What programming language is used for video games?

Question

What kind of languages and IDEs are used to develop video games? like Xbox 360 games?

Are they OOP?

Thanks.

UPDATE: Great answers guys, I am sorry I can only mark 1 as answer, you have all provided great feedback!

Answer 1

C++, mainly. Xbox 360, more C# with XNA. Yes, they are OOP. IDEs, mostly Visual Studio where these languages themselves are concerned.

Answer 2

One of the more modern tool is XNA Game development studio for XBOX. This tool allows you to code games using the C# language and is fully object oriented.

Answer 3

It's mainly C++ (or C# with XNA), and Visual Studio for the IDE. Both C++ and C# are object-oriented languages.

Answer 4

http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/articles/video-game-programming-languages.htm

Answer 5

Lua is also quite popular for scripting - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language).

Answer 6

It really depends on the engine.

A lot of engines are written in C++, but the language used either is brewed in a scripting language or it's like the native code.

To give some examples Ogre uses C++ both as an engine and programming and Unreal is written in C++ but as game language it uses UnrealScript.

Answer 7

The vast majority of console games are written in C++, often with some kind of scripting language (such as Lua or Python or a custom solution) for scripting higher level game logic.

You can use C# and XNA to make 360 games, but generally most people are using C++ on that platform. If nothing else, you'd have trouble if you wrote an XBLA game in C# then the publisher decided they wanted a PS3 version, for example.

For smaller platforms, like the DS, C or C++ are still the main languages, but you might get a bit of assembler too for low level code. Similarly, you'll often find intrinsics being used for SSE or Altivec optimizations on larger platforms - so it's not just pure, portable C++.

Answer 8

Have a look at this previous SO question that lists a number of Games development frameworks that you may find useful:

whats the best .net game development framework

Answer 9

On the engine side, it's usually a mix of C++ and a scripting engine that uses either in house language or a popular scripting engine like Lua.

Also languages like C, C# (XNA, Mono + Unity), Objective C, Java are used, but are far less popular than C++ and certainly are used very (very) little in AAA titles.

On the tooling side the use of languages is more diversified and modern OO languages like C# or dynamic languages like Python have started to see more use.

Answer 10

Agree with C++ Also bits of inline assembler or custom assembler/intrinsics for PSP/PS3

Also don't forget pixel/vertex shader ops - usually Cg. Very important :)

Answer 11

Lua is getting real popular for Video games... !!! though the base language remains same as C++