Architecture logicielle & Développement

This is a preview of a GameDev.Net article which is available here

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This is a preview of a GameDev.Net article which is available here

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This ticket is the first in my Design Pattern series. This series (in English, sorry for those who don't speak this language) focuses on business-oriented design patterns. The intended audience is the game development community, although I hope that others will also find some useful information. Be aware that it's a Work in Progress - some patterns may need refinement before being usable.

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Bruce Shelly, founder of Ensemble Studio, gave a talk about the game design methodology which has been used since the inception of the company to design their AAA games - Age of Empire, Age of Mythology and the forthcoming Halo Wars.

Preview of a future gamedev.net article.

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Leigh Davis (Intel) gave us a great presentation about what one should consider when writing multithreaded games. He was seconded by Doug Binks (Crytek) who explained us how multithreading is used in Crytek’s CryEngine2.

Preview of a future gamedev.net article.

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Ideally, the title of this post would have been You've got a problem in your code? "Just read the comments!". But it was a bit too long for the layout of this blog.

If you work in an international team setup, it's always good to have some way to communicate. And since you are spending most of your time in your favorite IDE, browsing some code to find this small but irritating bug, you probably think that the best way to communicate about the code itself is to put some comments. You are right. But you have to write them in the team language.

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As I see it, it seems that many programmers really think that white spaces use loads of processor power at compilation and maybe even more at runtime. That's the only way I can explain functions or methods definitions that contains so little white spaces. Which is quite a bad news if these functions or methods are several hundreds lines long - and you are trying to debug them.

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Contrary to the French version of this post, I decided to break the English version in two parts. The first part deals with the law formulation, and the second part deals with the application of the law. The reason for that is that it gives me a good reason to continue the translation. I know, that's a strange reason.

In addition to the multiple object oriented software design principles that have been discussed in previous blog tickets, the tool box of the software architect contains many other tools, including a set of "laws".

Of course, these are not law in the juridic meaning of the word. They must be seen as guides whose clever use allows us to simplify the code or the software design. Actually, most of these laws are not fully applied, and they often feature logical restrictions when it comes to their application. As we'll see it later, this is the case of the Law of Demeter.

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La version française de ce billet est disponible ici.

At a first glance, everything looks easy. The delete operator is used to deallocate memory that has been allocated previously using operator new. It also executes the destructor of the deallocated object in order to free its owned resources.

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... more and more. More exactly, this blog is now speaking English.

French people don't have to worry - I won't post only English tickets here, as I continue to want to publish my French tickets. But given that half of my visitors are coming from the US, older articles will be progressively translated into English. As a mark of respect to them, I will (finally!) publish my favorite tickets in the two languages.

To see the list of English tickets, you just have to click on the small en in the Langues section.

PS: I'm sorry about the French accessible captcha. If you want to post a comment, just try to copy the Captcha question into a web translator - that will probably help you. Google Translator works fine in this situation (although the result is still far from being perfect). I'm trying to find a work around about this issue.

La version Française de ce billet est ici.

While waiting tomorrow's ticket about the Liskov Substitution Principle, I make this wonderfull piece of code I recently found on the system I work on available to you. And I'm pretty sure that, like me, you'll have hard time to find any kind of justification for this.

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