[Ninkazu]

Yup, the article I advertised for quite a while on RPGDX is finally under way. I made the necessary corrections to the article info on the site, and more will be soon to come.

For those of you who are lazy, here is the url:
http://venosoft.com/articles/preface.html

[God_Cells]

It's a good beginning for a tutorial!

[Tenshi]

- I find C++ easier to understand than C. I know C++ is slower than C. But as far as power, it depends on what you're referring to. The "future" is Object-Oriented Programming. That's what I'm interested in. C++ is what I'd suggest for them large, detailed games. Use C blitters and Drivers, but write your game primarily in C++ to take advantage of objects.

- That's my 3 yen.
_________________
- Jaeda

[Rainer Deyke]

C++ is not intrinsically slower than C. A well-written C++ program can easily match or beat a well-written C program in performance. Some C++ techniques can lead to slow code, but others are blazingly fast. You just have to know what you're doing.

[Bjorn]

Yeah, one thing to note as slow are virtual functions. Testing the performance of an early tile engine of mine I noticed a big difference whether my tile drawing routine was defined as virtual or as a normal method. I'm not sure if it was already actually drawing the tiles at that time because I think if it was, then the time it takes to copy the tile bitmap to another bitmap would make the virtual or non virtual difference very insignificant.

[white_door]

yeah... its not the compiler that is any slower.. and since C++ is a superset of C, you can code fast code if you want. its only a few of the features of C++ have hidden costs.. where as if you do the same thing with C you have to do it all manualy so you can see if it will be optimal or not.. straight way.

I mean if we really wanted pure speed, we would code everything in asm. and some people do. Sure a few asm routines can go a long way to boosting your programs speed, but the whole thing? Who has the time for that?

Of course OOP != C++. A lot of the features in C++ were designed to aid with object oriented programming, however OOP is a style of programming you can still use in C. And conversely just becuase you use C++ doesn't automatically mean you are coding with OO.

Personally I like some of features that C++ has to offer, and I agree it would be helpful to have some good tuts on them.

[Tenshi]

Well if you really want OO, use Java... everything is an object.. but it's hella slow on some things. But Java's sexy. =)...
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- Jaeda

[Rainer Deyke]

Personally I can't stand Java. It's not just slow, it's horribly verbose, and it doen't let me structure my code the way I want to structure it.

[God_Cells]

I donot agree with you guys/girls ;)...

C++ will be always slower, new/delete vs malloc/free is a clear example. C is harder to learn/understand, class heritage, template are examples. Learning the syntaxe of a language is one, but to master it is another, and C++ needs more time to master, i count mastering into learning/understanding... this language tend to simplify at cost of speed by hiding complex memory manipulations like pointer on functions.

If you dont use OOP why do you use C++? C++ was created for that... use C instead.

ASM :), is great, I agree with WhiteDoor :)

[Bjorn]

Nah, the future is in multithreaded parrallel programming for high performance computers using the message passing interface!

[Tenshi]

- Correct me if I'm wrong, but oftentimes, aren't threads objects?

I know in Java they are.

- Unix generally uses fork() so...
_________________
- Jaeda

[God_Cells]

Yeah, who knows :)
_________________
Be vigilant, uncle Sam is looking at you...

Take a look to my project at : L'odyssée de Zed

[Bjorn]

In Java, threads are explicit objects but in a language like C you are just free to look at them that way. OOP and threaded programming are mostly discussed as totally seperate subjects. But anyway, I was just kidding of course.

[Nodtveidt]

Rainer Deyke is right...C++ is not slower by nature, but here's a good reason why it can be slower...

Think of BASIC versus C. BASIC is designed to be easy to use. It seems that the easier the language, the more work the compiler has to do, and thus more generalized output instruction, which means more CPU time to execute command sets, etc etc etc. C++ is easier than C, most anyone will tell you that. And likewise, a C++ compiler will end up doing far more work than a classic C compiler. Thusly you've got the more generalized output code which eats more CPU time per instruction block, etc etc etc. So although it's true that C++ by nature isn't slower than C, it can be. Modern C++ is designed to take a lot of the work away from the programmer, and that comes at a cost. Why do you think all these games that come out a dozen per week need such power-hungry computers? I swear to god they're written over the weekend in vanilla C++.

-nek

[Bjorn]

C is closer to machine language and thus would be more efficient and easier to optimize, I agree. But new games don't need big processors because they are written in C++ instead of C. That is because they are loaded with graphical content and polygons, requiring both a good graphics card and a fast processor. Also, most of the actual game functionality gets scripted, these scripts execute about 20 times slower than native C/C++ code. Of course, the scripted part is supposed to be non-speed critical but they implement complicated stuff like AI. Also, games get an increasingly higher amount of detail on the physics part (ex. Karma Physics in Unreal Engine), which takes a lot of processor power.