It's an intro for those wanting to start game development. I haven't done anything in this area but getting in to effective distribution of work across multiple cores is so far beyond what someone asking, "How do I write a game?", can handle that I wouldn't think to start talking about it.
If someone is at the point where they have a good game but are only 50% utilizing the device because of single threading, they won't need to read an intro. They'll be looking for more advanced stuff. If you want to see how much more complicated life gets when considering concurrency for work in an environment which really needs to act sequential to make sense, read this: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=483040 Life in the game engine gets very complicated when trying to manage work being done by multiple threads. It is a total art to get it just right and it's certainly not something that anyone working on their first game would want to mess with. I talked to a few guys at EA and asked them what the hardest thing about porting games between the 360 and PS3 were. They said that the among the hardest things for them was the difference in parallelization between the platforms. The XBox 360 has 3 CPU cores and the PS3 has the cell engine which is 1 general purpose CPU and 7 "synergistic" ones, which I'm sure is a programming nightmare until you've really gotten used to it. Making an engine run well on multiple cores can be very specific to the game. Different games have different needs and can offload different weights of tasks better than others. For example, I have a fairly heavy AI algorithm in Light Racer 2. It could make sense to run it on another thread, so long as I can make sure that it's still synchronized with the game world running on the main thread. More often than not though it makes more sense to do weirder things like design the collision detection system so that all of the checks are broke up into units of work that can be round robined across multiple threads until they are all processed. That would work but it is a big design issue and something a first time game coder may struggle with more than they need to. These are some of the reasons I just don't address that specific issue in my article. It's just too much for someone who's still trying to figure out how to make graphics show up and do stuff and it could even be a deal breaker for someone who gets stuck on it, thinking that it's more important than it is and doesn't focus on just getting their basic game idea prototypes and working. On May 28, 2:56 pm, Al Sutton <[email protected]> wrote: > It's a good enough intro, but it's very much focused on single threaded games > which will work well enough on the current generation of devices, but you > might want to consider multi-threaded approaches which can scale if run on > multi-core devices. > > Al. > > -- > > * Written an Android App? - List it athttp://andappstore.com/* > > ====== > Funky Android Limited is registered in England & Wales with the > company number 6741909. The registered head office is Kemp House, > 152-160 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, UK. > > The views expressed in this email are those of the author and not > necessarily those of Funky Android Limited, it's associates, or it's > subsidiaries. > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert Green > Sent: 28 May 2009 20:30 > To: Android Developers > Subject: [android-developers] Re: Game Development > > Start here, my friend > -http://www.rbgrn.net/content/54-getting-started-android-game-development > > On May 26, 10:43 pm, Cold <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > I am Bishesh and i am student of Bachelor in Information Management. > > I have knowledge of C, C++,J2SE and i m looking to develop a game in > > Android. I have been reading the documentation of Android. > > But i have never done a gaming project. > > > Could anybody of you help me out with a simple game. > > > Plz reply to me if i need to be more specific. > > > I am in real need of help,. > > > HELPP!!! HELPP!!! > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
