"Josh Simmons" <simmons...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.2920.1316237301.14074.digitalmar...@puremagic.com...
> On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Sean Kelly <s...@invisibleduck.org>
> wrote:
>> On Sep 16, 2011, at 7:09 PM, Xavier wrote:
>>
>>> Peter Alexander wrote:
>>>> I recently stumbled across this (old) blog post:
>>>> http://prog21.dadgum.com/13.html
>>>>
>>>> In summary, the author asks if you were offered $100,000,000 for some
>>>> big software project,
>>>
>>> While this is a "silly little hypothetical thread" (and it is Friday
>>> afterall so that probably explains the OP), I cannot fathom that amount
>>> being spent on just software on one project (though I've worked on one
>>> system, i.e., software + hardware, project worth 10's of millions).
>>> Maybe
>>> someone here can? Examples please, or give the largest one you can think
>>> of (it can be hypothetical). Remember, it's just software, not a system.
>>
>> Top-tier computer game budgets are tens of millions of dollars.
>>
>
> Writing a AAA game in D would mean fixing a whole bunch of D, way
> easier to stick to what's proven.
>
> You'd have to disable the collector or make it better than every
> existing one, which in turn means you're not using most of the
> standard library. This is OK though since AAA games generally don't
> use standard library stuff anyway. You'd have to fix the codegen too
> (or maybe develop further ldc or gdc) and build new tools for just
> about everything.
>
> So basically sure you could do anything with enough money, but why
> would you do it the hard way?
Keep in mind, most of a AAA game's codebase is externally-developed
middleware these days. I think the middleware development sector would be
willing to fix those issues if it meant being able to provide a more
competitive offering (ie, their customers can use an easier to use/learn
language, and don't need as many C++ gurus, etc).
Of course, D will need more buzz in the game world to give middleware
developers that push. But middleware provides a way around the question of
"Why would game developers do it the hard way?" Their product may (arguably)
end up the same either way for a game developer. But doing that hard stuff
could make a middleware developer's product be more attractive ("It's kinda
like moving from C++ to C#, except you don't have that 5% performance hit,
you have all this metaprogramming and concurrency stuff C++ and C# don't
have, and you're not locked into MS platforms."). So there's the motivation
for "the hard way".
Of course, personally, I'd consider using an already-working-but-C++-based
toolchain to be "the hard way", but that's me.
