Hi Shaun, No, actually the proper tools and languages have always been their, but a lot of amateur self-taught audio game devs chose to take the path of least resistance when it came to programming. Languages like AutoIt and Visual Basic, for instance, are easy to learn and use so they decided to learn and use those rather than something like C++. Had they chosen to learn and use something like C++, which is the industry standard, they would have had a language and more long term development platform to work with. They could have fairly easily updated the dependencies to newer DirectX libraries, recompiled the games for say 64-bit platforms, and maintained the code over a long period of time. However, that's not what happened.
I don't think we should blame them too much though. After all, Visual Basic 6 was widely marketed in the 90's as the language for amateur developers, an intro to programming, and there for a while there were a few books being published how to do indi game development using VB 6. It was quick, it was fairly easy, and nobody was aware of the fact by 2008 Microsoft would scrap Visual Basic 6 for the .Net language sweit of languages. In short, those developers like Jim Kitchen, GMA, Draconis, etc who had based all their games on Visual Basic 6 had the rug rudely pulled out from under them as well as several indi mainstream game developers too. Anyway, the point i wanted to make is that we did have the tools and languages available. They always have been available to us. There was never any need to use Visual Basic 6, AutoIt, etc but that's what people chose because of convenience. Now, we are paying for that lack of industry standardization and forethought as there are some issues running VB 6 apps on Windows 7, and the problem is likely to get worse instead of better as time goes on. Had those devs used industry standards like C++, DirectX 8, etc we probably wouldn't be in this situation today as C++ apps are designed for long term support and development. Cheers! On 9/29/11, shaun everiss <sm.ever...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think another real aspect of this is the lack of technology and > goes back to the legacy thing above. > We don't or well didn't have the tools back then. > as a result we have to deal with a legacy autoit, vb6 and other > inferior languages as the basis for our games. > including directx8. > We don't have that many games that support the dx9 and up or dotnet > standards. > If we do its mostly 1.1, 1.0, or 2.0. > I think we may have one or 2 games running 3.5 and maybe 4.0, and > xna, but really thats our limit. > Python has some traction but I doubt we will ever get up there, at > least not till we ditch all the old languages. > And since about 90% of all games are in those outdated crappy and has > been languages I can't see the backlog will ever clear itself, at > least not right away. > And ofcause the blind start simple and unless you have been exposed > to the otherside or wanted to try and not stayed in your assigned > boxes where you are put then you never know and therefore you never do. > Also the bg community is only in its first generation cycle its still > vary young. > So give it another 100-500 years and maybe it will work or it will die. > Even when biggish games come, since its only 1 real person its so > fragile that anything from the biggest disaster to the smallest > illness can derail everything. > The industry is like a mudflat, unstable at best at worse it could > collapse at any time. > There are probably only a few devs that actually have the ideas of > how the other side the rest of us are just along for the ride. > and though we may have a chance with the engines comming out, we are > not yet going to go foreward at least not that much for now. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
