Programming language

[Noer]

What programming language was used or is used nowadays in game development?

for example if anyone knows what was the language used to create baldur's gate, icewind dale...?

What's the language used for Pillars?

In other games like League of Legends? Diablo III? Any infos / guess?

[Yellow Rabbit]

I'm not a developer and my knowledge is pretty vague, but as far as I know most games architecturally divided to engine handling rendering/os interactions/other low-mid-level stuff and game scripts telling the engine what to render. For engine development most sense would make C/C++ with few asm injections here and there. And shaders having their own magic. What language will be used for scripting (i.e. to actually build the game) on said engine depends on engine author's liking. Could be anything.

 

PoE's engine is Unity, which requires either C#, JavaScript or Boo for scripting. Though I'm not sure if someone really uses the last two.

[Elerond]

Language that is used depends lots on platform/s and goals that you have for the game.

 

C/C++ are popular in engine programming because they are efficient languages and have good access to hardware

 

Java is sometimes used because of its cross-platform abilities, although one can't make as efficient programs and platform specific things are much harder if not impossible to use, which of course don't prevent one to make popular games like Minecraft with it. Java is reliant to Java Virtual Machine or some other virtual machine which can interpret Java bytecode for the computer.

 

In web platforms JavaScript and other ECMAScript variants like ActionScript for Adove/Apache Flex (flash) are popular for both engine programming and scripting.

 

Many commercial engines use their own languages for scripting, but they are often influenced heavily by C++/Java/Python/Lua/(Visual/Quick)Basic 

 

But overall imperative programming languages are most popular with very large margin in game coding, and in most cases when you learn one imperative programming language you can learn another with relative fast.

 

C++ is very good language to learn, although it isn't easiest especially if you want to make some other than command line programs.

C# and Java are easier to learn and with them it is much easier to produce flashier programs (including games) at first, although low end programming may be painful learn after you have used to their easiness (that is what is told to me by people who started their coding with these languages, I myself can't comment as I started coding with C and QuickBasic)

 

Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale use Infinity Engine which is in my understanding programmed mainly with C/C++ and it uses its own scripting language.

 

Pillars of Eternity use as said previously Unity as it's engine, which is coded mainly by my understanding C/C++ and its default scripting is done by using as said previously C#, JavaScript and Boo using Mono (open source variant of MS .Net framework) framework.

 

League of Legends uses at least these languages  C++ (the core game is written in this), Lua (core game), C# (game tools), ActionScript (game hud and pvp.net), Java (platform servers), Erlang (platform servers), Php/sql (web team / platform). Information is based on what one of their developers said in their forums.

 

But if you want learn game programming I would say don't get hung with any one language, but instead learn paradigms and ideologies behind programming then you have easier time to jump from language to another with little work which gives you ability to use most efficient language for any given task instead of trying to bent one language to task which it was not designed.

 

Also understanding computer graphics is very important thing in game programming and also understanding network programming (at least what problems and limitations it brings) is probably in these days quite useful to know.