Mediocre game technology

No matter what fancy allocator you come up with, memory allocation will always be expensive. In order to reduce memory allocations I have been using stack-allocated containers for the past four-five years and I think it has worked really well, so I thought I'd write a post about them here. These methods have been used in all our games (Sprinkle, Granny Smith, Smash Hit as well as our new project). Using containers is really convenient and often necessary. Take the array for example: MyArray<Object> array; Everybody's got one. The problem with these are that you need to allocate memory when putting stuff in them. In many cases you know on beforehand approximately how many objects you want to put in there, reducing it to a single allocation: MyArray<Object> array; array.reserve(50); But if this code is in a function that is called frequently it would be much nicer if those first fifty objects were reserved on the stack instead of the heap, like this: My

I will give a talk about the fracture algorithm in Smash Hit at GDC 2015. Come by room 304 on Tuesday at 1:45 PM. The session will cover the actual fracture algorithm as well as the physics engine to support it and how fracture affects other subsystems in the game. There will be be cool, shiny videos of stuff breaking :-P