Month: May 2006

Game Objects

I just read something in AI Game Programming Wisdom 3 which sounded sooo familiar to me. Sergio Garces of Pyro Studios writes about game architecture regarding the game objects, “… we often see examples of inheritance abuse, making the fundamental mistake of confusing behaviour (what objects do) with identity (what objects are)” This is exactly one of the many mistakes I did in DVW, where the inheritance hierarchy is like Entity<-Unit<-Vehicle<-Constructor<-KPBConstructor or Entity<-Unit<-Building<-UnitFactory<-BunkerBarracks. It works, but this really is not the way I would do again. Next time, I would use a part-based approach like sheijk|6S is doing in Velox3D, i.e. the game designer (not necessarily the programmer!) creates units out of several abilities, just like plugging and playing: plug in a motor, and the entity could move; plug in a weapon, and the entity could attack or fight back; plug in a brain (i.e. some AI) and it knows how to use its parts. But we’re making good progress anyway.

Coming and going

Many of us are enthusiastic about getting into the game industry. And the more enthusiastic we are, the more we might wonder why people are happy to leave the business again. At the end of 2004, a blog entry widely known by the authors nickname, ea-spouse, rocked the boat. I remember that many professionals joined in complaining about the working conditions. Recently, I read two similar articles again: Jurie Horneman of ex Rockstar Vienna wrote that he was glad when the studio was shut down. He refered to another article entitled The joyful life of a lapsed game developer whose author was glad to have left the industry for good. How can it be that so many want to get in, and at least some are happy to get out again? Let’s face it. The trouble is that the game industry still is an industry. Like in every other business, be it software or whatever, there are customers, deadlines, and consequently there are crunch times. And I’d expect my employees to commit themselves to the …