Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

It was on hiatus for a couple of years: I left the game industry, moved across the country, and had a couple of kids. But I'm back to working on it now and I hope I can get it finished.

View on HN

Hi! Wow, very nice to meet the author. Most of this was written after I'd already finished my game, but the Object Pool article was part of the inspiration for my memory pool class [1]. Thanks for everything you've written, it has helped more people than you probably know.

[1] https://github.com/karlgluck/Evidyon/blob/master/Source/comm...

That's great to hear! I'm glad you got some use out of it. Feedback like this is the only thing that gives the book a chance of being finished. I'm generally terrible at staying focused on one thing but hearing stuff like this really helps.

I just read the component chapter and its the clearest article on components I've read so far, I wish I had read this 2yrs ago!

BTW in my game I do some component communication by having a GetComponent method on GameObject that takes a component identifier and returns the component. This is a compromise between messaging and direct reference and I think many engines offer this :)

Thanks!

I only just found it, read the "Game Loop" chapter and it's great stuff! I like how you clearly enumerate the pros and cons of several approaches. And even if an approach was already familiar to me, that made it very useful providing new ways of thinking and comparing about it.

So please do keep it up :)

"If there is one pattern this book couldn’t live without, this is it. Game loops are the quintessential example of a "game programming pattern". Almost every game has one, no two are exactly alike, and relatively few programs outside of games use them."

I've borrowed many of the game loop and other game programming principles when developing code for controlling external equipment like robots and radio transceivers. It's a better model than some of the crazy state machine code I'd written in the past.

Hi, It's great to hear that you are back on it! I stumbled on this page a couple of years ago and was saddened to see it wasn't getting updated. Thank you for this great piece of writing.

If you ever do finish it, go and wrap it in a book via some online self publishing platforms. I'll be the first one to buy a copy.

Or, if you're not interested in making some money out of it, maybe turn it into wiki style website, so that other people could chip in and you would moderate the submitted text.

> go and wrap it in a book via some online self publishing platforms.

That's what I'm thinking right now. I actually really really look forward to doing layout on a book. I used to be a designer before I was a programmer.

> maybe turn it into wiki style website, so that other people could chip in and you would moderate the submitted text.

Sometime soon, I'll probably try to get the source repo public and up on github. Then I can take pull requests and let people file issues to fix bugs/errors in the book.

I have to do some sanitizing of the repo first, and figure out a license, but it's on my TODO list.

I've read through about half of the on-line content and I'm impressed, I would gladly pay for a completed version, particularly if it was available to read on a kindle.

So, please consider finding a way to make this project worth your while as I really want to see this completed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com