Quote:
Originally Posted by rodroth
What program language(s) is the army builder made in?
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All of our products are written entirely in C++. Well, OK, there is a tiny smattering of C sprinkled in there, but that's merely because that code is *really* old. :-)
We use Visual C++, but we could just as easily use a different flavor of C++. There are a few places where we are tied to Microsoft's syntactic rules, but they could be easily revamped to another tool.
We don't use DirectX. The reason is two-fold. First, we don't need any 3D graphics, so we can use the standard Windows API directly for stuff. Second, DirectX has traditionally been a hugely bloated pig that would have limited the computers on which AB will run. All of the skin handling in our product is done using the 2D Windows API.
We actually rely very little on the built-in Windows mechanisms for visuals. Except for Edit controls, we do virtually everything ourselves. The reason we did this was also two-fold. First, we could do stuff visually with AB that Windows didn't support internally, which was a much bigger factor back in the Win9x days. Second, we could much more readily port AB to another platform - we had planned to port to the Mac for a long time, but could never carve out sufficient time to do it. Now that new versions of Windows have lots of abilities built in and the Mac has switched to Intel (allowing fast VMs), doing everything ourselves is sometimes more limiting than beneficial, but it helped us in the early years of AB.
I hope this little bit of history proves interesting to some of you... :-)