Introduction

[Structure]

Hello all,

ive been reading this developer forum for about 6 months now so I feel like I know most of you, but ive never had a reason to post, till now.

Firstly a quick introduction so you can know me a bit better, my names David Wilson, im 24 and just finished a MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems at the university of Sussex Uk. Ive been reading this forum as its always been my intention to get into indie games development, and pda’s seem to be small but potentially interesting market place.

I would say I have good to high c++ skills, but am rubbish at assembly (though understand it conceptually). Im lazy so any 3rd party code that’s free is good for me, and yes I like m$ development environment.

Through 3rd party backing im now working on a game project full time, under the studio name Construct Unusual, ive found this forum to have friendly flame fee environment (well it got a bit sketchy around the gapidraw price increases ) and wealth of useful information, I look forward to working with you all.

Structure.

[mlepage]

Welcome.

Evolutionary and adaptive systems, that's way cool, I love that stuff.

I don't do any assembly either, C++ is fine for most purposes. Just try to keep things on the structured end of the structured <-> spaghetti spectrum.

Ask whatever questions you feel appropriate (after searching of course) and we'll try to help. And let us know what your game is about when you are ready.

[Dan East]

[fzammetti]

[mlepage]

[fzammetti]

Good points Marc, I should have been a bit more clear... I don't mean to minimize the importance of modeling and design ability by any stretch, just want to emphasis the importance of what's below it...

What I've seen many times is people coming into work that either never had low-level (or even mid-level) programming knowledge but could model the hell out of a system... These are the "I went to school, got a Ph.D in CompSci, so therefore I know all there is to know, so listen to me, I am God". These are the people that think a degree is the be-all and end-all of knowledge and learning and that gaining one entitles them to running the show completely, rather than just being one important achievement in a chain of achievements. Those people seem to me to cause more trouble than they are worth many times because they think at such an abstract high-level that they make it difficult for anyone that has to implement their models.

It's the whole theory vs. concrete experience/ability. Both are important for sure, but emphasizing one over the other leads, usually, to bad things (too much theory = an inability to model in a way that won't make life impossibly difficult for your subordinates, too little modeling ability = spaghetti code and poor architectures).

ASM is the prime example of the concrete side of the fence, and seems to be the side many people de-emphasize nowadays, while putting too much importance in the abstract thinking, which I believe is an overall bad thing to do.

(Argh, one of these days I'll learn how to post something that isn't a 5,000 word essay!)

[Structure]

Fzammetti I like your essays,,,,,,,,

But yes I completely agree with you , when I came out of my computer science BSc I had a good grounding in high level design, but as we’d only used java there was no real attempt to make us think about what was going on underneath, rather just use the language. There was a half descent MIPS assembler course but this just scratched the surface.

This was made particularly apparent when I was helping someone in the labs make some java games (when we thought java was the best language there ever was) and we were dynamically allocating/ deallocating hundreds of game object classes all over the place, then sitting back wondering why its going so slow!

Even the MSc year only helped a bit, we had a grounding in c++ , which is not that hard after java. It was mostly the experience of developing real time systems this year that helped me. Programming evolutionary systems efficiently could mean the difference between 3 hours and 3 days evolution time, so it was important to get it right.

I think nothing can make up for experience, which is why this forum is great, I can pick the brains of you lot over all the pda issues im gona come across im sure.

Mlepage nice to hear your into Alife, shame a lot of it cant really be applied to game systems (sweeping statement I know), but im looking at ways at the mo.

[David Horn]

[Structure]