Any programmers here?

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Something really neat that Stephan Mischook posted recently. The part that really caught my attention is the energy use chart in around 7:04, where Stephan was reading AWS's statement about the low energy usage of Rust and C compared to other languages. The chart compares languages in terms of amount of power used in comparison to C and found Rust to be 1.03x, Java at 1.98x, C# at 3.14x, Javascript at 4.45x, Typescript at 21.5x, PHP at 29.3x, and getting into the insanely bad - Ruby at 69.91x and Python at 75.88x:

I am and I love it. I've been doing it since high school and now in mid-life. Currently I do a lot of c#, PHP, front-end languages, and SQL at work; working through c, lisp, and assembly at home.

This is my hobby project, "People's Conquest": https://imgur.com/M02Nn1O

It is inspired by "Strategic Conquest," a nostalgic favorite of mine from the 1980s (I doubt its as good as I remember).

Here is the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Conquest

So, my graphics aren't great but its the best I could get with my budget and skills. I hired an artist that does a little work here and there for the little money I pay here and there.

My primary target is iOS, but in the short run it will be a free game on Mac on itch then I may put it on Mac App store.

I am 39 and work in an unrelated field. I started this about 5 years ago when I took a job that ended up being awful but I couldn't easily quit. I ended up staying nearly 4 years there and survived it by taking my personal laptop to work and finding about 90 minutes per day to work on it. I'd straight up go to my car in the parking garage sometimes and just work on it. That company doesn't exist anymore so I don't really feel guilty about not taking that job seriously.

Strategy games are code heavy. So, I didn't make a game, I made a strategy game engine of sorts and actually this is the second game. Its hard to draw the line between mod/scenario/new game. Both use the same grid map, but use it in different ways. The short version of why I chose a grid map like this is each tile is actually divided into a 3X3 internal map and that enables buildings that block movement such as walls.

In my opinion, what this has taught me is that there is a huge difference between merely programming and building a product. A product requires marketing/market research, a creative director, a tester - and none of that even gets to who actually makes it.

When it comes to making it, you have to be all things to the programming project. Normally, people who are good at front end aren't good at back and vice versa. I am awful at GUI programming and really struggled initially with it. I got better but its still a significant limitation.

For strategy games, it takes more than programming. You have to have a mathematical model of the game. My day job actually plays into that and the combat odds calculations are heavily inspired by the math in my day job. I work in banking/finance and the risk of a loan is derived from its expected loss calculation, which is conceptually identical to combat odds in war strategy games.

For AI I was also inspired by other aspects of my industry and borrowed the concepts from the techniques used to flag fraud in customer accounts. However, with game AI the emphasis is on how you implement it.

Comparing game programming to regular software development, proper game programming patterns involve maximizing the ability to make changes as fast as possible. This is necessary to retreat from bad decisions and to try out new ones. If its hard to make changes to the game, you will end up sticking with bad game design decisions longer.

So a key design pattern is to put as much of what makes the game a game into text files that are read upon launch. Think of it as a giant preference file, but as you expand on it you end up with a bunch of files.

The codebase is about 230,000 lines of Objective C/C code. Apple's environment strongly encourages you to use Swift but I started this before Swift became significant so I started with Objective C for the front end that calls a C back end. My hope someday is to make it multiplatform but I am not prioritizing that because if I can't sell 1,000 copies on iOS I highly doubt its worth porting.

What the code basically does is read the text files and configure the rules and display from what the text files say. The text files can reference folders for graphics and also sounds. So I can add graphics and sounds in a lot of things without recompiling or even opening the project.

I am playing the long game and have designed the project so that I could do this on the side for my entire professional career. My day job is pretty good and I have no complaints but there isn't really any more "up" to my career. I hit the autistic ceiling about three years ago so I have zero shot at management (nor do I want that, that would be awful).

This is the only thing keeping me from losing hope.

My suggestion is to not focus on languages - people who mention the languages they know aren't giving the flex that they think it is. Design patterns matter more and a competent programmer should be able to copy the same successful design pattern into other languages without too much difficulty. Even one they do not currently know! It will take you longer to learn best design practices than it will for you to learn a language after you have learned a decent one like C, Java, C#... but I am very partial to plain ol C.

A competent programmer should also be able to write code in a language so that a programmer in another language could read the code and roughly know what is going on. That gets accomplished by descriptive variable and function naming.

Regarding C++ and object oriented programming - the only thing worth it about OOP is the ability to interact with others' code. Thats it. I suggest using as little OOP in your own code as you can. I am partial to Objective C because I call it "OOP without the need to know what OOP really is." Its also a superset of C, which is very convenient.

Use a data oriented approach.

I would even double down on this and say when you make a struct, make it generic. An early design pattern I did was this:

I would make a player struct in C that contains info about the player. Like for example,

struct playerData
{
int player_id;
char *player_name;
float player_strength;
};

Right, pretty straight forward right? And that design pattern makes sense when you are trying to make one game.

But if you want to make a codebase that can handle different scenarios, mods, or maybe even be a full blown engine with its custom script...

You only need one struct to rule them all, for all your game related information.

struct genericVariableList
{
char **int_variable_names;
int *int_variables;
int count_int_variables;

char **float_variable_names;
float *float_variables;
int count_float_variables;

char **string_variable_names;
char **string_variables;
int count_string_variables;

};

Whoa, now how do you work with this?

The answer is in those text files.

You write the C code to read the text files and it parses them, and the text file will say this:


begin_node
priority 1
condition
probability (1)
end
int_var (Gold,100)
float_var (Respect,0.0)
end_node

So this is my custom script. The C code parses it, and evaluates it. There can be many nodes, and this is a behavior tree. But this is just a short example. What this is doing is with probability 100%, it is evaluating this node as true. This is a "terminal node" when this behavior tree file is called. BTW, I use behavior trees for everything. It greatly increases your ability to drastically change game behavior without recompiling.

Anyways what this node does when executed, it creates an integer value called "Gold" and adds 100 to it. By the way, whats it adding to? Well any object that calls the behavior tree! Because all objects have the same generic struct, any object in the game can call that script and get this variable added to it. It enables you to create different game objects - think a character that has different images, game attributes, name, etc - without messing with the C code. I can create a new character/whatever in text files, and then create a behavior tree for something like init or interaction, and it will call that when that happens.

It also creates a float variable called "Respect" and assigns it a 0.0.

The C code reads this action in when the node is evaluated and knows to check if the variable exists first, then sets it to that. The function call looks like this:

addIntVarGeneric(&inEntity->variable_list,var_name,value);

Because each game object gets this generic structure and the behavior trees can act on all game objects - the data of the game is divorced from the internal C code. You could search "Gold" all you want in the source code and you will never find it as a variable. But when you play the game - there it is!

See how this design pattern makes the choice of C language irrelevant? I could rewrite the game code in Python and the text files that contain what makes the scenario unique do not need to be changed at all.

C is a great language to learn - people get scared off by pointers and it is extra work. But see how if you use generic variable lists in a lot of things it greatly reduces the problem? You only have to write about 100 lines of C code to handle the memory management of it and once you get that right, you got that right forever. The pain that is C memory management is vastly overstated. In return, you get a language that lets you do whatever you want without considering if you even should.

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Visual Studio for Mac:
How to Get Microsoft Visual Studio on Mac

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This divided love has led to most of us living double lives. We know so many of you in the software industry are victims of this and have had to use Microsoft at work and Mac everywhere else. Visual Studio is an excellent example of this. Even developers who live by and large in Apple's ecosystem know the value in the years Microsoft has spent refining, running, and upgrading this tool.

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Takeaway
A majority of developers around the world trust Visual Studio to develop programs, and for good reason. The improvements made to it over the years, including adding more languages to program with and incorporating developer requests, make it the best Integrated Development Environment (IDE) around.

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Programming is one of my main hobbies. I know a few languages, but the ones I’d say I’m the most skilled in are Python, Java and C#.

I have a love-hate relationship with the C family though. I want to become better at them (especially C# and C++ since these are some of the most commonly used languages for game development - my dream job! ) but they are just so complicated!