4 ms·

Shitty development language and no iOS support. No thanks.

• thoradam 15y ago
  What is your preferred language for simple, cross-platform game development?
  • nixarn 15y ago
    Well sure there's no silver bullet here. But still doesn't make me like Java more. C# works well for Unity and it's a better language than Java. Another alternative would maybe me Lua and go the Corona SDK route. Corona SDK looks quite nice and supports iOS & Android. I'd find it more exciting with something else besides Java, even Dart would make me more excited about it.
  • moonchrome 15y ago
    C#/Mono with Unity, or just plain Mono/.NET. Unlike this it's actually cross platform (ie. you can use it on iOS, Android, all desktops, browsers via plugin, and the consoles), it's been used/tested by many companies, it comes with development tools, etc. If I want a HTML5 game I'll write JavaScript or CoffeeScript, it's going to have wildly different performance characteristics over other platforms anyway. Java sucks for game development, eg. no operator overloading or value types, it's insanely verbose, and this uses GWT to compile down to JS anyway so it's not going to get any performance benefits from being written in Java over JS.
    • bermanoid 15y ago
      browsers via plugin Avoiding a browser plugin is precisely the reason anyone would ever go with something like this. As for writing plain old Javascript or CoffeeScript, I'd be all for it in principle, but the game libraries are still a bunch of fairly weak offerings, at least when it comes to general-purpose game middleware. I'm not sure if PlayN is much better feature-wise, but if you're planning to target Android anyways (and hence get your hands dirty with a bunch of Java code), I can definitely see value doing it through PlayN to get a browser version "for free". Doubly so if you've already got a lot of experience and tooling set up for doing games in Java (probably for Android). Also, PlayN is not exactly unused/untested: Angry Birds for Chrome uses it (http://chrome.angrybirds.com/ http://chrome.angrybirds.com/), and it seems very solid. It's a huge testament to the quality of GWT's compiler that they pretty much cut and pasted JBox2d into PlayN (IIRC they only had to alter a couple of threading-related classes when they brought it in) and it performed on par with the Javascript ports, despite the fact that the port was written exclusively with desktop Java in mind.
      • nailer 15y ago
        > Avoiding a browser plugin is precisely the reason anyone would ever go with something like this. There's already WebGL exporters for Unity made by the J3D (which is JS, not Java) team. I'd be surprised if Unity weren't doing something official. > Angry Birds for Chrome uses it (http://chrome.angrybirds.com/ http://chrome.angrybirds.com/), and it seems very solid. My experience (2010 Macbook Air, latest Chrome) differs from yours.
  • larubbio 15y ago
    Additionally you can look at Moai. (http://getmoai.com http://getmoai.com) It allows you to write your game logic in Lua and compiles to Android, Native Client and iOS. There also is a hosted cloud that allows you to write your game's backend logic in Lua (I work for Zipline Games and head up the cloud development team)
    • rogerbraun 15y ago
      Wow! This looks really good! I always wanted to try out Lua, maybe this is a good reason to do so.
  • rogerbraun 15y ago
    Mine would have been Javascript.
• afsina 15y ago
  What do you think they would use? Objective C? O_o