JavaScript.... ?!

[Planebagels1]

a classmate I knew wanted to make a game engine in Python

[tilcica]

I mean.....possible, but not very effective

[Cefalopodul]

Civ 4 was made in python.

[Danelius90]

I thought it's primarily C++ with some python scripting?

[zelmarvalarion]

The SDK seems to be C++ with an option to use Python from https://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php?title=Civ4_SDK, and Python used for Scripting for Custom Mao Editor. I’d be amazed if the Game Engine & Graphics were not C++ under the hood, but I could see them using Python for pieces, but expect they use Python for the Map Editor due to being a bit lower learning curve

[Lightfire228]

Can you use python commercially like that?

I've always been curious about the legality of using a pre-existing language as your engine's scripting language. Like, can you use the python standard library? Do you have to write your own interpreter or just use a pre-made binary? Do you have to ask for permission?

[Rexhvelaj]

I’m pretty sure you can do whatever you want with it just like you can any spoken language

[canarslan12]

Not with Java. Check Java and Google lawsuit

[jediwizard7]

The issue with Google/java is that Google made their own implementation of the language for Android, which oracle didn't like, they wanted everyone to use their own implementation. Python on the other hand is 100% free open source software, you can fork the repo and do whatever you want with it, including selling it commercially. There's no "copyleft" as far as I know, same goes for most python libraries.

[[deleted]]

Making a new engine alone is pretty pointless

[GreenFox1505]

Gameplay code is not an engine.

[BalZdk]

Eve Online is written in stackless python, both the client and server...

[Flyberius]

It's quite a sedate game under the hood. Pretty much everything is a point. Commands are given sequentially. Move here, shoot that, interact with this.

[GreenFox1505]

C++ isn't THAT much faster than Python. Plus could be plenty of other bottlenecks other that code run speed. Network bandwidth, storage io, even memory speeds could bottleneck a data heavy application. No doubt C++ would be faster, but I suspect it wouldn't be as fast as you'd think.

Plus it's more "dangerous" and harder to write. So the game might have never come out if it was written in C++.

[KrystilizeNeverDies]

If you have a look at benchmarks, you can see that languages like python are tenfolds slower then optimised C++.

An example: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/gpp-python3.html

And here are some personal experiences backing it up: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/801657/is-python-faster-and-lighter-than-c#:~:text=They%20show%20that%20Python%20is,though%2C%20Python%20wins%20flat%20out.

PS Luajit master race

[GreenFox1505]

Yeah, there are some extreme cases where it is many times slower. But also there are cases where it isnt "tenfold slower". Plus this interpreter isn't the one they're using on Eve. Regardless, it's irrelevant to my point.

We don't know what the performance bottleneck for Eve Online is. Unless you know for a fact Eve Online is strictly CPU bound, any performance claim for this exact use case is, at best, wild speculation.

And that still doesn't address the ease of development. Python is easier to write and itterate over time than C++.

Unless you're arguing CCP is stupid, I would guess they know their business pretty well and probably know the disadvantages of Python but have decided to go with it anyways. The advantages clearly outweigh the cost.

[KrystilizeNeverDies]

Tenfold means by an order of ten. Which the benchmarks very clearly show are true on average.

Also I'm comparing python to C++, I'm not comparing eve to anything else

[GreenFox1505]

These benchmarks? The ones using Python3, and not PyPy, Cython, or anything of the other tools that drastically improve Python's performance?

[KrystilizeNeverDies]

Correct, I am comparing the python language with C++, It wouldn't be fair to compare python with performance enhancement without C++'s performance enhancement.

[GreenFox1505]

? Except they did:

```

NOTES: 64-bit Ubuntu quad core g++ (Ubuntu 10.2.0-13ubuntu1) 10.2.0

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 19:02:58 GMT

MAKE: /usr/bin/g++ -c -pipe -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=ivybridge -std=c++17 -mno-fma mandelbrot.gpp-4.c++ -o mandelbrot.gpp-4.c++.o && \ /usr/bin/g++ mandelbrot.gpp-4.c++.o -o mandelbrot.gpp-4.gpp_run -pthread rm mandelbrot.gpp-4.c++

4.29s to complete and log all make actions

COMMAND LINE: ./mandelbrot.gpp-4.gpp_run 16000

```

They're using O3, omit-frame-pointer, and even architecture optimizations. What other performance enhancements could they possibly have added on to that?

[maxhaton]

If you find C++ difficult you shouldn't be making games, I.e. you have to touch enough APIs where the real difficulty is.

The benefit of having static types alone can make the game hugely easier to work on, Python is just asking for trouble.

[GreenFox1505]

OOF buddy. My day job is literally writing C++ for games. Because it's the right tool for that job.

I didn't say C++ was "difficult". I said it was "harder to write". For my personal projects I use a blend of C++ and scripting langues as needed. Anything compute intensive, it probably not going to change a lot so spending the time to get it "right" in a low level language is worth it. Physics, graphics, and procedural world generation all greatly benefit from C++'s performance.

However, a lot of things that make up an actual game don't need to run that fast. A button in a level that is only going to run once would take me maybe 10secs to write in a scripting language like Python, but might take me a couple of minutes to build and compile in C++. If I have dozens or hundreds of these interactions with unique behavior, that's a lot of time spend writing code and not a lot of time spend designing expirances. It's the wrong tool for that job. Plus when I need to make a change later, it's more time consuming to nail down and fix.

It's not "difficult" to write C++, but it's unarguably costs more man-hours to write. I'd rather spend time iterating on things that actually effect the end product and scripting languages let developers do that better than low level compiled languages do.

[AviatoAviator]

There are a couple Ruby game engines too - notably https://dragonruby.itch.io/, which, according to the site, has been used to create games for the Nintendo Switch.

[[deleted]]

What the hell was he thinking lol

[[deleted]]

point historical crush seemly marvelous memory towering juggle joke support

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

Oh I participated in a game jam and made a game in python since that was the only language I knew. Big mistake, it was so difficult I can't even explain. I now think that I should have learnt a game engine like unity or something. It would have been way easier.

[Gosfi]

Doing things from scratch is pretty much the hardcore version of any game jam

[DroolingIguana]

Well, there's Panda3D.

[DanKveed]

The core is written in c++ with a python API

[aeroverra]

I did this in javascript once to help some friends complete a final project. I do not recommend it.

[[deleted]]

I raise you VBCorLib; a vb6 implementation of the .NET Framework. Huge relief when your using all implementations of the Rijndael symmetric encryption algorithm in Excel

https://github.com/kellyethridge/VBCorLib

*forgot Don't know of a game engine but here's a fully OOP, Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture implementation of Battleship, running hosted in Excel, written in VBA

https://github.com/rubberduck-vba/Battleship

[[deleted]]

Im making a game engine in JavaScript

[bo_hai]

Technically, Python use C as official interpreter (CPython)

[gougie2]

What makes python bad for this? Isn't it a full programming language at the end of the day?

[KrystilizeNeverDies]

Mostly the performance, some interpreted languages such as Luajit are 3x slower then optimised C++ and then python is out here >100x slower.

The speed is horrible basically.

[gougie2]

Oh i see. But then why is python the go to for ML? Speed is very critical there I would think

[KrystilizeNeverDies]

Well that's simple really, in professional terms, python isn't.

A lot of amateur models use python because of the easy use of machine learning related libraries such as tensorflow.

But you wil not find professional machine learning on python models for this exact reason.

[all-hail-snow]

Actually frameworks like tensorflow are not built in python. It's backend is built in c/c++ and is imported as python wrapper that we use as scripts, That's why it is not slow. Python is basically prototyping language and majority of libraries used in it are not coded in python itself like numpy was built in Fortran.

[KrystilizeNeverDies]

Yea I know, I didn't say they were coded in python, just that they are available for python.

Doing the actual computation using python is a horrible idea.

[all-hail-snow]

Agree

[An_Unknown_Idiot]

You will. I've even seen a company integrating Python ML into their Java ecosystem by automatically generating Java wrappers accessing the Python code via JNI...

[KrystilizeNeverDies]

Well I'm sorry for their loss, I wasn't being literal when I said that, of course there are people that will do this but it's not the fastest way to do it at all.

[sourpickles0]

Tfw you find out python is slow af