Why was Half-Life 2 written in VS C++ .NET?

December 11, 2004 8:15 PM

I've been messing with the Visual Studio 2005 betas, and the .NET framework, and am wondering why Half-Life 2 was written in VS C++ .NET? From what I gather, .NET applications require the framework to be installed on the system, and don't actually use .exe files (correct me if I'm wrong, the whole .NET framework is hugely vague to me still)? So is HL2 just a plain vanilla C++ application that just happens to use VS C++ .NET? And if so, could it even be ported to target .NET and/or be written in say, Visual Basic or J#, since I've also read that there's now no performance difference between anything since they all target the CLR.
posted by Big Fat Tycoon to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I found some comments about using the HL2 SDK with Visual C++ 6.x. That it can be done suggests that HL2 is just a C++ application that happens to be written inside the VS .NET IDE.

If HL2 was a bytecode/CLR application then it might be possible to "decompile" its code back into VB, J# or C#. Keep in mind that the CLR is roughly similar to Java's bytecodes. Both are interpreted by virtual machines. I haven't looked for benchmarks that compare Java and CLR applications, but I would expect them to be roughly comparable in performance. As a result, I find it highly unlikely that a high performance game like Half-Life 2 would be written in a CLR language (or Java).

CLR applications do get to call into the .NET Framework, which makes it very easy to write XML oriented web applications. If you don't like linux and write database driven applications, or tools that interact with them, then Windows XP Server + VS.NET + SQL Server can be a very compelling toolset.
posted by b1tr0t at 8:53 PM on December 11, 2004

... and Microsoft continues to over-extend the .NET marketing term to anything and everything they can.
posted by zsazsa at 9:11 PM on December 11, 2004

The ".NET" in "Visual C++ .NET" isn't just marketing blather, since Visual C++ .NET does allow one to develop using the Managed C++ extensions.
posted by esd at 10:22 PM on December 11, 2004

From what I have gathered the VS .Net essentially operates as a wrapper around their core technologies, which are standard C++ and C in many cases (LOD algorithms in the Source Engine).

Reason why .Net is used there as far as I know is for Steam.
posted by dasibiter at 10:33 PM on December 11, 2004

It was almost certainly written in C++ (whatever the flavor is basically irrelevant, though I'm sure the .NET libraries came in handy, as dasibiter points out), with smatterings of optimized assembly.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:20 AM on December 12, 2004