Re: sparse components

I've read all the Mike Acton's stuff I can find. He's a really interesting
read for performance, I especially liked his small bit on branch
optimisation, went and implemented the stuff only to find that it's not just
faster on Cell's but on CISC out-of-order CPUs as well. He's also very clued
up on concurrency and I've definitely learned from him in that area. Without
what he had written, I'd have had a couple of problems trying
to perceive some of the other benefits to using my collected techniques.

My general work is almost like an attempt to bring a lot of "right thought"
to the general coders rather than go for ultimate throughput, because I've
found that optimising conceptually wrong code can be a nightmare of
refactoring before you even get to doing any real performance tuning. I
guess what I'm doing is trying to make it possible to enable the less clued
up to write code that easier for performance guru's like Mike to make a
bigger impact by having things laid out in a simple to grasp format.

On 28 May 2010 16:18, Javier Arevalo <[email protected]> wrote:

> You might enjoy this:
>
> http://www.insomniacgames.com/blogcast/blog/mike_acton/1500756
>
> Sorry I can't elaborate much, but I can tell you you're not the only one
> thinking in that direction.
>
>
> On 5/28/2010 16:44 PM, Richard Fabian wrote:
>
>> I'm working on some stuff at the moment, a kind of collection of
>> techniques that I've started pulling together into a more coherent single
>> way of thinking.
>>
>> One of the techniques is something I've been calling Existence Based
>> Processing, and it was born of my early implementations of component based
>> development. I've now heard someone call it Push Processing, but can't find
>> any references on Google, and wondered if anyone knew of the right search
>> phrase.
>> In my component system, I oriented the component processing to a per
>> component type rather than per entity, which meant I was keeping the I cache
>> warm all the time. I was lucky, I hadn't noticed this benefit at the time,
>> and now I do. Also, because components only existed for entities which
>> needed them, there was no processing done for entities without that
>> component. At the time I had simple finite state machines for AI that
>> switched in and out which component the AI was using as a hierarchical FSM,
>> but I've seen now that this rabbit hole goes deeper.
>>
>> So, what's this stuff called normally, and also, why aren't we taught
>> anything about it, and why aren't we using it?
>>
>> I've seen speed ups in my own code due to rewriting small sections in this
>> style, so can't fathom why we're not using it in general, or for that
>> matter, taught it at all.
>>
>> I've breathed even more life into this technique with my current work on
>> writing up my experience with data oriented development by adding or at
>> least clarifying what this sparse existence component technique can offer,
>> including some work on making your components behave as states for an FSM,
>> or even, because now I only have the concept of an implicit core entity, the
>> ability to generate multiple entities from one when needed (such as level of
>> detail change), and also collapse multiple entities down to one when the
>> level of detail is no longer necessary.
>>
>> A bit of background,: I was spurred on a bit by the "OOP is bad" talk into
>> putting a bit more effort into what I was doing so that other people might
>> benefit. The basis of my stuff is really a revisit to old computer science,
>> relational databases to be specific, and leveraging what has been learned
>> over the decades into something more useful for games. I've found that there
>> are a number of parallels in database technology and current high
>> performance game development, and I think it's because we're effectively in
>> the same hardware situation, just scaled up a lot. I think of the old DB
>> hard drives as our main memory, and their old small computers as being
>> equivalent to our modern CPUs and parallel machines. That is, we're using
>> powerful but small processing machines, committing transforms on the data
>> set that is in a slow medium.
>>
>> I'm currently doing general research to find out if there are other old
>> science techniques that we've forgotten, or not repurposed, while also
>> writing a proof of concept rogue-like in 3D. This does mean I have to write
>> two whole games that are exactly the same, as best I can, just to prove any
>> of my research, but I hope that doing so I may come across some other
>> unexpected discoveries.
>>
>>
> --
> Javier Arevalo
> http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare
>
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>



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