Programming Language?

[hoverbike]

What programming language are you using right now? Don't say which is the best but which one you are working with. I'm using the very simple OO Turing to start out with. It comes from Canada. It's easy to learn and it's a good one to start with.

I want to start making games with this and I found a Mario one but I can't open it. I must have a out-dated program .

[Hunnter]

The one im using most is Java, mostly because we are doing it like crazy in college
We have a whole 3 hour class dedicated to Java (well OO-Programming) oh joy
Its pretty good anyway so yeh...

Im also using Python right now (with Blender )

And we are using Delphi in college as well, thats pretty good.
I prefer it over VB anyday, the interface is much more efficient and simple to get around.
Plus it can use a scrollwheel! Last version of VB i had you couldnt even scroll!

[Fallout Boy]

All I use these days is Visual Basic & a bit of Perl here and there.

I hate programming its boring as hell thats why I left my Software Engineering/Computer Science degree and became a systems engineer instead.

More of the stuff I do is scripting then anything else, occaisionally i will have to write something but very rarley.

[moofs]

First year in university and we started off with Java. At first it was pretty hard cause I had a teacher who could barely speak english, I totally did not understand what the hell was going on. But now everything makes sense... so it's all good. Currently having to use java to simulate a computer with its memory, the I/O, CPU register stuff. Well done that part... now our next part is to create our own compiler, which shall be uh... fun but a bit hard.

[Firefox]

I started off using Turing, and made my way up to Visual Basic, and now I am on
C/C++.

I recommend turing for people who want to learn about programming basics:

http://www.holtsoft.com/turing/

try this if you really want a challenge
visual C++:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/

[Smily0012]

RIght now im using mostly Java, I never really learned C++ so im going to have to learn it on my own over the summer. If your using Java, Eclipse is a good program to use to debug and so on.

Right now im working on trees in java and its annoying me really right now, I cant figure out how delete elements from it and still keep a balanced tree.

[Fallout Boy]

Java was a fairly good language to learn on.

I first learned Visual Basic before I did java, vb is so much more forgiving then java!! I didn't know what i had gotten myself into when I started java.

I just hated doing AWT, it was a pain in the ass building the GUI with text, powerful but going from WYSIWYG to hard coding was a steel learning curve.

[Firefox]

Java, is okay, the real challenge is C++, that's when you really start to lose your patience
when you make programs (always hard to make one)

[hoverbike]

Does anyone know what programming language they use to make PS2 games? I would guess C++ that's modified to suit the PS2's hardware. Does anyone know what language they will use to make PS3 games?

hate programming its boring as hell thats why I left my Software Engineering/Computer Science degree and became a systems engineer instead.

I'm sorry to hear that, I think it's because the forced you to make boring programs!! I would just try to make a PC game with it.

[Firefox]

Does anyone know what programming language they use to make PS2 games? I would guess C++ that's modified to suit the PS2's hardware. Does anyone know what language they will use to make PS3 games?

hate programming its boring as hell thats why I left my Software Engineering/Computer Science degree and became a systems engineer instead.

I'm sorry to hear that, I think it's because the forced you to make boring programs!! I would just try to make a PC game with it.

here's a good article about developing for the ps3:

link

In fact, PS3 employs a cut-down version named Open GL ES, which is even simpler - as Volatile's lead PS3 programmer, Lyndon Homewood explained:

"ES is designed for things like set-top boxes and mobile phones, where you want the fundamental graphics but don't need some of the fringe stuff that Open GL has. Because you've got that on PS3, it's going to be much easier than the PS2 to get something up and running - there are hundreds of books out there for it, so you can do your background reading. All the documentation is there."

We also got onto talking about how PS3 will deal with Cg - a version of the programming language C, which allows developers to code for advanced graphics processing units, specifically in the area of 3D shaders. (You can read more about Cg here and here). You may be completely up to spec on how this works, but Lyndon gives a decent beginners guide if not:

"Cg gives you a standard documented API for programming graphics chips. The main two segregations of Cg programming are the vertex shader and pixel shader. With the vertex shader you can act on 3D models at the vertex level, so for each triangle you can do something on each corner and then everything in-between is interpolated. So if you want to make your whole shape bigger, you can just push all the vertices out a bit. In this way you could, say, morph your character into a giant just by scaling up all the verts. It's a lot easier to get to that point in the graphics pipeline.

"And then you've got the pixel shaders. When you render each triangle on screen the GPU asks whether you want to do something to each individual pixel you render... so at this point you could run some sort of mathematical algorithm on each individual pixel - perhaps a lighting effect like high dynamic range lighting (a rough Wikipedia entry on HDR lighting can be found here). And that wasn't possible on PS2.

"All of this is already available and won't be a massive leap from what you're seeing on PCs with high-end graphics cards. But obviously on PS3, you've got eight chips to spread the processing cost over - the main PowerPC chip and seven SPE chips. In a PC, there's just one CPU, two in a dual processor machine. Having an eight CPU multi-processor system in your living room is pretty flash.

"At the end of the day it's just a multi-processor architecture. If you can get something running on eight threads of a PC CPU, you can get it running on eight processors on a PS3 - it's not massively different. There is a small 'gotcha' in there though. The main processor can access all the machine's video memory, but each of the seven SPE chips has access only to its own 256k of onboard memory - so if you have, say, a big mesh to process, it'll be necessary to stream it through a small amount of memory - you'd have to DMA it up to your cell chip and then process a little chunk, then DMA the next chunk, so you won't be able to jump around the memory as easily, which I guess you will be able to do on the Xbox 360.

"The graphics capabilities of PS3 will, I think, be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry. With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that..."

According to Homewood, the management of the SPE chips is going to be a major consideration. One way is to assign specific roles to each of the chips - get one handling physics, one working on AI, etc. This might sound tidy, but Volatile are not convinced - partly because certain gameplay events, like a massive shoot-out, are going to create spikes in demand for, say, animation, collision detection and rag doll physics. One SPU working alone on each of these elements won't be able to deal with such spikes efficiently. Also, there's the question of co-ordination:

"The way we're thinking of doing it ourselves is via a job queue. We'll stick the jobs we want to do into a queue on the main processor and then we'll get the SPEs to pull off a queue entry and process it whenever they're free. You want to make sure all of your processors are always running. If you give the chips specific jobs, you'll end up with a lot of them being idle - you won't get the maximum out of PS3 doing that unless you time everything perfectly, so that the time it takes to do the animation on the first chip is exactly the same amount of time to do the physics on the next chip, which is exactly the same length of time it takes to do all your AI on the next chip - I think that would be extremely problematic."

[Fallout Boy]

Does anyone know what programming language they use to make PS2 games? I would guess C++ that's modified to suit the PS2's hardware. Does anyone know what language they will use to make PS3 games?

hate programming its boring as hell thats why I left my Software Engineering/Computer Science degree and became a systems engineer instead.

I'm sorry to hear that, I think it's because the forced you to make boring programs!! I would just try to make a PC game with it.

I just found I didn't like sitting at a computer for hours at a time coding and debugging, or developing System requiremnt Specification documents and following strict documenting procedures.

From some of my subjects I found enjoyed system design and the more hands on stuff along with dealing face to face with clients and helping them with the problems.

A lot of coders think the tech side of things is lesser work, but its really not, managing systems requires a lot of hard work plus its demanding especially as when things go wrong. I love the tech side of things so much more then when I was doing coding, im so much happier with the descision I chose to make.

The thing is with computers, there are so many different fields, coding, tech, design, graphics, managment etc you just have to find the one you feel comfortable in, each field requires different skills, but each field needs each other.
There is no point writing the best program in the world if you don't have techs who can support it and make it work in a business, and vice versa

[ShaktiZaharette]

Right now I'm temping at a geotechnical firm ,working on their website so all I'm using of the above is Java. I've taken classes in Perl which was easy but not so useful; and C++ which was v. useful but 2nd in pain-in-the-assness only to assembly . Someday I want to try Python which I've heard is easy for graphical programing.

[Firefox]

which is better java, C/C++, or perl?

[hoverbike]

which is better java, C/C++, or perl?

C/C++ would be the better because of what it can do and how big it is. Hard to master I hear?

How do you make a program to convert files? Let's say, AVI to STR (PS1 movie format)? There is already a program to do that BTW.

[CompGeek]

C++ is my cup o' tea

[PS Gamer]

I use C/C++, VBScript, PERL, Java, Visual, and some others.

[DigitalRemedy]

Well, I mastered C++ pretty much already, going on to Java and J2EE, know some ANT, MySQL, JBoss, Hibernate, Perl, VB, HTML/XHTML, XML, PHP, ASP, SOAP, DTD, ActionScript (FLASH), and a few others.

Loving the Java/J2EE!

[IPB]

I'm using a thing called Bloodshed to try and teach myself C/C++ but it's just I cant get myself motivated. Does anyone have any advice to help a first time programmer wannabe?

[Hunnter]

Never heard of Hibernate before, might have a read on that sometime

Forgot to add in SQL as well, just been doing some basics for now but we will be going into it alot more now since we have finished with Database Design.
And HTML, ive done some XML, but it was mostly just analysing and copying... hehe

Im actually doing some Java right now, creating a program that will let you create a question/answer tree.
Its kinda hard trying to get the alternative answers to work out right... i'll figure it out eventually

[Firefox]

I created a math tutorial, and boy it took a lot of time!

these are the two things you need to be a successful
programmer;

1) patience (and a lot of it!)
2) innovation, and creativity

if you don't have patience you will go crazy being a programmer

[hoverbike]

I'm using a thing called Bloodshed to try and teach myself C/C++ but it's just I cant get myself motivated. Does anyone have any advice to help a first time programmer wannabe?

I was in your shoes the exact same way. I downloaded Bloodshed and tried to learn C/C++ but it didn't work at all. What I would do is start with the language Turing and then learn from Wikipedia books and a forum that has tons of Turing info and help. Turing is very easy and you can start there and then work up to C/C++ later on because they seem to weird at first. Motivation is a problem yes, I have that problem with video games and this!! Think what problem you want to make then learn different formula's and theory's.

I'm looking at random number generation in programs and it seems that the computer can never do it 100%. The reason is because computers need a set of rules and things it needs to go by so it's impossible to get total randomness out of a computer. However, the computer can gives us numbers randomly to us because we won't know them unless we study the formula in full detail and all that crap.

these are the two things you need to be a successful
programmer;

1) patience (and a lot of it!)
2) innovation, and creativity

if you don't have patience you will go crazy being a programmer

That can't be good . I have innovation and creativity but not patience at all. Crap....

[WhatRuOn]

I'm looking at random number generation in programs and it seems that the computer can never do it 100%. The reason is because computers need a set of rules and things it needs to go by so it's impossible to get total randomness out of a computer. However, the computer can gives us numbers randomly to us because we won't know them unless we study the formula in full detail and all that crap.

Yes, a computer will never output a truly random number. The closest you can get to one is seeding your generation of the second of the hour, minute, hour,day of month, and year. Basically since those variables will never been the same you can get a theoretical random number. But it still isn't random.

[hoverbike]

I'm looking at random number generation in programs and it seems that the computer can never do it 100%. The reason is because computers need a set of rules and things it needs to go by so it's impossible to get total randomness out of a computer. However, the computer can gives us numbers randomly to us because we won't know them unless we study the formula in full detail and all that crap.

Yes, a computer will never output a truly random number. The closest you can get to one is seeding your generation of the second of the hour, minute, hour,day of month, and year. Basically since those variables will never been the same you can get a theoretical random number. But it still isn't random.

You hit the nail right in the head. That's what I hear often so it's in my Sig.

Does anyone else know of a programming variable or formula that is useful?

[IPB]

Thanks for the advice hoverbike, I'll check out Turing.
On the subject of random number simulators, one of my modules dealt with them briefly. Just the sort you get on calculators using mods and stuff. Was quite interesting in an otherwise dull stats module.

[OKlondon]

Last one i was using was java and before that was vb.