> Lord,
>
> I suspect which language you use is much less important than the tools
> you use to make a professional game. The bar is very high and one
> person, or even a small team, cannot make all the tools needed. Many
> of those tools are purchase from 3rd parties for significant sums. At
> least, that's true for the games that you mentioned. Also, quality of
> game play is more important that the language it's written in, which
> is a skill that takes years to learn by practice and failure and lots
> of testing. For now, Smalltalk does not link to these tools very well.
> Most are file based which is not so compatible with Smalltalk's image.
> Managing large art content files and large quantities of them is
> required which might put a strain on Smalltalk's memory management.
> Professional games us a lot of tricks at the compiler level and code
> architecture level to squeeze every bit of optimization at the expense
> of ease of programming.

I spoke about actual VM or Strongtalk because the speed of the VM for
this things.

>
> Smalltalk's strength is that it's easy to change, but that may be a
> weakness here. Often in professional games, you don't want the games
> easy to change by the players because the temptation to cheat is too
> large.

I disagree. I know very goods games writen in python (ospace.net for
example. The web is down now). Or python bindings for 3D engines, like
Panda3D, or pyogre for OGRE3D. And, as all you say, squeak/smalltalk
is faster than python

>
> If you have a game where it's good for the player to change the code,
> then you may have an advantage with Smalltalk over other games.
>

I'm not thinking in develop a game (at the moment). Only I asked to
myself about this, thinking in croquet but without collaboration.
Croquet is a collaborative "space", I was talking about a
solo/multiplayer game.

I think smalltalk is great (well, forgot all the C/C++-VB-.NET-Java
developers tells about it). And with an opengl bindings, ("easy" to
do), and a "framework" upon it (not too easy), would be possible
develop great games. With the croquet tools, the work about MDL files
for example, are done, And Alice3D with Maxis in collaboration, would
be a good tool. ODE is openSource and could be ported (well, but it's
done i think) and Sound is done too. Multiplayer layer works (see
Croquet) and Blender is the better opensource 3D suite, with scripts
in python (easy to write an export to "squeak" files for example).
Thinking in this, all the low layer, seems to be done, but, What about
the speed?.

I tried yesterday a "simple" application, BottomFeeder, writen in
VisualWorks, and is slow. Then, a Game will be more slow than this.

My knowledge about smalltalk is very low. I'm learning at slow steps
because I don't have much time, but I'm ambitious. And I'm looking the
Squeak's steps like an eagle :)

Cheers.

-- 
::Mi blog::
http://blog.lordzealon.com

Linux-User: #370919