A Perspective on D from game industry

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 6/16/2014 3:54 AM, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> Well, first hurdle, closed platform holders provide tooling for their
> platforms. XBox360 has arch-specific instructions, which aren't widely
> supported in GCC/LLVM backends. Same goes for Nintendo and

Sounds like being able to compile down to C/C++ could help here?

Although, looking forward, I would imagine this would be less of an 
issue for PS4/XB3 since they're apparently x64?

> Sony used
> to be a problem, but got past that with the PS3.

Interesting. I've been impressed with how Sony turned things around 
within the PS3's lifetime. It came out the staring gate with both shoes 
tied together and a faceplant into the dirt, but they really did a lot 
to undo the damage within the constraints they had. ('Course, their 
biggest competitor's quality control problems probably didn't hurt, either.)

> Secondly, there isn't really budget allocated for the would-be compiler team.
> Perhaps there should be, but it would be an unconventional move by the
> first mover, and games is so risk-adverse; good luck trying to
> convince the suits to get on board with that...

Hmm, I guess that would be budgeted separate from any existing "tools" 
projects.

> Finally, games are so complex that most staff available tend to become
> highly specialised. There are usually a relatively small number of
> generalists capable of such a task in any one company,

I see. I'd heard about that before, but tend to forget it.

> and such staff
> tend to find themselves becoming mission-critical resources, often
> exploited to burnout ;)
>
> I'm heavily generalising, obviously every company is different, but
> it's a hard industry to manifest the right set of circumstances where
> the idea would be taken seriously.
>
> It's been done before though. Insomniac were well known for their
> invention of their internal language 'goal' used by designers and
> scripters to produce game logic. It generated a lot of discussion, but
> most people dismissed the idea stating that they didn't have the same
> resources available that insomniac had, and Lua eventually won that
> war.
>

Yea. Insomniac, along with their "friend" company, Naughty Dog, have 
always seemed to stand out as being fairly forward-thinking and more 
tech-driven than others. While I haven't usually been into their 
respective games, I've always had good reason to respect them both. The 
way they've pushed PS1/PS2 hardware, the scripting as you mentioned 
(which I had actually forgotten about), PS2-era advancements in 
follow-cameras, the more recent animation work, and just generally high 
level of polish on everything.