158
votes
Accepted
Why are games built on cross-platform engines sometimes exclusive to Windows?
Technical Reasons:
Game-code made platform specific: When some developers are making their games, they can sometime rely on platform specific functions. While the game engine might be able to build ...
- 3,651
88
votes
Accepted
When is the best time to consider performance?
Engineering for Performance
Follow vendor recommendations.
Use the correct data structures.
Implement the correct usage patterns.
Don't do anything stupid.
Optimization
When already written code is ...
- 20.3k
31
votes
Why are games built on cross-platform engines sometimes exclusive to Windows?
Because being available doesn't mean being free & instant.
Supporting one more operating system, in its most simplistic form, means one more platform to provide technical support for.
The more ...
- 5,335
22
votes
When is the best time to consider performance?
If you want to do optimization at the right times, have slow machines and use them. For a small shop, a good option is to use a slow laptop on the commute and a fast desktop in the office. As an ...
- 9,945
19
votes
Accepted
Is it a good option to simultaneously work on a game and a game engine?
Consider using a framework, like MonoGame.
It is a kind of a middle ground between "nothing" and a full-blown engine like Unity or Unreal.
It saves you from the really finicky implementation details ...
- 647
16
votes
Is it a good option to simultaneously work on a game and a game engine?
You, of course, can use a third party solution. You can develop C# games with (in decreasing complexity) Unity, Godot, Monogame, OpenTK, among other solutions.
Making a game without a third party ...
- 28k
15
votes
Accepted
How do you determine what order to process chained events/interactions?
I don't think I'd put all of these effects into a single container at all, because as you show, any one container behaviour is unlikely to fit every use case you care about in your game.
Instead, I'd ...
- 139k
14
votes
Why are games built on cross-platform engines sometimes exclusive to Windows?
The other answers here are good, but here is one that wasn't mentioned.
I'm having this problem right now - my team is about to release a game made in Unity for Windows/Mac. We've gotten lots of ...
- 241
14
votes
Accepted
When or why would someone use a programming language (Swift, Java, C++, Rust etc...) over an engine like Unity?
You need to write a game without an engine when you have a game with very unique technical challenges which are not sufficiently covered by general-purpose game engines.
General purpose game engines ...
- 122k
11
votes
Accepted
Should items in an RPG be hardcoded or loaded in some other way?
Weapons are data. You shouldn't really ever keep data hardcoded. Your structs / classes should accommodate all necessary parameters to build a weapon's data from scratch, e.g.:
...
- 30.4k
10
votes
Do retail games use "inversion of control" and "dependency injection"?
I'm writing this at a time when the accepted answer is by a contributor who strongly opposes the concept and I wish to provide a different view:
Dependency injection is indeed not widely used in game ...
- 232
9
votes
When is the best time to consider performance?
No, you don't have to check after every line because not every line is performance-relevant. It mostly depends on how often a line is executed. A code section which takes 1 ms to be executed is ...
- 122k
9
votes
Accepted
Which parts of Doom (1993) are open source and which are not?
Doom is divided into two components:
The game engine.
The game data.
Of these, the source code which was released is for the game engine only, and as the readme notes, only for the Linux version, as ...
- 20.3k
9
votes
Accepted
What should be an entity/component, and what shouldn't?
A lot of systems in a game that needs to be updated are things that are not rendered and don't need any input, they simply need a call to their update function every frame. They don't have any ...
- 139k
8
votes
Accepted
Are there technical reasons to use short variable names in shader code?
I've noticed the same trend, I've found the following reasons apply:
Shadertoy in particular is just that a toy. You will often find people don't bother with good coding standards and do what ever ...
- 1,793
7
votes
Accepted
Is an ECS viable in garbage collected languages?
The Garbage Collector (GC) is not really an obstacle to implement an Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture.
All you need is a root object for your ECS. It would hold references to the containers ...
- 28k
7
votes
Accepted
Decouple game entity from its owner when logic depends on it
The crux of the issue appears to be that you are tying the identity of an object to the implementation.
In it's simplest form a players ID could just be an integer (player 0,1,2,3...). Hence instead ...
- 783
6
votes
Solutions for maintaining importers and exporters when chaning file formats
Naughty Dog seems to use scheme for describing both the data and how it should be read. However, my knowledge of scheme is non-existent so I have no clue how that would work. This would however, solve ...
6
votes
Are there technical reasons to use short variable names in shader code?
Some possible reasons for using short variable names are:
Brevity: short variable take less time to type.
Following Textbooks: similar to the discussion in this software engineering SO post on short ...
- 13.3k
6
votes
Accepted
endless Thorn (deal damage when taking damage) effect
One option is to create a damage type called Reaction Damage, and construct your rules so that Reaction Damage does not trigger Reaction Damage.
The Thorn effect then becomes "When another player ...
- 139k
6
votes
Accepted
Is it a good idea to use a hash table in an ECS?
If you want to know what is faster, measure. That is the engineering approach. Thus, write your code in a way that you can swap the implementation (e.g. behind an interface) and benchmark.
With a ...
- 28k
5
votes
Accepted
How do I program attacks and combos in a fighting game?
This advice is more general, rather than being specific to fighting games, but typically player behaviour in games with any reasonable level of complexity will be coded as a finite state machine, ...
- 279
5
votes
Accepted
The number of shaders a large game or game engine has
It depends in part on how you count them.
Many games & engines use large shaders, called "ubershaders," that try to cover many different material effects and rendering techniques, with ...
- 139k
5
votes
Accepted
Multiplayer Game Server Input vs Tick
so ... I can probably speak to your example, since I'm the primary author of the Jackbox Games multiplayer server, which as it turns out ... is written entirely in Go!
Since there's no simulation to ...
- 166
5
votes
When or why would someone use a programming language (Swift, Java, C++, Rust etc...) over an engine like Unity?
The main reasons I can come up with are:
the challenge / bragging rights / language practice. Some people just get bored when things get too easy, or they want to see what is possible without an ...
- 436
5
votes
Accepted
How to get the source code for a game?
Getting access to a game's sourcecode can be anything between trivial to impossible. Factors which decide that are:
What technology was used to create the game? Decompiling executables to readable ...
- 122k
5
votes
Accepted
How to implement a function that normally returns a float, but can sometimes fail?
You are correct in that you can't return null, which is because you have declared in your method that it returns a float. So, ...
- 28k
5
votes
Accepted
Programming Singletons vs Static classes
In Game Programming Patterns, Robert Nystrom lays out that there's a few common reasons we like to reach for singletons:
Ease of global access
Only takes resources if used (if no one uses the ...
- 139k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible