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Research topics regarding game programming

Started by Soaps79 Jul 22, 2011 at 7:06 PM 1 replies 7.6k views

Original Post

Jul 22, 2011 at 7:06 PM

This isn't exactly a programming question, but very related. I am in my third year of school for game programming, and have to write a semester-long (12ish pages) research paper for English class. I would really like to use that time to research something useful to my career, so I am trying to figure out a topic in programming. Since it's a paper rather than code exploration, it would have to be more theory than application.

My first thought was on programming paradigms. We started in procedural and are now working in mainly OO, but I know little to nothing about other approaches. I can't see spending time exploring the others as anything but a good thing.

Another idea would revolve around scripting and why it is important to game development. This would encompass, among other things, how it's important to open the development to non-low-level-programmer designers.

An extension to that would be a paper on how to approach designing architecture with the designers in mind, encompassing scripting, tools, level builders, etc.

I have written lots of code in C++/DX, and have some experience in C#/XNA and a tiny bit with Lua/binding. The paper would probably be language-agnostic, but I thought it would help to know where I'm at.

What I am asking of this community is for any ideas that I haven't thought of. You guys know the next logical steps for what I should be learning, and I was just looking for some ideas to research. Thanks for any suggestions.

bloodisblue

Jul 23, 2011 at 1:57 AM

Well. I haven't gone through college yet however if you wanted to do something related to computers you could easily do a paper about Moore's law and how it has constantly held true even though in recent years it constantly is predicted to fail but somehow there is another breakthrough / or just like the development of modern computers.

Somebody linked this course http://www.gameinstitute.com/courses.php?coursedisplay=121 and I found the short description here very interesting. I believe it said that you shouldn't expect background knowledge of how the hardware works and is created to get you the job it definitely helps.

Anyways good luck with the paper and finding a good topic to write about!

Krohm

Jul 23, 2011 at 8:00 AM

... Since it's a paper rather than code exploration, it would have to be more theory than application.
Another idea would revolve around scripting and why it is important to game development. This would encompass, among other things, how it's important to open the development to non-low-level-programmer designers.

An extension to that would be a paper on how to approach designing architecture with the designers in mind, encompassing scripting, tools, level builders, etc.

Having wasted at least 3 years of my life in a university which routinely bashed real-world issues to "solve them in theory because that's sufficient", I'd say you'll have a lot of trouble doing that. The benefits of scripting emerges mostly from interactions with real-world problems in real workflow. If you're going to tackle this, you'll have to introduce and model ("theoricize") the whole asset pipeline and workflow.

The worse thing is that few scripting languages can actually do more than you could do in the base language. In line of theory most languages are equivalent (in 'computability' terms) so in line of pure theory, they don't buy anything new.
By contrast, if you keep the problem on the Software Engineering kind of things, you might be able to make them digest it as SWENG is, by definition, to worry about the process. It's still quite problematic in my opinion as the benefits start to emerge predominantly for "big", complex systems.

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