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Data Structures for Pre-College Programmers: Choosing The Right Structure UNDER REVIEW
Apr 30 2013 09:33 AM | Posted By Bryan Wagstaff (frob)
in General Programming
This is part of a series of articles dealing with data structures for beginners. It covers choosing between the various data structures.
Math for Game Developers: Intro to Vectors
Apr 26 2013 11:26 PM | Posted By Jorge "BSVino" Rodriguez
in Math and Physics
A series of videos that visually explains and demonstrates various math concepts applied to game development
Tagged With: video math vectors cross product dot product
Game Development with Win32 and DirectX 11 - Part 01: The Basic Framework UNDER REVIEW
Apr 26 2013 11:27 AM | Posted By Josh Vega
in Game Programming
In this second lesson of this tutorial series, we'll start getting our hands dirty by setting up a Visual Studio project and writing our basic framework.
Tagged With: Win32 DirectX 11 C++ D3D11
Vectors and Matrices: A Primer
Apr 26 2013 07:55 AM | Posted By Phil Dadd
in Math and Physics
An introduction to using these mathematical equations in game development
Tagged With: vectors matrices math
Practical Cross Platform SIMD Math
Apr 26 2013 05:11 AM | Posted By AllEightUp
in General Programming
Supporting multiple target SIMD dialects is a painful chore. Intel made this quite difficult by continually adding a little here and there and ending up with 8+ different variations. This article will present a solution of leveraging SIMD without too many hassles.
Tagged With: C++ C language SIMD math cross platform C++ 11
Managing Decoupling Part 4: The ID Lookup Table
Apr 24 2013 11:28 AM | Posted By Niklas Frykholm
in Game Programming
Looks deeper into the advantages of using an ID lookup table and what data structures a system might use
Tagged With: engine design decoupling program organization systems
Dynamic 2D Soft Shadows
Apr 24 2013 09:10 AM | Posted By John "Orangy Tang" Campbell
in Graphics Programming and Theory
Describes an accurate method of generating soft shadows in a 2D environment on the fly
Tagged With: shadows 2d dynamic soft shadows real time
Managing Decoupling Part 3: C++ Duck Typing
Apr 19 2013 12:42 AM | Posted By Niklas Frykholm
in Game Programming
Dealing with systems that need to manipulate objects whose exact nature are not known, and how to handle this efficiently
Tagged With: engine design decoupling program organization systems
D3D11 Tessellation In Depth UNDER REVIEW
Apr 18 2013 07:51 PM | Posted By Seth Hoffert
in DirectX and XNA
Learn more about the D3D11 tessellation pipeline, including how to take advantage of the two new hull and domain shader stages
Tagged With: d3d d3d11 tessellation intermediate
Design Tradeoffs For Customized Script Interpreters
Apr 18 2013 03:35 PM | Posted By Brendan G Bohannon
in General Programming
There may be a number of tradeoffs in the design of both a scripting language and the underlying interpreter. I will attempt to address a few of them here.
Tagged With: script VM interpreter language bytecode stack register
Introduction to Spritesheets
Apr 18 2013 07:43 AM | Posted By Jeremy Kennedy
in Game Programming
This article aims to introduce spritesheets and how to incorporate them into your game. Basic programming knowledge is assumed, however, knowledge of C++ and SFML is not required. The spritesheet concepts apply to other languages and libraries.
Intersection Math & Algorithms - Learn to Derive
Apr 17 2013 09:24 AM | Posted By Vilem Otte
in Math and Physics
In this stand-alone article I'm trying to explain how to derive several intersection algorithms that are very important for every game.It should teach you *how* to derive, of course math-thinking is (as always) very important!
Tagged With: algorithms point ray linear algebra vector plane normal aabb bounding box intersection sphere
Game Development with Win32 and DirectX 11 - Part 00: Setup UNDER REVIEW
Apr 16 2013 01:27 PM | Posted By Josh Vega
in Game Programming
In this first lesson of my tutorial series, we'll look into setting up a complete development environment for game development using C++, Win32, and Microsoft DirectX 11.
Tagged With: C++ Win32 DirectX 11
Managing Decoupling Part 2: Polling, Callbacks and Events
Apr 16 2013 10:49 AM | Posted By Niklas Frykholm
in Game Programming
One of the fundamental challenges in system design is to keep systems decoupled while still allowing the necessary interactions to take place. Here we discuss what to do when a low level system needs to notify a high level system that something has happened.
Tagged With: engine decoupling design program organization systems
Bit Fields
Apr 15 2013 09:42 PM | Posted By AllEightUp
in Game Programming
Bit Fields are a useful element of C and C++ which are seemingly poorly documented. Presented here is an attempt to gather up the most pertinent information and provide a better understanding of bit fields.
Tagged With: C++ c language
C++: Custom memory allocation
Apr 15 2013 02:07 PM | Posted By Tiago Costa
in General Programming
Being able to efficiently use the available (limited) memory is extremely important in high performance applications like computer games.
Tagged With: c++ memory allocation
Cross Platform Test Driven Development Environment Using CMake (Part 4)
Apr 10 2013 04:10 AM | Posted By AllEightUp
in General Programming
It is time to finish fleshing out the build environment and discussing some of the more advanced features of CMake. This article goes through the options system in more detail and shows how to add a cross compilation target for iOS. Many of the prior article details are put into use in the process and the resulting environment is not a bad starting point for further work.
Tagged With: cross platform makefile c++ c++11 make cmake
Managing Decoupling
Apr 10 2013 01:10 AM | Posted By Niklas Frykholm
in Game Programming
The main challenge in keeping an engine “healthy” is to keep the systems as decoupled as possible while still allowing the necessary interactions to take place. If a system is properly decoupled, adding features is simple. Want a wind effect in your particle system? Just write it. It’s just code. It shouldn’t take more than a day. But if you are working in a tightly coupled project, such seemin...
Tagged With: engine design decoupling intermediate program organization systems
Hackathon: iOS game in 7 days
Apr 09 2013 03:10 AM | Posted By Arseniy Vershinin (Arsonic)
in Mobile Development
In this article I would like to share with you the story of creating our company’s first iOS game at a hackathon event, using a wonderful 2d graphics engine Cocos2d. It covers some technical problems, we’ve bumped into, while developing the game, as well as the process of creating the actual gameplay.
Tagged With: AppStore development mobile game cocos2d box2d hackathon budget indie quick week
How we Built an iOS game on PC
Apr 08 2013 08:05 PM | Posted By Thomas Henshell
in Mobile Development
This article chronicles Catch the Monkey from ideation to sale worldwide in the App Store.
Tagged With: game monkey marmalade design player scene time tool png ios
Cross Platform Test Driven Development Environment Using CMake (Part 3)
Apr 08 2013 03:40 AM | Posted By AllEightUp
in General Programming
In Part 3, it is time to finish off the basic build environment by adding the last target type, shared libraries. Unfortunately this portion involves Windows specifics and takes a while to make fully cross platform. When everything is functional it will be time to add the unit testing framework. The remainder of the article will cover how to setup the unit tests with CMake and various methods...
Tagged With: make cmake makefile cross platform c++ c++11
Data Structures for Pre-College Programmers: Non-linear Data Structures
Apr 07 2013 07:23 PM | Posted By frob
in General Programming
This is part of a series of articles dealing with data structures for beginners. It covers the the non-linear data structures. These include data dictionaries, ordered sets, and unordered sets.
Tagged With: beginner data data structures dictionary hash set unordered set ordered set
Evolve Your Hierarchy : Refactoring Game Entities with Components
Apr 05 2013 11:26 AM | Posted By Mick West
in Game Programming
Up until fairly recent years, game programmers have consistently used a deep class hierarchy to represent game entities. The tide is beginning to shift from this use of deep hierarchies to a variety of methods that compose a game entity object as an aggregation of components.
Tagged With: entities entity object hierarchy class organization pattern
The Guide to Implementing 2D Platformers
Apr 04 2013 08:00 PM | Posted By Rodrigo Monteiro
in Game Programming
Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
Tagged With: 2d platformer
Understanding Component-Entity-Systems
Apr 02 2013 01:37 PM | Posted By Boreal Games
in Game Programming
The traditional way to implement game entities was to use object-oriented programming. This led to large, rigid class hierarchies. To solve this, game programmers started to build entities through composition instead of inheritance.
Tagged With: component entity system component-entity-system architecture