How do you follow best practices for game programming?

As a manager, the intricacies of each language may not be your primary concern. What's important is ensuring that your team chooses a language that aligns with the project's requirements and the team’s expertise. Additionally, the choice of language could significantly impact the project's timeline and budget, so having a managerial grasp of this aspect is essential.

Choosing the right programming language in game development is crucial because it can significantly impact the development process, performance, and platform compatibility. Factors like the type of game, target platforms, team expertise, and development tools should guide the decision. For example, C++ is commonly used for high-performance games, while Unity's C# is great for cross-platform development. Ultimately, selecting the right language aligns with the project's specific requirements and goals, ensuring a smoother development journey and a better gaming experience for players.

There are many different programming languages that can be used for game development, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Some popular languages for game programming include C++, C#, and JavaScript. The best language for a particular project will depend on a number of factors, such as the type of game being developed, the target platform, and the team's experience and preferences. However, some general considerations include: Performance: The language should be able to generate efficient code that can run at high frame rates. Features: The language should have the features needed to implement the game's features, such as physics, graphics, and networking.

Always ensure that what you are learning on one language isn’t the programming language, but instead the pattern and/or algorithm that you can carry with you to apply when you need. A good way to verify if are doing right is check if you can use your recent learning in another lang or development area.

After programming in Java, C# or Python, you will never want to go back to C++, C or Objective C. So many things can go wrong that modern languages protect you from. IL2CPP converts C# bytecode to C++, removing any speed disadvantage. PyPy for python. There is no good reason to use UNSAFE languages any more. You will save so much time not having to worry about and debug memory leaks, memory overwrites, and buffer overflows!

Frankly, I don't care if you comment too much or put a space before or after your //. Clearly define types, and use simple naming conventions. Self commenting code rules. For everything else use, LINT or KISS. Also TODO's generally go in an organizational project text file within the repo when you're checking in. It acts as an centralized list you can check back in on. This can help your PM's and also your peers tremendously here.

Once you have chosen a language, you should establish coding standards for your project. Coding standards are a set of rules that govern the way code is written. They can help to improve the readability, maintainability, and portability of your code. Some common coding standards include: - Using a consistent naming convention for variables, functions, and classes. - Using whitespace to make your code more readable. - Commenting your code to explain what it does. - Avoiding global variables. - Using functions to modularize your code.

We should take note of the recent ai tech, it will rewrite our common industry coding standards. Or for that matter all standards.

Coding standards are the backbone of organized and readable game code. They provide a common language for developers to follow, ensuring that code is consistent, comprehensible, and maintainable. Whether it's naming variables meaningfully, indenting code consistently, or documenting functions clearly, adhering to coding standards greatly eases collaboration in game development projects. Clear, well-structured code is not only easier to work with but also reduces the likelihood of errors, making it an essential practice for creating successful and efficient games.

I believe everyone recognizes the importance of coding standards. However, ensuring consistent enforcement and updating can be challenging. Forming a team with representatives from various tech groups might be an effective way to keep the standards relevant, current, and efficiently communicated to all teams through their representatives.

My advice is make your code so obvious that small comments will not add up information. Reserve comments to TODOs, code areas not easy to understand (potentially logging a refactor task), to express potential improvements on other’s code and prefer name functions and variables with meaningful words (ie. Avoid abbreviations and suppress words if possible).

If your code is clean and function names are descriptive, there may not be much need for additional comments. Good code formatting and meaningful naming conventions can make your code self-explanatory, reducing the necessity for extra explanations.

Commenting your code is a vital practice in game programming. Comments act as a bridge between code and human comprehension, serving multiple essential roles: - Clarity - Documentation - Progress Tracking - Communication - Debugging Aid -Optimization However, maintain a balance in your commenting approach to avoid over-explaining or cluttering the code. Focus on explaining the "why" behind code choices, intentions, and potential alternatives considered, rather than delving into excessive detail about the "how." In summary, code comments transcend mere documentation; they convey thought processes, promote collaboration, and enhance game programming's maintainability and efficiency.

The answer to the "How" question is the code itself. Therefore, it is unnecessary to add comments about "How" it works. Always add comments about "Why" a code is written the way it is. In this way,whatever is in the mind of the person who wrote the code will be transferred to other developers. Even after a while (for example, 3 months), it will make the person who wrote that code remember why that code was written that way. If you encountered a problem while developing a game and used a "hack" to solve that problem, be sure to add it as a comment. If you have created a class, add a comment for what purpose that class was created. If you use documentation generator tools like Doxygen, you can easily document your code and export it.

Comments are important but should not be overused to explain every single line of code, the more important goal is clarity and being able to understand what your code is doing at a glance while also having a backup/commented explanation for code elements that are easy to misinterpret or get confused about, a lot of comments can sometimes make it harder to understand code at a glance too. Use comments wisely and try to write code (variables, functions, class names, etc.) in a way that is self explanatory and does not require a comment in the first place. eg. bool isPlayerAlive = true; //no comment required

Testing and debugging are cornerstone practices in game programming, safeguarding your game's quality and functionality. They are dynamic processes aimed at identifying and rectifying errors, ensuring a seamless player experience. Testing: 1. Continuous Evaluation 2. Diverse Tools 3. Beta Testing 4. Player Feedback Debugging: 1. Root Cause Analysis: 2. Fix and Iterate 3. Documentation 4. Regression Testing 5. Collaboration In summary, testing and debugging are twin pillars of game programming, essential for delivering a polished and enjoyable gaming experience. Rigorous testing ensures that your game functions as intended, while diligent debugging eradicates issues that could mar the player's immersion.

There should be a new concept introduced from my pov, staging testing. Where the staging env would be replicated entirely and set out for a small designated amount of gamers to interact with. That way your testing cycle would be more complete, and reduce the risk in launching a new game.

Use error/crash detection software like Firebase Crashlytics. Check on it often. Try to identify the source of the error/crash by monitoring the stacktrace on bugs/crashes. Add unit tests, which are often ignored when coding a game. This way, you can be sure whether it works or not when there is a change in the code. You will encounter fewer bugs. Play the game regularly and try to find bugs. Try different use cases. Always playing with the same gameplay style will cause you to ignore some bugs. Try to repeat the bug. If you can repeat the bug, it will be much easier to solve the bug. If you can repeat it sometimes and sometimes not, it may be a race condition.

I envy big teams that have time dedicated to establishing and maintaining a suite of tests for their project. In small projects, testing mostly consists of checking whether everything behaves as expected in-situ. At small scales, writing tests is too costly in dev time, especially when the writer is not experienced: more likely than not, you will write code that will pass your test but will fail in the context of the actual usage. For these cases, it's faster to just try out the code in-situ.

Performance, like testing, should not be something left for the end of a project. Instead, it's something every developer actively contributes to as the project goes on. While I do agree that you should not 'prematurely optimize' a particular path of code before you are sure it's a problem via confirmation from a profiler, that's still no excuse to sprinkle in code that you know performs worse than an alternative approach. For example, using slow string-compares all over rather than something quicker, such as numeric hash comparisons in their place. The phrase 'death by 1000 cuts' comes to mind.

Optimizing performance in game programming is a continuous effort that directly impacts how well your game operates on various devices and systems. It's a multifaceted challenge influenced by graphics, audio, physics, AI, network, memory, and more. Ensuring optimal performance is crucial for delivering a smooth and enjoyable gaming experience while mitigating issues like lag, stutter, and freezing. Optimizing performance in game programming is a multifaceted task requiring careful consideration of various factors. It involves efficient algorithms, data management, design patterns, and the elimination of redundancy. Profiling tools and benchmarking are indispensable for identifying and rectifying bottlenecks.....

Do not blindly edit the code without finding the cause of the performance problem. Because if it is not the cause of the performance problem, it will not contribute to performance. Constantly check its performance since then the prototype is created and until that game is released. If you are using Unity game engine, Unity's Profiler tool makes it very easy to detect performance problems. If you are using a different game engine, determine the cause of the performance problem with its Profiler. Test performance on a device with or close to the game's minimum supported system requirements. This way you can easily detect performance problems. Compare before and after performance optimization: What was the impact on performance?

CPU cache optimisation is often overlooked, and is somewhat of a dark art. Avoiding cache misses is where the major performance improvements are to be found in tight inner loops, after you've done the basics of using an efficient algorithm, "strength reduction" and eliminating unnecessary code. Think about how your data is structured in memory and how it will be loaded into the cache. Try different memory layouts, test and repeat. Don't dereference things unnecessarily, and always cache the dereferences before going into a loop.

Try to write code with performance in mind always, this come with experience and the more time you spend problem solving, the better you get at this. Use a more event driven pattern instead of running conditional checks in update or tick loops. Profile your games performance from the start using inbuilt or external tools. Don't leave optimization as a last step, it is a mindset that you need to develop through experience, even if you lack the experience required, do invest time into researching bottlenecks you discover by profiling your memory usage and frame generation time (fps) and try to figure out various new optimization strategies.

Many game projects, although applicable to other fields, suffer from what could be called the "Janitor Syndrome"... In most projects, due to time constraints, budget limitations, or team capacity, performance and optimization tend to be left until the last moment. It's crucial to understand that this should be part of the process from the beginning and should be an iterative and incremental process as new features are added. It requires a working philosophy deeply ingrained in the team's work culture. It may seem like time is being saved by skipping some steps, but in the end, it can have a huge impact if errors accumulate.

At the end of the day, most games need to ship within a set timeline and budget, consider the time, money and team size you have with the scope of the project in mind and write decent code according to the requirements of the project. Decent code means code that is readable and maintainable enough, it doesn't need to be perfect or extremely modular since that takes a significant amount of time to achieve, more than most projects can allow for. If your working with a larger team where modularity is a requirement, then it would make sense to discuss and keep code modular enough so that everyone can keep working on their own separate modules without affecting each other too much.

In summary, focus on improving what you love to play. Developing games that you don't personally enjoy playing is unlikely to bring joy to you or the players of your game.