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View Full Version : Everyone needs to hear this Jon Blow talk



dislekcia
28-06-2011, 01:51 PM
Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) talks to a class at his alma mater about the aesthetics of programming that he's picked up over the years. It's thoughtful, questioning and should hopefully poke a lot of the assumptions that people make when starting game projects.

http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games

There's wisdom here, scads of it. I had to click the link through to the myplick site before it would play for me, but it did in the end.

Finally I have a way to talk about the way I feel about optimisation ;)

herman.tulleken
29-06-2011, 07:09 PM
Jeezz, thanks for this!!

dislekcia
30-06-2011, 03:49 AM
I think the best stuff was how much code people expect to write vs how much you actually end up writing, especially how much you write on pure gameplay. It really put the problem of wasted time optimising and over-generalising in perspective...

herman.tulleken
30-06-2011, 02:20 PM
Yes, I agree.

I found the idea of "data structures are bad" because "data structures = optimisation" very interesting. I have never thought of it on those terms before, and even though I have been shunning unnecessary optimisation, I kind of love a good interesting data structure or two (because they are cool to write: self-contained problems, neat solutions, blah), but as soon as he said it, I realised it's true.

I am still digesting the idea of more inline code... after reading Code Complete I have been aggressively using more and more function calls, following the principle that where I feel I need to comment a block, I write a function instead... So I am re-evaluating that practice a bit.

The other thing is that although the advice is good, I think you really need to go overboard with an idea in code before you can really see it... For example, going all out with design patterns is a good way to learn that moderation is a good idea. Similarly, you have to build a piece of production software and hit your head hard with optimisation before you can really appreciate its pitfalls. Guess that's where experience comes in.

Legion
30-06-2011, 08:14 PM
He makes some good points.
I remember making look up tables for cos and sin in QB4.5 to speed up 3D raycasting