8. Lesson: Iteration
• Quality of your game is proportional to the
amount of work you discard
You have to be fast at trying out things and
throwing them away. Once in a while you
actually end up with something that is fun.
9. Game Design and Prototypes
• Game designers write first prototypes
– Enforces stringency by requiring attention to detail
– Shortest possible feedback cycle for game design
– You can go a long way with tools like BlitzBasic
• Tech guys ready engine for production during
prototyping
Once the concept matures you must be ready
to prototype in the engine
20. Map Editor
• Planning overlays
• Full undo support
• Replay support for crash recovery
• Objects can be freely scaled
– Non-uniform with automatic texture adaption
• (Almost) zero user interaction for movement blocking
• Copy and paste support for landscapes
– Copied landscape can be rotated and translated
– Copied landscape can be mirrored
• Template tool: create landscape with a single brush
stroke
24. Lesson: Iteration
• Quality of your game is proportional to the
amount of work you discard
You have to be fast at trying out things and
throwing them away. Once in a while you
actually end up with something that is fun.
26. Lesson: More Is More
• Understand your engine
• Beware of cache
• Stay in control of resource usage
Artistic resource hunger is insatiable.
Technology enables and must enforce limits.
27.
28. Standard Stuff
• Keep object representation small
• Simple and regular scene division
• Visibility culling
• Spatial locality of iterated data
• Stream to stay in memory budget
• LOD wherever you can
• Compact/compress vertex/texture/animation data
• Imposters
• Sort objects by materials to save pipe state changes
• Instancing
• Write efficient shaders
• …
29. Introspection
• The better you understand your engine the
more you can squeeze in.
– Cpu usage
– Memory usage
– Texture and geometry data
– Render targets
– AI goals
– Spatial partitioning structures (quadtree, …)
– …
Trajectories needed
31. 2GB Virtual Address Space
• DirectX 9 managed resources add to virtual size
• Differences between XP and Vista
• Address space fragmentation can be critical
– Rule of thumb: leave at least 1/3 unused
• Managed textures: 144 MB • Managed geometry: 150 MB
• Render targets: 121 MB (way too much) • Default: 88 MB
• Default textures: 440 MB • System geometry: 19MB (way too much)
• Animation data
• Streaming buffer
• Quadtree
• …
39. Use the Force
• Where performance matters treat your game
loop as a series of data transformation steps
– Exploit multiple cores
– Exploit SIMD
– Exploit GPU
40. Automated Data Preprocessing
• Support multiple platforms
• Prepare parallelization
• Compact data in order to squeeze more into
the game
• Stay in control of resource usage
• Keep artists happy: they want to work with
native formats only
• Enforce data consistency
41. • fully automated: server monitors jobs for changes
• decentralized: runs on every developer machine
bad data does not block others
• lives in perforce
data for any version can be rebuild any time
• fast: parallelized, incremental archive update
• extensible: jobs are just command line tools
programmers do not need to deal with
framework APIs
44. Lesson: More Is More
• Understand your engine
• Beware of cache
• Stay in control of resource usage
Artistic resource hunger is insatiable.
Technology enables and must enforce limits.
47. The Settlers Online
Expanding his social network,
a player will become more
powerful at a faster rate
Buff your friends production
Send gifts to your friends
Trade with your friends
Help defending your friends kingdom
Earn hard currency by inviting new friends
into the game by Email, Facebook, or Twitter
