people who will already have said components and frameworks installed anyway.
The situation is quite different from say ten years ago when I released my first game, Final Conflict, where everyone was running Windows XP, and most users didn't have .NET 1.0 let alone any la
ter version. These days
the situation is quite different with end users running XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.x, and many of them have some version of .NET installed. Especially those running newer Windows operating systems like Windows 7 and Windows 8. So worrying about installing .NET isn't quite the issue it was just a decade ago.
Second, there are many advantages in using C# .NET or VB .NET over C++. The main one is ease of use. The .NET Framework contains thousands of classes using a fully implemented object oriented design meaning it takes less code, time, and effort to develop any peace of software given that there is lots of pre-existing code right there for the taking.
There are classes in .NET to perform many tasks like serialization, handle the Windows registry, and various things that are not trivial in C++, but are fairly simple to perform in .NET languages thanks to the ready made classes. It is not just that it cuts down on the amoun t of code required to do those things, but it simplifies it in the process as well.
Third, .NET is fairly easy to use COM based components like SAPI 5 which isn't so simple to do in C++. When I wrote some games in .NET I was able to get SAPI 5 up and running with minimal effort in .NET, but found it was considerably harder to do in C++.
Finally, thanks to Mono and the availability of other open source .NET components for Mac and Linux it is a much better option for doing cross-platform development than is Java. I discovered it was fairly simple to build accessible graphical user interfaces using the GTK+ wrapper for Mono on Linux and the standard Windows Forms on Windows without requiring another dependency like the Java Access Bridge required for graphical Java applications.
I actually did develop a very simple test game using SDL .NET and C# which compiled and ran on Linux and Windows without any serious modifications. While I think SDL leaves one with much to be desired the fact of the matter is it is possible to do cross-platform development with .NET and the options these days are numerous. Far more feasible now than they were ten years ago.
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