Re: [GD-General] Architecture Design

[David H. <da...@hu...>]

Phew - I was beginning to think our studio was living in the stoneage - we
as it would seem do a lot of others do just cobble stuff together as we go
along, designing the component we're currently working enough so it works
and is tailored for its purpose.
I suspect a completely revision-proof design isn't possible within the games
industry. If I write a donkey simulator the chances are one of the artists
will come along a week later and ask me for a dancing donkey simulator. Now
designing a dancing donkey simulator in the first place wouldn't be even
close to efficient as the final game might never have needed it.
As far as code re-use goes - who really honestly ever gets to the end of a
project with an engine clean enough that they want to re-use it in its
entirety - little bits maybe but not a whole engine.

Just out of interest Philip when you said "Invariably the code is then
revised and expanded as the project's needs are really understood." - does
large scale formal design mitigate this at all? Do you find that a proper
formal design makes things revision-proof?

As a little anecdote.
About the same time as C++ became more commonplace (maybe 6 years ago) about
half the people I worked with went off and re-wrote stuff that had taken
them a couple of months to write the first time into very conceptually clean
C++ versions  - except this time it took them 6 months. Most of them moved
out of the games industry soon after that. Now perhaps they were on a voyage
of language discovery but I've personally always looked back on the
experience as the need for design winning out over the need for progress.
(PS. This is not a C against C++ tale - I am a perfectly competant C++
programmer)

It'll be interesting to see where this debate goes when the Americans get on
board;)


David Hunt

----- Original Message -----
From: "Parveen Kaler" <pk...@sf...>
To: <gam...@li...>
Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2001 11:09 PM
Subject: [GD-General] Architecture Design


> Just a little bit of a survey.  After the gameplay and story of a game has
> been somewhat fleshed out, what kind of techniques do you guys use to
> design the code?  I'm assuming everyone uses diagrams such as ORDs, ERDs,
> and DFDs or some variant.  Is this true?  How detailed do you guys get?
>
> Does anyone get hardcore and actually use UML and tools like Rational
> Rose?  Are there people out there who have worked on both game projects
and
> common desktop applications?  How did the design techniques differ, if at
all?
>
> Parveen
>
>
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