Tough times on the road to Starcraft (2012)

The part about hand maintained lists is a common pitfall in game development. When you're trying to push out frames at 60fps, you generally need to be caching quite a lot of values, for example, "Get all units that are moving" or "Get all units from side x". The absolute best way to handle this is to start off with safe, conservative functions, that don't cache at all - create a list, iterate over each entity, add whatever fits the…

> Since we were only “two months” from shipping, making changes to the engine for the better was regularly passed over for band-aiding existing but sub-optimal solutions, which led to many months of suffering I'm having a version of this problem right now. One of our products is not going to be sold to new customers at some point soon (but will continue to have plenty of existing customers), so it receives a small-ish budget for maintenance. A lot of…

What's the point of using linked lists ? Low memory ? I'll never understand why the usage of linked lists is so common. I mean you don't have fast random access with linked list, aren't hash maps just better for fast insertion/deletion ? Object pools are also pretty great too. I'll never forget the day a classmate in some game programming school argued that linked list were like vectors (std::vector). Linked lists only seems viable for insertions, they're not viable…