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Data Structures and Game Development

Started by ChrisCppDev Nov 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM 2 replies 2.1k views

Original Post

Nov 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM

Hello all,

I'm new to the forums and came here seeking advice about my education and game development. I would love to land a job at companies like blizzard, but I'm struggling in the current process. I recently transferred from a CC to a University of California institution, and I have been struggling ever since.

My current data structures c++ class is destroying me, and I'm having a hard time grasping and incorporating the material into my code. I believe this is probably the most vital class for software development jobs since it teaches you the efficiently of writing a great program.

So, I was wondering how important is the data structures concept and how can I go about it learning it a bit easier? Is it a large part of game development? I'm also not too strong with inheritance, so should I learn that before I dive into the data structures material? I'm rather new to the gaming scene and have tried to google these questions, but didn't quite yield the results I wanted.

Thank you in advance for the answers.

Ashaman73

Nov 12, 2012 at 9:03 AM

Data structures are just the fundamentals and you should be able to use them (not to recite them). Which data structures is useful really depends on the coding problem you need to solve. From my experiences you will need many of them at least once in your coding life

, so learning them is important.

ChrisCppDev

Nov 12, 2012 at 9:10 AM

From a game development stand point, is there a lot to be loss if the programmer uses minimal data structures implementations ? (Such as poor performance in game quality, slowing down the game in any way, etc )

Ashaman73

Nov 12, 2012 at 2:10 PM

From a game development stand point, is there a lot to be loss if the programmer uses minimal data structures implementations ?

It depends. Certain data structures solve certain problems, implementing the basic structure is often the first barrier to take (e.g. an oct-tree instead of a simple linked list ). The second step is to optimize this implementation if necessary. Optimization bears always the danger of writing unreadable code or to introduce new bugs. Therefore optimization is often only necessary after a bottleneck has been detected, but AAA games often have a lot of optimization going on to ensure that the game runs at 30 fps

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