Intrepid Blog

I’ve been working on a Direct 3d game in C++ for quite some while now. I recently tried using Direct 3d in C# and it took me only 15 minutes to get a basic framework running instead of the 5 hours in C++. Now I know that C# isn’t favoured for game developing for it is slower; it is rapid development and a lot more maintainable.

I did some test on how much the difference would be between having a C# or C++ game engine.

The results were quite supprising:

• C# is slower, but when letting as much as possible be done by the graphics card and direct X instead of C# code the difference between C# and C++ is neglected also due to superior threading control and runtime memory managment of C#
• C# develops a lot faster than C++, far faster than I expected initialy
• Threading and timing the renders and other operations is a lot faster in C# than it is in C++. Also multithreading doesn’t generate as much problems in C# as it does in C++. And maybe even important; debugging threads in C# is a lot easier than in C++
• The second critical area (after the rendering) is the gameplay engine. Most games need to use scripts for it is unfeasable to hardcode everything. C# doesn’t has to use scripts for using seperate .net dll’s works quite well and is hundreds times faster too

I wonder what will be the first major game that will be written in .net. It certainly should atract some attention by game developers.

(Tentrix is actually a quite boring module based websoftware framework)

(Picture taken by Noud)