Viability of C#/.NET as the new standard game dev platform?

Question

For a long time now C++ has been the dominate game development language. Many AAA quality 3D engines are available to fit any budget.

My question is, with the rise of XNA, has C# and the .NET framework been positioned well enough to take over as the new standard game development platform? Obviously the inherent cross-platform nature of the XNA framework (Windows, Xbox, Zune) has its benefits, but are those benefits good enough to entice large game dev studios to switch gears?

Personally, i am torn between using C#/XNA for a new project, and using Java via jMonkeyEngine. I have a great desire to have my game be portable to multiple platforms, and the only languages i know well enough to accomplish this are C# and Java. i would love to see an implementation of the XNA codebase that is powered by OpenGL and would run on Mono, but i think that is merely wishful thinking at this point.

I am curious to hear what others have experienced while building 3D games in something other than C++.

Answer 1

I think C++ will go out of fashion in the next 10 years just the same way as assembly did. I'm a professional game programmer for more the 15 years. In early 90's lot of people said that C is not efficient enough for games. In the late 90's same people said that C is OK but C++ is just way too slow for performance critical applications such as games. Now C++ is the standard high performance language and people argue that other languages would be too slow. In the meantime today's games use script languages like Lua, Python or Unrealscript for game logic which are ten times slower than C# or Java.

C++ is much faster when you do math in your game. Doing linear algebra is painfully slow in C# or Java. However, this is only a part (10 - 25%) of the game. When it comes to the game logic bottleneck is memory access so using an other language does not reduce the performance significantly. The tool side of the game, which use to be the 50-80% of the code, really does not require any C++. It happily runs in C# which is fast enough for almost any tool.

One also should not forget that C++ is derived from C, which is made in the early 70's. So C++ is obsolete in many ways. The most annoying thing is probably the pre-processor which kills transparency and causes insanely long compile times. An average state of art C++ game engine compiles in 30-60 minutes. In such time you could compile every C# and Java project ever made by humans. Lack of self reflection and dynamic code creation is also a drawback. It often costs a lot of development time to overcome on these shortcomings.

Nevertheless C++ development costs a lot it would cost even more for a game studio to risk a failure by switching to a new technology which is not yet proven in game development. It is also an important factor that majority of experienced game programmers use only C/C++ and they do not have experience with other languages which would definitely increase the risk of switching. Because of these, you probably will not see game studios in the next couple of years switching to C#. However, it is likely that a Microsoft owned studio will make a big hit with a C# game in the next 5 years which will convince other studios that it is feasible to make AAA titles in C# and then you will see more and more studios switching to C#.

For now, my advice is: If you want to make an AAA multi-platform title you have no other choice than C++ for the runtime part of the game. Consider using C# for the tool side. It's a little bit tricky to efficiently connect managed and unmanaged code but on long run it worth the effort you spend on it. If you do a hobby project or a B title where performance is less important than development cost/time then forget C++ and just use C# for everything and spend some extra time to optimize the math.

Answer 2

The large gaming studios will probably not adopt XNA any time soon. Some indies are using it, but definitely has the potential to eventually be very successful and leave C++ behind.

XNA provides many classes that you can use in game development, but many others often choose to use a fully fledged games engine. Although XNA is rather good for beginner's to cut their teeth on if you are new to programming games.

C# is a good language to use for games development. Games development produces applications that require sound, advanced graphics, AI, Physics, etc. All that requires a powerful and fairly quick language environment. While most of the top tier PC and console games are written in C++, C# has a road map that will likely leave C++ behind. The coming changes in C++0x will no doubt reinvigorate C++ for a little while but C# looks poised to overtake it.

If you really want to be a games developer I would urge you to at least learn C++ and write your own game engine. Using a pre-made game engine is easy and you can code something that is 'okay' but you will run into many limitations that you won't be able to code around. You will effectively be confined to the capabilities of the game engine (unless you have access to the source, which you could then modify to your liking).

Learn C++ and preferably OpenGL :) Once you know OpenGL you can learn DirectX pretty easily.

C# is a piece of cake once you know C++.

Answer 3

While some time ago XNA Professional was announced, Microsoft now seems to focus on the Express edition (though it lost the "Express" in the name), and that seems to be aimed at the hobbyist market rather than the commercial market. Among other things, this largely benefits the XBox 360 community, because they now allow hobbyist developers to develop their games for Windows and XBox 360 and then to sell their games on the XBox network, and that is a good thing.

I'd really love to see XNA gaining momentum in the professional world, but this won't happen unless it's available for the other major gaming platforms (PS3 and Wii). The problem is not only the XNA framework / API, it's the language / framework requirement, so you can't even write the game in C# and then use XNA on Microsoft platforms and OpenGL on other platforms.

The performance profile of XNA is also aimed at the hobbyist market rather than commercial, though the performance seems to be quite good and there are impressive demos out in the wild.

Edit:

If your question is actually "should I use XNA now for my project with a budget much less than a million", my answer is definitely yes. Go try it out, it's free. And it's powerful.

Answer 4

I worked at a place called Newfire in the late 90's. Before funding ran dry, we had an engine that could render an immersive world that was 10,000 square km with a resolution of 10 cm. You could get a huge number of players in at once and persistently deform the landscape. This engine ran at frame rate on a P200 with a Voodoo 2 card.

Most of the engine was written in carefully tuned C++. All the game code was written in C or C++ or Java. I also had prototype code that could define object behaviors using a push down automata that could do very decent AI. It took nearly no CPU time. The execution of game logic was dwarfed by rendering.

At one point, I had a demo of Conway's Game of Life running in Java using our software renderer. The cells were cubes laid in a plane which appeared or disappeared and changed color as they aged more generations. While the game was running with a fixed generation rate of 4 generations per second, the 3D display was running at 20+ FPS, again on a P200 with the software renderer.

So the answer is not definitely C++. The answer, like any problem domain, is the language that works the best within that domain. C++ works well in that domain for the rendering engine, but for the actual game logic and rules, lots of languages work well. Python is great. C# is great. Java is great.