thanks for sharing

-eldee
;another space monkey;
[ Forced Evolution Studios ]

He would design the program and then code it up, probably working with a small team of coders.

Magmai Kai Holmlor

"Oh, like you''ve never written buggy code" - Lee

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Hi,

an OO software engineer:

1) Design the architecture
2) Design the application
2.1) Design the classes
2.2) Design the objects

A game is not only a "98624 E 900" lines of good performant
code... Just think to networked multiplayer role games (
Ultima online, DAOC, ...) or games in which there is a lot
of A.I. (strategy games for example).

Creating a game is not only:
"how can it be faster/nicer/opengl''ed/and so on".
but theories, statistics, methods are essential.

This is not only my opinion...

Software engineers are problem solvers. About anyone could have the title of software engineer while doing about anything. That is simply the reality of corporate America. A true software engineer is a programming god though. I think John Carmack would be a prime example of a software engineer though that isn''t his title. It isn''t so much the programs he writes as his impact on the industry. Certainly few people will acheive that level, but if you want to call yourself a software engineer you should have a comparable impact on your own team. Scaled down of course Clearly and without any doubt your team should be accomplishing more because you are part of the team than if you were not. Not because of what you, yourself, do, but rather because of what you empower the team to do. The experience it would have taken them years to gain they instead gain in months from working with you.

The key to that is the experience you gain from them. If you are in school then the starting point is the computer lab. Help anyone and everyone that wants or will at least accept your help. If you do that all the way through college then you walk into your first job not as the equivalent of every other entry level programmer, but rather as a peer to most people with a few years on you. You will have a lot to learn about professional programming but by being the person your peers come to for help you can gain years of experience for each year you actually put in. You don''t have to solve the problem. You just have to know the problem exists and what the alternatives are for solving it.

Now a whole seperate view of what a software engineer is would be that you deal with hardware. A game wouldn''t have a software engineer. Rather nVidia would have a software engineer writing device drivers for their graphics cards and designing the software that actually runs on the graphics processors. I assume that isn''t what you mean though.

I think this is a team leader, not a software engineer...
At least because a software engineer may be completely
extraneous to programming!
Now the *real* question is on the mean of "software engineering".
To discover the world that is behind this name, try reading
something on:
http://www.software-engin.com
http://www.rational.com

To mention some names: Jacobson, Booch, Yourdon