9
9.2 Listening
of this story is that managing code architecture is a very important topic to make coding more efficient … So, as I was saying … there are a lot of resources
to help you with your coding. Useful books can be divided into two categories. First, are domain-specific books. These focus in depth on some aspect of games development, such as 3D graphics or physics simulation. Secondly, there are books which are written to cover all the parts of a game engine. One example of this, which is on your reading list is Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory. It was published in 2018 by CRC Press. It’s the third edition and it has a lot of new material. The problem with the domain-specific titles is that
while they are very good for developing specialist skills, they don’t explain how these skills fit with other parts of games programming. The problem with the second type of book is that not all modern games development is centred around a specific games engine, especially with mobile and casual gaming. At the same time, games engines are important and many of the concepts in Gregory’s book will be important later in the course. Finally, I want to refer to some specific challenges
for developers who are coding for games. The first is the emphasis on timing and sequencing. Getting everything to happen at the right time and in the right order is extremely important, so coders need to pay particular attention to this. Secondly, development cycles are very compressed.
This means that games programmers have very little time to build and test the software in each iteration. Also, it means that a lot of developers may be working on the code at the same time, so they need to be able to integrate their code efficiently. Finally, games performance, such as how realistic
characters look and move and how quickly they respond to player inputs are crucial. So, developers need to write code which is extremely efficient in using the hardware on a specific games platform or a specific game engine. So, a key challenge in writing code is to write efficient
code that can be reused and can be shared among members of a team. A good book to help you with this is Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom. It was published in 2014. Nystrom explains that he is sharing common code patterns for games so that programmers ‘can spend their time inventing new things instead of reinventing them’. This is definitely something that I recommend you read.
C 9.2_Cornell_example
Explain to students that they are going to make notes on Part 2 of the lecture. Ask them to divide up a page of their notebooks into the three sections of the Cornell system, and review the purpose of each section. You could hand out the blank Cornell diagram provided in the PDF as a guide.
Remind students that they should take their notes in the Notes section as they listen. Warn them that they may not be able to complete their notes while listening; if there are
176
any details they miss, they should leave spaces which they can fill in later.
1. Set for individual work. 47
Play Part 2 straight through. Then put students in pairs, and give them time to complete any gaps in their notes.
Elicit the content of the notes from the class, and feed back visually, building up a set of notes similar to those in the model answer opposite.
2. Set students to work in pairs to write Review questions. Feed back visually as a class. Some example Review questions are given in the model answer opposite.
3. Set students to work in pairs to write a Summary. Feed back visually as a class. There is a model answer opposite.
4. Refer students back to the questions they asked in Exercise A. If you recorded questions on the board, elicit from the class whether they think these have been answered.
Model answer See table opposite.
47 Part 2
So, what types of games are popular today and what can we learn from the way they developed? I want you to think about what your favourite games are and what kind of games you want to write? Share your ideas with each other briefly … Well, … in terms of types of games, there are two
key ways we can classify them … according to the type of platform used and also the genre of the game. OK … well, according to the most recent statistics
I have, the top three devices for playing games were smartphones, game consoles and personal computers. Breaking it down a little more, according to the Starloop Studios website – which seems reasonably well informed – the majority of developers are currently working on games for the PC, next highest is for PlayStation, next for smartphones or tablets and a slightly smaller number for the Xbox. Developers are also working on games for VR and AR headsets, though the numbers there are reasonably small. So that is where we are now. How did we get here
and what can we learn from it? Probably the best place to begin looking at gaming trends is with a Computer Science graduate called Nolan Bushnell, who started the first commercial computer games company, a company called Atari. As we shall see, Atari was a major force in the development of the modern games industry. In 1972, it introduced the first successful arcade game – a game called Pong – which, as I have said, will be your first project …
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