Software Engineering

Navigating Complex Spaces Ships navigating between obstacles is a complex challenge that requires advanced planning algorithms. As ships traverse oceans, they encounter islands, shoals, reefs and other vessels that must be circumnavigated. Plotting an optimal course through these obstacles is critical for safety and efficiency. The Core Challenge: Planning Paths Around Obstacles The core challenge…

Setting Limits on Acceleration The acceleration imposed on a ship by an AI pilot system directly impacts the feasibility of resulting trajectories. Unconstrained accelerations can lead to movements that overstress ship structures or require unreasonable amounts of thrust. As such, properly specifying maximum acceleration values is crucial for safe and effective ship control. A key…

Providing Efficient Access to Shared Components Entity-Component systems power many modern game engines and simulations. These systems compose game objects from reusable, mix-and-match components. To enable flexible composition, components are often stored in global pools and shared between entities. However, contention for read/write access to these shared component pools can become a major bottleneck. This…

Streamlining Asset Pipelines Asset pipelines process art assets like 3D models, textures, animations, and audio clips to optimize them for use in games. Manual asset processing can hamper developer velocity. Automating asset processing, enabling incremental builds, and parallelizing tasks can significantly streamline workflows. Automating asset processing and builds Manually processing assets is time-consuming and error-prone….

Obfuscation techniques like code obfuscation, user input sanitization, and simple client-side validations are often used by game developers to protect against hacking game scores and mechanics. However, skilled hackers can bypass these defenses leading to compromised game economies and leaderboards. More robust validation directly within the game’s core logic is required. Reviewing Common Obfuscation Techniques…

Preventing Score Tampering with Hashes A cryptographic hash function is a mathematical algorithm that maps data of arbitrary size to a bit string of a fixed size. It is a one-way function, meaning that it is easy to compute the hash for a given input but extremely difficult to generate the original input from the…

Identifying Performance Bottlenecks Early Detecting parts of a game’s code or systems that are performance bottlenecks early in development is crucial for balancing optimization versus maintainability. Profilers and metrics can pinpoint where a game is CPU-bound, GPU-bound, or memory-bound, directing programmers’ attention to hot spots needing improvement. However, premature optimization without actual metrics risks complicating…

Balancing Creativity and Structure in Game Development Game development requires a careful balance between creative freedom and structural best practices. On one hand, game designers and developers need the flexibility to rapidly iterate and test out creative, sometimes wild ideas. Imposing too much planning and process upfront risks limiting this creative spark that is vital…