Developer blogs

[CuteAlien]

Found a very nice blog about advanced c++ topics related to game and 3d programming: https://molecularmusings.wordpress.com/
Stuff like efficient implementations of entity-component systems, writing platform independent simd code (interesting for Irrlicht...), memory systems and so on. If you work on any of that it's worth a look!

If you know more great blogs - post 'em!

[sudi]

Nice find. Thank you so much

[AReichl]

SIMD and "fast Quaternion-Vector multiplication" are the only things i found interesting at a first glance.
For example i don't understand why anyone today is writing his own delegate solution. Or avoid strings
"at any cost". Too slow? - well, go back to pure C.

[CuteAlien]

Avoiding memory allocations at runtime is one problem game programmers faces constantly and strings are one of the worst offenders. He's a little extreme, but people who are not careful about strings can mess up the speed of their game. We have places in Irrlicht where we were not careful enough (collada loading is for example slow - thought partly because we have no streams).

About own delegates - don't know. Maybe it's not that much code and so no point in adding another library dependendy to his library just for that. Also some other solutions (boost...) are rather slow (and horrible when debugging as they cause a fat stack-trace).

If you don't need that stuff - OK. But the blog is nice if you code those things as it goes into details. And he works on problems which are common in the game industry. Right now a lot of game studios work on figuring out problems as:
- Effective entity-component solutions (what is an entity really, how to make systems work in parallel, communication between components, handling update-order dependencies).
- Improving the asset pipeline (editors, serialization, avoiding loss of type safety when working with json or similar formats).
- And how to get code fast is the all time classic (avoiding cache misses, avoiding memory allocations).

[sudi]

The most interessting thing i saw was atually Using runtime-compiled C++ code as a scripting language: under the hood. Looks really interessting. Besides the component-entity topics i did not really see. Maybe they are named strangely? Especially the communication part.

[CuteAlien]

The "Adventures in data-oriented design" series is mainly about component entity system implementations (especially 3rd and 4th part).

Not sure yet about communication - haven't read it all yet. But the delegates article mentions his event system a little. And I hope when I get to the task-scheduler series it might have more info.

[sudi]

I wrote my own delegate system not really in the need of a new one and works pretty much like his one with static types and typechecking during compile time.

I will check out the "Adventures in data-oriented design"

[sunnystormy]

Cool. Lots of purdy words and such.

Just finished reading the article about thread-local storage... pretty advanced topic, if I do say so myself.

[MobileGameGraphics]

Nice find. Thanks for sharing

[REDDemon]

using 16 bit index for mesh buffers ids. with mantle or wulkan that limit will just reduce possible number of drawcalls. (Actually 20k possible, the 16 bit limit to 65k with vulkan 100k is likely without ever touching drawcall limit, just a premature optimization that ends in a bottleneck).