Total War engine

[Rodion Romanovich]

I've heard of Mount & Blade and Civ 4, but I don't know the exact limits. I haven't tried python for myself but I've heard it's good enough for most game development stuff, unless you want to compete with the absolute cutting edge games. You can probably make a MTW1 or Shogun like game in Python with reasonable framerate on modern computers. As for an RTW engine I can't say with certainty whether it'll work or not, but it'll probably work if you choose to switch to sprites at a quite short distance... Then again, the rendering of the actual landscape will also take a lot of triangles so I can't really say how well it'll work, especially if you want things like advanced sky, shadows etc....

[edyzmedieval]

Mount&Blade is one of the best games to start off with exploring Python. It's just a simple 54MB game, made with Python modules and scripts and some animations and graphics in Blender.
Check this out: www.python.org

I know C++ well, but not enough to do graphics in it. So, guess Python and Blender are the best things to use. Blender is a sort of open-source 3DS Max 8, which from the screenshots, it's very cool.

[ScionTheWorm]

Mount&Blade is one of the best games to start off with exploring Python. It's just a simple 54MB game, made with Python modules and scripts and some animations and graphics in Blender.
Check this out: www.python.org

I know C++ well, but not enough to do graphics in it. So, guess Python and Blender are the best things to use. Blender is a sort of open-source 3DS Max 8, which from the screenshots, it's very cool.

wrong, m&b isn't written in python at all, it just supports it to add some gamecontents as far as I know (through it's python based module system). it's pretty much like how rtw modding works (with scripting and "stats reading"), just that m&b is more modding friendly. at best you could use a graphics engine with an interface too python (that is: the engine is purely written in c++, but you could access functions in it from python, sending arguments etc). python is mostly used putting pieces from other languages together, as it's just a scripting language. everything in python is a c structure (an early version of the concept class), even integers, functions and floats are c structures.

so how it would work, using a low-level language coded c++ engine from a scripting language could be in pseudo-pseudo-code like this:

engine = mygraphicsengine()
scene = engine.makescene() (or something)
warrior1 = mesh('warriormodel1.brf', 'warriortexture.dds', ...)
warrior2 = mesh('warriormodel2.brf', 'warriortexture.dds', ...)

scene.addmesh(warrior1, some location)
scene.addmesh(warrior2, some location)

start()

this would be about how it would work from c++ too, but that would be faster. making the AI would require very CPU-demanding algorithms, which with python loops would be... very slow.

best place to start with python is in my opinion with PyGame, though that wouldn't be 3d and the game you aim at. I just recently posted in a similar thread the link to ogre3d

[edyzmedieval]

Nice info. Thanks.