OT - Kind of

[chewy027]

This is a question for all you computer programers out there. How hard would it be to program a game of SE4's magnitude?, and how much experience would be needed to do something like that?

[Suicide Junkie]

I'd say "very" and "lots".

Aaron started (AFAIK) with SE I, way way back in the dim history of computers (anybody know the year?). Each iteration added experience, and hard work, and lots of time.

[ZeroAdunn]

Depends on what sort of resources you had, if you had a team, it wouldn't be to hard (still hard but it wouldn't be as hard as) if you only had one guy working on it, very hard. It can also depend on the equipment, there are various programs that help ease programming. And of course your programming skills.

All in all though, from the sheer complexity of the program I would say it is pretty probably hard.

[chewy027]

so where would you start i mean what type of language would you use and such

[Atrocities]

One thing about game development if you have ever disected a game is that a game is nothing more than basic images that move. Much like a movie. I took BOTF apart, and found that 90% of the game was graphics. The rest was the program that used the graphics and interacted with the player.

I would love to posess the knowledge needed to program games. Man I have a few that I would love to see made that currently are not on the market.

[Alpha Kodiak]

The hard part isn't the programming. The hard part is to come up with a complete, consistent game design including all of the rules, combat system, movement system, AI behaviour, etc.

Once you have the complete game design, you can begin the software design. I would recommend an object oriented approach to the design as it would simplify the implementation later. It is important to get the software design to model the game design completely. Pay attention especially to the data structures that you are going to use to model the game. Don't start coding until the design is complete.

As far as language is concerned, it is purely what you are used to. I would use C++ because that is what I use the most. It is not necessarily the easiest, mind you, just what I am comfortable with. Delphi would work, and even (cough... choke...) VB could be used. You want a language that can support objects and understands Windows dialogs, etc. (I am assuming you want it to run on Windows, rather than Linux, Mac, DOS or other operating system.)

The most important thing that most people overlook when approaching something like this is that the design is the important part. If you have a good design, implementation is much easier.
(Not trivial by any means, but easier.)