- Evolution of Video Game Programming
- The Game Loop
- Time and Games
- Game Objects
- Summary
- Review Questions
- Additional References
Additional References
Evolution of Video Game Programming
Crane, David. “GDC 2011 Classic Postmortem on Pitfall!” (http://tinyurl.com/6kwpfee). The creator of Pitfall!, David Crane, discusses the development of the Atari classic in this one-hour talk.
Game Loops
Gregory, Jason. Game Engine Architecture. Boca Raton: A K Peters, 2009. This book dedicates a section to several varieties of multithreaded game loops, including those you might use on the PS3’s asymmetrical CPU architecture.
West, Mick. “Programming Responsiveness” and “Measuring Responsiveness” (http://tinyurl.com/594f6r and http://tinyurl.com/5qv5zt). These Gamasutra articles written by Mick West (co-founder of Neversoft) discuss factors that can cause increased input lag as well as how to measure input lag in games.
Game Objects
Dickheiser, Michael, Ed. Game Programming Gems 6. Boston: Charles River Media, 2006. One of the articles in this volume, “Game Object Component System,” describes an alternative to a more traditional object-oriented model. Although this implementation may be a bit complex, more and more commercial games are trending toward game object models that use composition (“has-a”) instead of strict “is-a” relationships.