Original Author: Timo Heinapurola Prototyping is a popular method for getting a feel for the core features of a given application. It is often used as the first step when your company is looking into a new prospect with a lot of uncertainty. The method relies on short iterations to quickly verify whether a set … Continue reading “Prototyping and Code Quality”
Month: April 2014
Building an Engine Plugin System
Original Author: Niklas Frykholm A plugin system is a useful way to allow developers to extend the capabilities of a game engine. Of course, an engine can also be extended by directly modifying the source code, but there are several drawbacks with that approach: Changing the code requires you to recompile the engine. Anyone who … Continue reading “Building an Engine Plugin System”
Multi-Threaded Programming 3: Locking, Lock-Free, Wait-Free
Original Author: Joseph Simons Now I want to cover the basic terminology used when talking about concurrent algorithms. This will be helpful so that you are familiar with the available techniques you have when you have multiple threads operating together. The term concurrent itself refers to an algorithm that can scale from being synchronous on … Continue reading “Multi-Threaded Programming 3: Locking, Lock-Free, Wait-Free”
Custom Vector Allocation
Original Author: Thomas Young (Also posted to series of posts about Vectors and Vector based containers.) A few posts back I talked about the idea of ‘rolling your own’ STL-style vector class, based my experiences with this at PathEngine.In two follow-ups I talked about the general approach and also some specific performance tweaks that actually … Continue reading “Custom Vector Allocation”
GDC 2014 Report
Original Author: Jaewon Jung It’s that time again. Personally I think GDC this year was more interesting that a few preceding ones. Next-gen consoles have arrived, mobile gaming is really big still, and a quality Virtual Reality is becoming a reality. PowerVR Ray Tracing Hardware and Mobile Graphics ImgTec announced its upcoming mobile GPU, PowerVR … Continue reading “GDC 2014 Report”
Principled Design
Original Author: Dan-Speed What makes good software? temporal coupling, informative error messages. Perhaps it’s well documented where it needs to be. These are obvious candidates, but even here there is room for debate between the individuals who work on the software. One property of software that I like to see is a consistency of vision, … Continue reading “Principled Design”