Unity 5.5.0b3 (edit: 5.4.0p4) looks like a winner so far for AI War II.

[Draco18s]

Mmm.  Yeah, always depends on a specific use-case.

Writing it taught me a lot about making shaders, even if I still don't intuitively understand some of the math behind lighting calculations.  I know a little bit about the kinds of things that break batching and can work around it some of the time (a subshader is fine IIRC, but another pass{...} isn't....most of the time*).

*I was playing with a shader once and found that I could have two of the passes that came out of Shader Forge without it breaking batching, never figured out why.

[x4000]

Batching is definitely one of the dark arts.  You inquire into the depths at your peril.

[Draco18s]

You inquire into the depths at your peril.

That's what I said about Java ASM.

[x4000]

You inquire into the depths at your peril.

That's what I said about Java ASM.

FTFY.

[Draco18s]

Nah, Java's not so bad. It's like most other languages.
It's when you start writing code that modifies/creates other classes at runtime that you start looking into a dark abyss.

[x4000]

It's the naming conventions that bug the most about Java, honestly.  And a lot of their libraries.

[kasnavada]

Java was quite bad 15-10 years ago. It got better. I know, I'm working with it since.
That said, it will always have limitations. I wouldn't make a game in java, for example...

[Pumpkin]

Java was quite bad 15-10 years ago. It got better. I know, I'm working with it since.
That said, it will always have limitations. I wouldn't make a game in java, for example...

Yeah, like a game that would make the entire world deconstructible by breaking it down into millions of small cubes...

[Tridus]

Could be worse, could be javascript. Only language I've ever seen where the equality operator was so broken by design that they gave up and made a second one.

[Yavaun]

Java was quite bad 15-10 years ago. It got better. I know, I'm working with it since.
That said, it will always have limitations. I wouldn't make a game in java, for example...

Don't be so sure. It wouldn't be the first time.

edit: I wouldn't write a game like AI War in java though...

[kasnavada]

Java was quite bad 15-10 years ago. It got better. I know, I'm working with it since.
That said, it will always have limitations. I wouldn't make a game in java, for example...

Yeah, like a game that would make the entire world deconstructible by breaking it down into millions of small cubes...

The concept of the game was good, so it sold.

Nothing to do with the technology here. Same, a lot of game that don't need without heavy optimization can be run without over-riding anything in Unity. That said, said dev team has to be competent in optimization and in the language itself.

Whereas java HAS been optimized a lot over the years... by concept, it's running on a JVM. That's always going to limit how it's running.

And... I can show bad examples of java games:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/221020/

PR + coding failure. Combo !

[x4000]

I was so looking forward to Towns, too.

And to be fair, my father in law uses a lot of the more modern Java stuff, and really enjoys it.  He is a native C coder at heart, so that really says something.  He wrote some substantial part of the code for some of the original "mainstream" commercial Cisco routers in the late 90s, and has ported the Java runtime to a number of device architectures, so he's someone I trust with a proper understanding of the full stack of code understanding.  The fact that he likes Java says a lot to me.

That guy is really awesome and has been able to work on a lot of really cool things ranging from flocking robot routers to virtual reality to stuff for the military and satellites to the protocols for "internet in space" (that was super tangential to him, but he got to be in the room at least), to a bunch of stuff involving Inception-like levels of VMs, etc.  We have a lot of fun talking, but recently my son has preempted most of that.