hey, I understand that the hardware, middleware, libraries and C++ is maturing... But it is not new. I am not criticising anything, and please dont take the word 'stagnant' as negetive.
All I want to say is, we are not creating anything new, just maturing the existing things. (and that may be a good thing). I am just pointing it out.

As for the id tech 6 and 7, (unreal engine 6, and put anything future), I just asked that if we are going to use existing(vigourosly maturing) things like C++11/opengl or something like x ??

I seriously doubt any of these languages/libraries will ever become obsolete or unused in the future, especially C++

Even if better languages or tools come out, C++ has been the standard for a long time, and will always be used to some extent whether for educational purposes or for implementations


What do you want these "stagnant" innovations to do that they currently cannot accomplish? Why are you so hungry for some new tool or language to pop out and replace them?

Why are you so hungry for some new tool or language to pop out and replace them?

That's a good point -- regardless of whether a new tool appears in the future, it's of great benefit for you to still study the tools that we have now.

e.g. We (almost) never write assembly any more, but the few guys in the office who can write assembly are extremely useful to have around when you've got a difficult debugging problem -- they can look at the assembly (output from your C++ code) as it's running on the CPU, look at the raw memory in hex-dumps, etc, and see whats going on at a completely different level, offering new insights to you.

Yes, just like learning assembly language. It isn't of practical use anymore, but it can provide a better knowledge to how the computer is really managing data and processing it, enabling the user to better manipulate and create what they want through the higher level languages.

That is why i think C++ will never truely die. It isn't overly abstract and doesn't hide ALL the details and allows a somewhat lower level control (correct me if I'm wrong)

I think the best thing that can be said here is this: We never truely understand where we are going until we understand where we have been.

There's rocket packs and flying cars, too, if you have the money.

GPU's are getting more and more powerful, pushing the boundaries and limits of what seemed to be impossible a year or two ago. I don't think the game industry has reached a point of stagnation. That said, frameworks that decrease the amount of time spent on development are usually adopted by companies and don't change for some time because it's expensive and often deemed unreasonable by other departments. I'd also like to add that algorithm's that work are here to stay. Companies like CAE still use the C flight simulator written from specs in the 70's because it works. Why change a winning formula?

How come noone mentioned HTML5 and browser technologies? That if something is a breath of fresh air to game developement. Taking the games straight to the browser, for easy access.

The industry is very different then it was 15 years ago but, IMHO, the next 15 years are going to be even more exciting.

HTML5.
WinRT/Metro
"Cloud Stream" games (OnLive/Gaikai).
Explosion of gaming platforms (phone, tablet, GPS watches, Google Glasses).

Today I can interface my shoes with my PC/phone ( http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/training/nike-plus-training?rh=true ). This is begging for a platform game.
They're currently testing self-driving cars. What sort of games will people want to play in their cars with all the free time they now have?

If you're having a bad day, or you're "heads down" concentrating on a single project, it might feel stagnant. But take a look around, we're heading into the Diamond Age of gaming. [font="helvetica, arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif"][size="2"][color="#282828"] [/font]

--- Posting this from work, so I'll give my company a plug ;) ---
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"I work for GarageGames, home of the award winning line of Torque engines and a [/font][font=arial, sans-serif]

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of more than 150,000 independent game developers. Learn more about us at [/font]garagegames.com[font=arial, sans-serif]

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I think that the issue is simply that everything we have is built off of something and always will be. Every modern computer we have will always have the base machine code as Hodgman pointed out. I think the sense is that we have so much that is built off of an old foundation, and that we could make an entirely new foundation that would work better, but how could we get to that point without what we have now? Why not a computer that doesn't run on electricity whatsoever? With our current computer design, it would be impossible. Every device requires an energy source. A pencil is useless without the energy to use it. If you keep going back, every new thing was built off of a pre-existing concept. At one point there had to be absolutely nothing, so how do we go from nothing to an entire universe? How do we go from nothing to gravity, to chemicals? Chemicals that exist in our very computers today.

By all of this logic the universe has been stagnant for its entire existence. You could say that every game we have existed billions of years ago as just as scattered atoms. Either way, it came from something that was already in existence. I mean we could go back and start from scratch and redesign the way a computer works, but right now, this is what we have.

You all rock with good answers....

So to conclude myself, we will not be changing the basic tools of trade, but changing the methods and way 'how we do a problem'.... that sounds gold.
I would say to myself that the usage of C++ will not decline, but grow with new platforms..

What I liked the most is the example of a screwdriver.
I guess that id tech 6 or 7(put anything there) would also use C++.