[GD-General] Architecture Design

[George W. <ge...@ap...>]

on 10/8/01 5:28 AM, gam...@li... at
gam...@li... wrote:
> 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?


LOL! ;-)


More times than not the core code is written as a "proof-of-concept" by the
design engineers and the engineers hired to "ship-it" just add code as
necessary to meet the final requirements. Very rairly have I seen any design
tools used to really "top-down" design from the get-go. This is on projects
ranging from 5 to 300 engineers.

OTOH, I have used several RAD tools to GUI => code quickly, one-off
"proof-of-concept" projects that later got used by the teams as a base to
add code to. One of my favorites was the Gooey editor & code generator
written by George R. Cossey. The Gooey editor was template based so if you
didn't like how his code worked you could edit his templates more to your
liking. I'd love to have this updated for CarbonEvents but I haven't heard
about updates or anything since it was updated for CodeWarrior 11 back in
'97. :(

There are still a few of these "framework generators" around. Probably one
of the most popular is AppMaker. Web crawl for more info. ;-)

Just remembered that this list isn't necessarily Macintosh. So just to show
that my opinion isn't Mac biased prior to coming to Apple I spent about 15
years on main frames and the experience was about the same. The designers
threw together a proof-of-concept that the developers would then be stuck
with adding code to for the additional features that the customer wanted.
;-)

-- 
Enjoy,
George Warner
Mixed Mode Magic Fragment Scientist
Apple Developer Technical Support (DTS)