Data-Oriented-Design

There has been a lot of recent discussion (and criticism) on Data Oriented Design recently. I want to address some of the issues that have been raised, but before that, I’ll start with this reprint from my most recent Game Developer Magazine. If you have any questions you’d like addressed, add write a comment and I’ll try to answer everything I can. Last year I wrote about the basics of Data-Oriented Design (see the September 2009 issue of Game Developer). In the time since that article, Data-Oriented Design has gained a lot of traction in game development and many of teams are thinking in terms of data for some of the more performance-critical systems. ...

_I’ve been meaning to put up the rest of the Inner Product columns I wrote for Game Developer Magazine, but I wasn’t finding the time. With all the recent discussion on data-oriented design, I figured it was time to dust some of them off. This was one of the first columns I wrote. At first glance it might seem a completely introductory topic, not worth spending that much time on it. After all, all experience programmers know about pointers and indices, right? True, but I don’t think all programmers really take the time to think about the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and how it affects architecture decisions, data organization, and memory traversal. ...

This is my first entry into #iDevBlogADay. It all started very innocently with a suggestion from Miguel, but the ball got rolling pretty quickly. The idea is to have one independent iPhone game developer write a blog entry each day of the week. At first we thought we would be hard-pressed to get 7 developers, but it’s starting to seem we might have multiples per day! Check out the new sidebar with all the #iDevBlogADay blogs. We’re also putting together a common RSS feed if you want to subscribe to that instead. ...

A few days ago, Tony Albrecht posted the slides of his presentation titled “Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Design” [1]. Even though the title is really broad and could easily be misinterpreted, it’s not just a general bash on OOD. Instead, it’s very much focused on how object-oriented design is not a good match for high-performance apps (games) on modern hardware architectures with slow memory access and deep memory hierarchies. His proposed solution: Data-oriented design. Spot on! ...

Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the end, you barely get much of a speed-up due to all the synchronization you had to add. To top it off, the code is so complex that fixing bugs creates more problems, and the thought of adding new features is discarded right away. Sound familiar? ...