To be honest: In the meantime while we talk in the forums you could have learned C++ via tutorials above (given the case you already have some programming knowledge).

Often we are just too lazy and seek for excuses.

Yeah time spent leaning is good...I recently started leaning back C++...If u wanna be a programmer for the most part of ur life then ur safe bet is C++..If u dont believe then go check here the programmer job requirements in the big studios :-

http://www.gamedev.net/directory/careers/default.asp?occupationid=4

That said,my first and last engine love is gamestudio..It is so powerful yet so easy to grasp...I just wait for the day a mainstream game is released in Gamestudio and then all GS programmers get hired in id software jk

yes, i do know a couple other programming languages; mainly C++.

Quote:

---

As long as SED crashes with debug information and error messages are not handled back to SED you will not feel as comfortable as you feel in a standard development environment.

---

the crashes are only with specific errors, and aside from those the error messages given are generally very useful and quite specific.

even then, A7 is fairly easy to use with other programming languages too.

i'm not trying to say "choose A7 over C4" because i couldn't care less. i'm just trying to be useful for anyone who comes across this thread and this decision by summarising the thread -- great for artists, but A7 is more useful for programmers. if a programmer really wants to dive into the C++ nuts and bolts A7 and C4 both give you good options, but i can't compare them because no one here who uses C4 seems to use it for its C++.

just one other note as i was scanning through this thread again:

Quote:

---

But since Lite-C also forces you to use pointers and structs the gap between Lite-C and C++ became smaller.

---

lite-C does not force you to use pointers and structs. it does not make anything more difficult than C-script. the only hard part is getting used to the little differences if you were already a proficient C-scripter.

julz

I rendered a few of my models and textures in C4 and I like it more and more.

Here is a machine of mine:




and another one:




And here is a test of one of my textures with different rendering modes:


normal-mapping:




parallax-mapping:




horizon-mapping:




Last one is impressive. It is better than parallax. It casts even shadows from materials on materials (self-shadowing) only from height map.

I will do some more experimenting with it. But up to now I am really impressed by the amount of lighting options, the optimized OpenGL shaders and the scene-management.
A quality demo with huge amount of details per zone should be possible there.

the last pic is incredible, indeed, you can almost feel the structure of the box. never heard about horizon mapping, though, something i must have missed.

http://research.microsoft.com/~cohen/bs.pdf

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7126602.html

And even an old pdf from siggraph 2005 / ATI mentions horizon mapping among many other techniques:
http://ati.amd.com/developer/SIGGRAPH05/Tatarchuk-ParallaxOcclusionMapping-Sketch-print.pdf

What are your FPS Frank ? Images do look pretty impressive.

Why_Do_I_Die:
I am afraid I cannot answer this sufficiently. Up to now I always had fps at my monitor frequency. So I think I did not produce any heavy FPS hungry scenes so far. But I will do in the future.

I checked another of my machines in C4. I tweaked the amount of light reflections a bit more this time with some micro-facet options of the shader. Very interesting stuff. It is really fun because you can do it in the material editor and see changes in real-time in your scene:

A tree with normal-mapping, shadow and alpha-test for transparency: