Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!greg_labrec@interactive.sony.com
From: jamin1@psu.edu (Jamin Frederick)
Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.freetalk
Subject: object-oriented support?
Date: Sun, 29 Jun 1997 17:54:59 GMT
Organization: SCEA Net Yaroze News
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To Chris Blackwell:

	I took a look at your page with concerns for Sony's lack of
support for C++ programming.  I also like using C++ very much, and it
seems very natural to incorporate it into video games, since it offers
such rich relationships among objects, and video game objects have
very distinct conceptual boundaries, very fun to abstract!
	However, since I'm very new to video game programming, I
haven't got far enough to worry about larger-scale relationships among
objects, I've been trying just to get things displayed properly and
the library functions worked out.  But once I start to figure out what
I'm doing, and it comes time to create the game world and the objects,
I can see where I'd really miss the advantages of object-oriented
programming.
	The obvious reason I've been avoiding C++ is that its
supposedly not supported, and I'd also like to know why!  Is there
really that much loss of performance, and must games be programmed
using a large number of global variables (sort of the opposite of
object-oriented paradigm)?  I HAVE been using a large number of global
variables, but it seems that once the game world starts to become more
complex, they will become enormously hard to maintain (i.e., having to
remember what each global variable stands for, for every event in the
game is not an easy thing to do -- object encapsulation gets rid of
this problem...).
	Does anyone know the details behind Sony's reasoning, or is
there really no fair technical reason that C++ and object-oriented
programming should not be supported?


Jamin Frederick