Archive for August, 2007

August 30, 2007 12

Write Games, Not Engines

By Josh Petrie in Blog

To begin with, the term “engine” (specifically as it related to the game development world) has no strict definition. Therefore, in the interests of keeping everybody on the same page, I’ll define the term as I intend to use it in this article. An “engine” is a collection of robust, reusable software subsystems (possibly including [...]

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August 29, 2007 0

The Dangers of Benchmarks

By Josh Petrie in Blog

Jack and Jill run a race. They’re both the same age, wearing the same track shoes and other similar running attire. The weather is favorable — a pleasant, windless summer afternoon, and they’re running on that fancy red rubberized track. Jill soundly beats Jack by a margin of about half a second. Therefore, girls are [...]

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August 28, 2007 0

Rewrite or Refactor

By Josh Petrie in Blog

Often, inexperienced programmers will reach a point where they decide that their existing code base is fatally flawed in some way. Perhaps they’ve learned some new techniques that cannot be cleanly integrated into the code, perhaps they’ve stumbled across a requirement they cannot address, or perhaps they simply don’t like the naming conventions they used. [...]

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