http://www.gamearchitect.net Musings on game engine structure and design en-us Copyright 2004 Kyle Wilson. kyle@gamearchitect.net kyle@gamearchitect.net http://www.gamearchitect.net/Images/joysticksmall.gif http://www.gamearchitect.net 32 31 Musings on game engine architecture and design http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/ChangeOfAddress.html www.gamearchitect.net.  The new RSS feed is available at http://gamearchitect.net/feed/.  Enjoy! ]]> http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/IntentionalGameplay.html http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html "Software is hard," reads the quote from Donald Knuth that opens Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code.  The 400 pages that follow examine why:  Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis?  Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both?  Why can't we ship code without bugs?  Why, everyone asks, can't we build software the same way we build bridges? ]]> http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/Fracture.html Fracture.  We're only a year and a half in, with a year of development still to go, but it's without a doubt the best game I've ever worked on. ]]> http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/GDC2007.html It's Game Developers Conference season again.  The show was more crowded than I've ever seen it.  Attendance was probably somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000.  That's a couple thousand more than filled Arrowhead Pond to watch welterweight champ Matt Hughes finish BJ Penn at UFC 63. ]]> http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/WhyC++.html http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/ExceptionsAndErrorCodes.html As software engineers, we are admonished by the doyens of C++ programming that the correct way to report error conditions is to throw exceptions.  As game developers, we are the heirs to a vast body of common wisdom holding that exception handling overhead is too expensive for high-performance games, and that error codes are the only acceptable mechanism for propagating errors in game code.  What should we believe? ]]> http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/GDC2006.html http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/ManagingConcurrency1.html revolutionary change.  The future is multi-core architectures and, for anyone writing performance-critical applications, multi-threaded programming.  And game developers have to deal with this sooner than most. ]]> http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/StreamingBestiary.html e option for titles on the coming generation of consoles.  The more detailed our world is--the more immersive it is--the more dense it will be.  That means that if we don't do streaming, we'll have to interrupt the player's immersive experience that much more often with a loading screen.  I'm going to discuss how we can keep players immersed in our games by streaming data off disk, some of the tradeoffs involved in different streaming approaches, and how game design interacts with streaming systems. ]]>