On Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 18:13:17 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
While there hasn't been anything official, I think it's a safe
bet to say that D is being used for a major title, Remedy's
Quantum Break, featured prominently during the announcement of
Xbox One. Quantum Break doesn't come out until 2014 so the
timeline seems about right (Remedy doesn't appear to work on
more than one game at a time from what I can tell).
That's pretty huge news.
Now I'm wondering what can be done to foster this newly
acquired credibility in games. By far the biggest issue I hear
about when it comes to people working on games in D is the
garbage collector. You can work around the GC without too much
difficulty as Manu's experience shared in his DConf talk shows
but a lot of people new to D don't know how to do that. We
could also use some tools and guides to help people identify
and avoid GC use when necessary.
@nogc comes to mind (I believe Andrei mentioned it during one
of the talks released). [1][2]
Johannes Pfau's work in progress -vgc command line option [3]
would be another great tool that would help people identify GC
allocations. This or something similar could also be used to
document throughout phobos when GC allocations can happen (and
help eliminate it where it makes sense to).
There was a lot of interesting stuff in Benjamin Thaut's
article about GC versus manual memory management in a game [4]
and the discussion about it on the forums [5]. A lot of this
collective knowledge built up on manual memory management
techniques specific to D should probably be formalized and
added to the official documentation. There is a Memory
Management [6] page in the documentation but it appears to be
rather dated at this point and not particularly applicable to
modern D2 (no mention of emplace or scoped and it talks about
using delete and scope classes).
Game development is one place D can really get a foothold but
all too often the GC is held over D's head because people
taking their first look at D don't know how to avoid using it
and often don't realize you can avoid using it entirely. This
is easily the most common issue raised by newcomers to D with a
C or C++ background that I see in the #d IRC channel (many of
which are interested in game dev but concerned the GC will kill
their game's performance).
1: http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5219
2: http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP18
3: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1886
4: http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20#more-20
5: http://forum.dlang.org/post/k27bh7$t7f$1...@digitalmars.com
6: http://dlang.org/memory.html
As a game developer I will be really enjoyed to be able to
develop our games in D, and for kind of games we do the major
issue isn't the GC but the portability and links with 3-party
libraries (mostly for our internal tools).
We essentially works on Point & Click games :
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Koalabs-Studio/380167978739812?ref=stream
A lot of games companies target many architectures like ARM, X86,
or PowerPC,...
And for our internal tools we essentially use Qt, but for the
moment I didn't try QtD. I don't have the chance for the moment
to work on D during my work time.
