Programming - Learning C# by Programming Games - page 20

Assembly— Confusingly enough, the file containing the intermediate code
is called an assembly . However, this has nothing to do with the Assembler
languages we have discussed earlier in this chapter.
2.5 Programming Games
We have discussed many different programming languages in this chapter, and
games can be programmed in almost any programming language. However, some
languages are better suited for programming games than others. In this section,
we are going to have a look what makes games so special and—very generally
speaking—how we go about programming games.
2.5.1 Games Are Special Programs
Games are quite complicated programs to write. They deal with a lot of different in-
put and output devices and the imaginary worlds that games create can be extremely
complex. One of the main challenges when developing games is making sure that
the game works with all the different graphics cards, sound cards, joysticks, game
pads, motion trackers, network connections, and so on.
Up until the beginning of the 1990s, games were developed for specific plat-
forms. For example, a game written for a particular console could not be used on
any other console without major efforts from the programmers to adapt the game
program to the differing hardware. For PC games, this effect was even worse. Nowa-
days, operating systems provide a hardware abstraction layer so that programs do
not have to deal with all the different types of hardware that can be inside a com-
puter. But at that time, each game needed to provide their own drivers for each
graphics card and sound card. So when you went into the shop to buy a game, you
were never sure that the game would actually run on your computer. As a result,
not a lot of code written for a particular game could be reused for another game. In
the 1980s, arcade games were very popular, but most of the code written for these
games could never be reused because of the constant changes and improvements in
computer hardware.
2.5.2 Game Engines
As games were getting more and more complex, it made sense for the game com-
panies to start reusing code from earlier games. Why write an entirely new render-
ing program or collision checking program for each game? The term game engine