Why dose noone make games in fortran? 1

[tomdacat]

this may be a stupid question and i can understand if you think so
but in modern fortran(f08) why cant you make games?
and as fortran has graphics libarys i dont see why it cant do the same as a language like c
c is my joinet favrote language with fortran and i havent yet spotted any major things it has
that fortran dosent apart from it has many many more libarys and more tutoirals

so dose anyone here think its possible to make comercial games in fortran
thanks in advance!!!

 

[tomdacat]

Also I am posting this under the assumption that most pepole think you cant make games im fortran!!!

 

[xwb]

F08 is still quite new: not all the major vendors have caught up yet. Of the free compilers only gfortran supports it. Silverfrost is still on F95/F03. Yes, you can make a commercial game in Fortran but what you have to think about is

1) development: how easy is it to find someone to help you with project development
2) maintenance: how easy is it to find someone to take over the project when you want to move to something else
3) animation libraries: how easy is it to interface with these

You can make games in any language but you have to find people who speak it like you do in order to use it in a multi-person project. Hardly any games nowadays are single person projects.

 

[FJacq]

I wrote few 2D graphic games in Fortran when I was rather young (around 1985). The language was Fortran-77 at that time, and I used the graphical library delivered with the compiler (watcom ?). I remember having written few low level routines calling BIOS interrupt functions to address the screen memory directly in order to increase the speed of the game, but don't forget that the clock frequency was only 12Mhz on my Amstrad PC which had only 1 Mbyte of memory and just a VGA screen (640x480 256 colors).

François Jacq

 

[xwb]

I remember those - mine were done around 76/77 in a weird dialect of Fortran which the vendor called Fortran V. You had to specify how much stack to allocate for recursion. It was basically character graphics on a mini-computer using ASCII codes for cursor addressing.

There was also the text based game called collosal cave which did its rounds on all the PDPs and VAXes and the famous lunar lander where someone invariably crashed into the hot dog stand.