Timeline for What is the best way to exploit multicores when making multithread games?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
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| May 28, 2014 at 14:13 | comment | added | Tara | @Anko: "shooting yourself in the foot with a cruise missile" LOL! You are right. But keep in mind, Keeper's board game was just an example (a not so good one for this problem). He was asking about multithreading in games in general. | |
| May 28, 2014 at 14:04 | comment | added | Anko | @Dudeson You're right, but if your game doesn't end up needing that highly concurrent engine, you'll have wasted dev time. Programmer time is more expensive than machine time. Of course, as with everything, experts can divine future needs and take design shortcuts, but they don't need advice. However, for OP's "small board game", having "read about using threads", if introducing unnecessary complexity is like shooting yourself in the foot, then starting a board game design with concurrency considerations is like shooting yourself in the foot with a cruise missile. | |
| May 26, 2014 at 13:39 | comment | added | Tara | @Anko: It seems like you have never worked on a high-performance game engine before. Do you think having 4 cores inside a PC and not using them makes sense? | |
| Mar 17, 2012 at 14:11 | comment | added | Maximus Minimus | My source is Knuth's original paper that is so often misquoted (or partially quoted) - "structured programming with goto statements" - PDF copy available here: cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammingGoTo.pdf pop down to page 8, things begin happening in the second paragraph of the second column. | |
| Mar 17, 2012 at 14:05 | comment | added | Maximus Minimus | stephelton is definitely correct here. If you don't design around multithreading considerations, if you try to retro-fit it after the fact, you WILL create a mess. Multithreading simply cannot be considered an optimization - premature or otherwise - these days. It's an up-front design decision. | |
| Mar 17, 2012 at 13:58 | comment | added | Anko | I'm deliberately annoying. I thought any discussion I could cause would be necessary and constructive. I expected a better discussion, though. Gentlemen and gentlewomen, please cite your sources! I cite heavy history. I cite the heaps of videogame vapourware that died of featuritis before birth. I cite those miserable hundreds of uncompleted hobbyist game development projects. I see no mythical 3 percent, only death caused by the other 97. | |
| Mar 17, 2012 at 3:12 | comment | added | notlesh | I don't really agree with the message in this answer. Threading issues are best considered before the interactions of large systems are implemented. At the same time, they are very pivotal points of design in the system and are huge points of optimization. A good high-level design will include consideration of multithreaded implementation. Premature optimization can certainly be a bad thing, but when designing large systems and their interactions, multithreading considerations are not necessarily "premature." After all, we're talking about some of the biggest decisions that will be involved. | |
| Mar 17, 2012 at 0:08 | comment | added | Maximus Minimus | The true master knows that exceptions this does have. Don't forget that what Knuth actually said was: "97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning; he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified". I see this misquoted (or partially quoted) as reasoning against any kind of optimization so often, and it's borderline annoying... | |
| Mar 16, 2012 at 21:37 | comment | added | Kylotan | In general, I agree with what you're saying regarding optimisation, but I think this situation is different. For example, if your entity update requires access to the world in order to iterate over other entities, then your ability to spread that across multiple threads is already severely limited. | |
| Mar 16, 2012 at 18:17 | comment | added | Anko | "Yes, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side." | |
| Mar 16, 2012 at 18:09 | comment | added | Keeper | Mysterious are the ways of the force... | |
| Mar 16, 2012 at 18:02 | history | answered | Anko | CC BY-SA 3.0 |