The Engine of the Future | Hacker News Reader

The Engine of the Future

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I've been a programmer for over 20 years, a gamer for longer than that, and I can understand more out of a Rainforest Ecology or an Iron Mine Geology article than I can make up from this one. Make you think about just how complex computers have become and how broad Computer Science is.

I understood the main points pretty well and the reasoning behind most of them. I don't work in the gaming industry. I draw upon these resources for my context:

- https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-09/cpu-utilization...

- Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

- A Crash Course in Modern Hardware by Cliff Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFgxAFdxYAQ

- GCAP 2017: Decima Visibility in HZD https://youtu.be/N7b65kPI5AQ

- GPU-Based Run-Time Procedural Placement in HZD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToCozpl1sYY

- https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024912/Beyond-Killzone-Creati...

I say this only to make the point that optimization is not completely inaccessible to the average person. It is useful to understand what the hardware is doing--up to a certain point; good abstractions are also necessary.

BTW: If you are interested in what's up in game engine architecture, check out the linked conference proceedings https://enginearchitecture.org/

The elephant in the room here is Peak Rendering. While most games are not photo real, the audience might not care or know the difference. The areas to improve are more likely in animation, secondary motion, physics, and (world) simulation. These will need high performance computing (gpgpu). Unity (engine) was working towards parallism of game objects with its next generation ECS.

To clarify, game/graphics/rendering engine, not vehicle or any other kind of engine.

I was really excited and thought, “finally, someone’s writing about the Pinion MGU!”

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