Back to The Future (Part 1)
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – (attributed) Albert Einstein How would you like to be able to reproduce every crash report that QA adds to the bug...
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I really enjoy a good cup of tea. On the surface, making tea is really easy: take some tea leaves, pour some hot water over them, and wait a few minutes. In practice, the difference between a bitter,...
View ArticleBuild Server: The Heartbeat of The Project
Have you ever given some thought to why you decided to become a game programmer? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t to do mundane, repetitive tasks. Yet sometimes we find ourselves spending a significant...
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Data-Oriented Design (Or Why You Might Be Shooting Yourself in The Foot With...
Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In...
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Managing Data Relationships
I’ve been meaning to put up the rest of the Inner Product columns I wrote for Game Developer Magazine, but I wasn’t finding the time. With all the recent discussion on data-oriented design, I figured...
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Nitty Gritty Unit Testing
It’s one thing to see someone drive a car and have a theoretical understanding of what the pedals do and how to change gears. It’s is a completely different thing to be able to drive a car safely on...
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Mock Objects: Friends Or Foes?
In a previous article we covered all the details necessary to start using unit testing on a real-world project. That was enough knowledge to get started and tackle just about any codebase. Eventually...
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Start Pre-allocating And Stop Worrying
One of the more frequent questions I receive is what kind of memory allocation strategy I use in my games. The quick answer is none (at least frame to frame, I do some allocation at the beginning of...
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Data-Oriented Design Now And In The Future
There has been a lot of recent discussion (and criticism) on Data Oriented Design recently. I want to address some of the issues that have been raised, but before that, I’ll start with this reprint...
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Writing Reusable Code
Some people asked what I meant by a “toolkit architecture” in the previous post about my middleware fears. It turns out I wrote about that in a previous Inner Product column that for some reason I...
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