by PointOfLight » May 29, 2006 @ 7:20pm
mmtbb,
First of all, I'd like to say thanks for your breakdown of the various languages / tools for PPC programming. You've clearly put a lot of time into this. I'd like to just offer a couple of clarifications / ask a couple of questions about it.
1. Programming C++ on the PPC - what tool would you use to do that? Short of writing the code in a text editor, I didn't think there was anything available for actually compiling code on the PPC.
2. C# Game Programming - I don't know how far along the support is, but I believe GapiDraw is building C# support into the latest releases of their product. Of course, there's a potentially hefty fee to go along with this, but it should make game development easier. Also, you can use the Edge library with C# if your target is WM2003 and above (I'm not sure if this supports WM2002 or not).
3. NSBasic and game development - from a "professional" standpoint, game development is nearly impossible with this tool. Unless you're going to write an ActiveX wrapper, the use of Game APIs such as PocketHAL, GapiDraw or Edge is impossible, and the native PictureBox control isn't going to cut it. Even the ASpriteCE control isn't a viable option since it is no longer supported.
4. NSBasic development on the PPC - yes it is easy, but development between the PPC and PC is not compatible, so once you start working on a project on the PPC there's no going back.
5. PPL and visual forms coding - there are a couple of things (one old, one relatively new) that can help in this department. One of the newest versions of the PIDE supports object events that work more like Visual Basic. I don't believe this ever made it to public beta, but it's a cool feature. That's the new one. If you look in the lib directory of PPL, there are several files with a _lib extension (for example, combobox_lib.ppl). Many of these were authored by myself and tweaked out over time by kornalius and others, but all of them are designed to make working with their respective objects much easier. It's still not as friendly as NSBasic, I'll admit, but I think everything else that PPL offers more than makes up for this slight inconvenience.
I hope this has been of some use to you.