Hello all,
I'm new here and reading through the forums so far I find I like this community here!
And the fact that AI Wars was developed using C# just makes me warm and fuzzy inside
C#, imo, is one of the best things to happen to professional (and hobby) development, and the Visual Studio IDE really helps that too!
I've recently started a new game project of my own that has been on a slow boil at the back of my mind for years now. Probably the 9th or 10th one I've started, most never get far, but were fun at the beginning before real-life kicks in and I need to take a break, then never seem to get back to them.
I've been using C# since Visual Studio 2001(?) was still in beta and love it as a language. Way better then many of the others i've used prior.
Before C# it was a mixture of Visual Basic (barf...), C++, Modula-2, Pascal. For windows stuff it was with VB. C++, Pascal etc.. was all either on DOS or Unix. Though I did play around with Borlands C++ Builder for some university projects. That was a nice IDE as well.
Before XNA I was limited to using COM Interop hell and/or using community created wrappers which had hit and miss results on usablity.
I've been programming professionally for over 12 years now specifically dealing with 2D/3D Graphics drawing tools, 3D Animations and Physics for (primarily)the Law Enforcement Industry.
When XNA was introduced in 2003(?) I was in heaven and been using it since. 2 Commercial Applications (with years of maintenance and updates on them) 1 with XNA 3, the other with 4.
I don't use the content pipeline or many other features. I coded my own engine on top of XNA. It was a dream to work with though. Very much in the same sense as c# is a dream to program in.
I am very disspointed in Microsofts lack of future support with XNA. I am still holding out hope that they will introduce something with the new "XBox One" system coming out. But in the mean time I have started looking at Unity3D. It has potential but I really don't like some of the ways it does things... too much hand-holding at the editor level it feels like to me. lol
I also don't care for the Mono IDE. I guess I'm really spoiled with Visual Studio (2010 currently) IDE.
But looks like Arcen developers have managed to primarily use Visual Studio and only uses the Unity3D Editor on a need to basis. I am going to have to look into that!
I am currently struggling with learning and implementing the Entity-Component approach that 'everyone' seems to be recommending for game development nowadays, and it appears Unity3D is using as well for it's built in framework. I see the great potential in this approach but I am so used to OOP that it is slowing me down in my progress by trying to re-think everything. And in some cases re-code classes as I found I did an OOPs instead... (ya ya a little pun there... )
The other area I'm struggling with in the switch from XNA to Unity is the art assets. I'm used to writing my own shaders (HLSL) and having full control over applying them to my models etc... Unity3D take a different approach and I'm still struggling at times with creating models instance vs prefabs etc... and when I want to change a material at run-time which object do I need to do it on gets confusing at times.
I also tend to do procedural content when I can. Creating geometry on the fly, more so then textures, is something I've spent a lot of time on in my work. Still haven't quite figured this out in Unity yet.
cheers
emp
