What kind...

Greetings,

I was just curious as to what area of Game Programming the areas I focus on would be labeled as. I'm an amateur programmer that, so far, has only gone through two years of standard college education for an Associate's. Most of the programming I do is typically research based, to overcome the lack of schooling at a college.

The primary area of interest is code generation, or taking a data model and making useful abstractions or concrete infrastructures off of this data, depending on the specific goal of the given project. I'm using a self-coded framework for code generation, and while I, presently, target a managed architecture (C#), I think that it might eventually be a viable medium for making games (professionally, that is, XNA's developing quite nicely, but lacks full platform independence).

Even if it (XNA + C#) doesn't take off, I think there might be use in the tooling area of games, for systems that use data from the developer to generate certain behavior or structure, depending on the project. The most notable area would be scripting systems, I'm guessing that transforming or compiling them vs. interpreting them would be favorable depending on the complexity and goals of the system involved.

The main question here is: are abstract models that transform into concrete systems from data, that describes specific instances of those abstractions, useful in games programming?

Thanks,

PS: In my spare time I'm developing a lot of different tools for transformation, code generation and so on. I hope to be able to create a series of visual editors that can demonstrate some of the benefits of generative programming principles in games. If I make no sense what-so-ever, please say so. Most websites I post on are other amateur game developer forums, and finding people to discuss concepts with is often difficult, perhaps it's because I just suck at communicating.

 

To answer your question: yes, they are. Anything useful in "real" programming can be used in game programming. It's not something that will get you a job or even something that will be asked at interview but you can see pieces of code generated from data here and there e.g. shaders built from material descriptions.

 

yes

 

Doesn't that sentence describe just about every game object?

For instance, a sprite is an abstract model (class) that is transformed into a concrete system from data (image, position, etc)? What you have described is a very abstract concept and could apply to most things in object oriented programming.

I am assuming that what you have is a little more complicated than that, though?

 

Hmm. For some reason now when I click on the "Report Post" button (for this obvious spambot), it says I don't have permissions to do so - that's new.