Hi guys, I am creating a baseball simulator game and need to figure out what languages I should learn. I took a year of computer science in HS long ago and learned basic/intermediate htm/asp/vbscript/SQL to create a few dynamic websites 3 years ago (a fundraiser site and a fan poll that took weekly ballots and compiled the results). But I remember back then that there were some disadvantages with asp, so I am pretty sure I am going php this time around. I am also interested in ajax and seeing what that can do for me (please bear with me and understand that I am still learning what a lot of this means). I guess my main question today is what would be a good backend language to run the game simulation? The games will simulate at scheduled times, and there initially won't be any mid-game user input. All user input will be due in before the scheduled time. Any thoughts? Thanks!
I think PHP would be a good choice for a baseball simulator that doesn't have many graphics. Someone has probably coded one already that you could use as inspiration
Online games are developed using several different technologies and languages. One example is Flash and ActionScript. I am sure you have seen or even played the thousands of Flash-based games on the web. Another is Java via an embedded Java Applet. Many online casinos use this technology. There are other choices of course, depends on your requirements. Good luck. Here is an excellent resource, check out the samples: http://www.microsoft.com/express/samples/gamecreators/default.aspx
Thanks for the responses. I think the first generation of my game is going not going to be graphics-based. The only graphical display would be a baseball diamond indicating what bases have runners. Something like this: The plays would be text-based (eg, "Barry Bonds grounds out to 3B Alex Rodriguez (5-3)"). The thing I'm most worried about is efficiency, as I would like to be able to run a lot of games simultaneously. Is there any efficiency difference between languages?
Well PHP is the winner in terms of speed, however it's not exactly A+ when it comes to handling a lot of requests. The thing with PHP is that although it might come under stress a tad bit easier, the other benefits like speed, ease of use, portability, etc. all outweigh it's minor disadvantages. Just don't go with Ruby Or Python (unless maybe mod_python), those suck at performance
Great info, thanks. Can you expand on the requests problem, because the eventual goal of my site is to host a couple hundred users, so if there is going to be problems with that I might have to rethink things.
Well it depends on the server you're hosting your website on. If you're running a shared server with other people then the efficiency of PHP is not so great compared to languages like Perl. However, if you're expecting only a couple hundred users, that's not much at all. You only start running into problems with around 10,000+ users.