Tough Times on the Road to StarCraft

Re:Tough Times on the Road to StarCraft by flohofwoe on Saturday January 24, 2015 @06:45AM (#8939379)

(Intrusive) lists were useful when the cost of a memory access didn't matter relative to CPU speed, so that cache thrashing wasn't an issue, and you had a scenario where list nodes had to be inserted and removed frequently, but you don't need random access. In C such intrusive lists are also easier to manage since you don't need to care about dynamic memory management since the list nodes are embedded in some other existing data structure.

Today where avoiding cache misses is the most important optimization, traditional lists have indeed become quite useless, especially the non-intrusive type like std::list.

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Re:Tough Times on the Road to StarCraft by flohofwoe on Saturday January 24, 2015 @06:59AM (#8939394)

...but I think linked list were not the main problem, but (1) use of inheritance instead of composition to implement unit behaviour (but we all walked into that trap, and these were the 90's when OOP was still hip and universally seen as a silver bullet), and (2) it looks like objects have been linked to each other quite ad-hoc, instead of providing some sort of 'object relationship system' which encapsulates object linkage and querying for objects. But as I said, these were the 90's and game developers have learned from these mistakes. There's a lot of good whitepapers around about entity component systems, composition, high-level architecture of games and so on. Today it's more about asset creation pipelines and production tools, at least for 'big' game projects.

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