Seth Gorden

Software is a strange business, be it games or otherwise.

I was reading a recent Gamasutra interview with Square Enix president and CEO Yoichi Wada. They speak on the subject of mergers and acquisitions that the company has been through. Yoichi Wada believes that he is creating a larger family of creative minds, expanding resources, and giving the company a chance to continue growing. On the surface, I can see the idea of this plan. And, assuredly, based on the company wealth, you can’t argue that he’s completely mistaken.

However, he also asserts that Japan is behind Continue…

I’ve been having a number of refactoring conversations with my friend and colleague, Rob. The scene graph had become a mess, and integrating with third party physics, 3D sound, and other systems was beginning to expose redundancies in our code.

After a lot of discussion and some influence from the recent surge of articles on Data-Oriented Design, we found some interesting ways to re-think the scene.  One of last week’s big examples had to due with transforms. As a standard, many objects are thought of as having world and local transform data. This way the spacial hierarchy suggested by your node relationships is respected when it’s time to draw.  This just makes sense….

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I have a couple updates to my recent posting, regarding Hallway Quest. That is to say, more evidence that Square-Enix is at the end of an era. More precisely, I would say a Golden Age has already passed us. What does this have to do with Recycling? I’m fairly certain the world has embraced the idea of reusing material to reduce our giant, industrial footprint on the world. Even in programming, reusable code is a fine thing. But in terms of game design, there is a line between building on established premises, and just recycling content…

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Rob: I wasn’t aware that even standard array types in C# were bounds checked
Rob:
double[] x = new double[32];
x[3] = 6;
Rob: x[3] now incurs function call + 2 asserts, thusly 2 branches
Rob: where as in C++, it’s an addition and possibly a multiplication if the complier doesn’t optimize it out (which it will in this case)
Seth: so you can’t code it wrong… it’s like bumper bowling
Rob: this is causing a good deal of the slowdown in this thing we’re supposed to be optimizing -_-;;
Seth: Honestly…. nobody goes Bumper Bowling and says “We do it because it’s highly sophisticated.”
Rob: hahaha
Rob: I like that
Seth: Seriously… you do it because it you don’t want to learn Bowling. You just wanna chuck a big heavy thing at some pins without the pain of direct and public failure.
Rob: lol

Okay, so it’s rant time. Everybody gets a turn. It’s the internet. Bear in mind that this is a rant, and therefore has narrow focus, for the sake of making a point and expressing thought. Ok. Ready. Go.

I want to go on an adventure. Who want to come? Everybody? I hope so. Now who is going to lead us? This is a question that needs answering. I’m going to discuss and pick on Square-Enix again, primarily because Continue…