2 posts tagged “c++”

As a graduate student, I consume knowledge like I consume cake: ravenously and without thought to my general well-being. It's supposed to be a useful trait, or so I'm told. However, I am one of the very few people who are like this. It's believed less than 1% of the population gets a PhD, and for good reason. This is a career, and it isn't for everyone. That said, I'm not one of those people that think university is entirely for academic pursuits either.

There is a constant push and pull between academics and students. Academics believe that they're creating the workers of the future. Giving them the building blocks for fundamental understanding is much more important than giving them experience in the vocational tools they'll use in the short-term. Universities create engineers, vocational apprenticeships create car mechanics. There's nothing wrong with creating mechanics. The world needs all types of people. However, the farther up the university quality food-chain you go, the harder it is to convince anyone that a vocational course has a use.

With Computer Science, and video games especially, this tension reaches a breaking point. I've sat in many classes where I've felt the academics have severely impeded my learning... I needed to know the "hows" and not the "whys". I didn't care how the naïve Bayes algorithm was derived, just what it did. Even at graduate level, I run into the same things.

The added difficulty with video games is that game studios are constantly pushing on universities to be a training farm for them: teach undergraduates C++, XNA and 3D Studio Max and get them out (the irony being that game developers then say in Edge that the Computer Science graduates are preferable to those with "lesser" games degrees). This is what the academics rightly push back on, but it seems many go too far. It is important to give undergraduates an idea of what a commercial toolset looks like. Neglecting that for some idealistic wrongheadedness that forces students to always use open-source software, work by themselves (teamwork is hard!) and be damned with the real world is hurting everyone.

A moderate approach is needed: the strong basics that Computer Science has always had, coupled with an idea of what the hard road of video game development is like. A class on XNA can only benefit, an entire curriculum based around it hurts everyone. This sounds obvious (at least to me), but you would be surprised about the number of professors for whom even this is a worrying proposition.

I trawled Google looking for a relevant quote to end with, and found this by Lawrence J Peter: "Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices."

That'll do.

Java will eventually be as fast as C++. Just as C became as fast as Assembler, so too will Java be as fast as C++.

Syntheticist was first told this about five years ago. The message was repeated about once a year, in various Computer Science classes that Syntheticist attended. It is hard to argue that this is yet the case, at least in the realms of video games.

Syntheticist has been reading "Programming AI by Example" by Buckland. While it is too early to give book review, the first chapter has proven to be clear, informative, and above all, entertaining. As is the case with almost all serious video game books, the examples are given in C++.

For those that don't know about C++, the Wikipedia article is a great starting point. Syntheticist has tried, and failed, on multiple occasions, to learn C++. The language is perhaps the most ubiquitous, and yet, one of the most difficult, that exists in modern programming. The syntax can be bizarre, it has a deep-reliance on programmer-handled pointers, and the memory management is difficult. While implicit memory management is of course necessary in performance-critical applications like C++, examples such as Objective-Cs retain/release paradigm simply make more sense to a great number of people. C++'s supposed object-orientation strength is not leveraged by the inclusion of a set of libraries in a standardised way. By this Syntheticist means there is no equivalent of the Java API, or Perl's CPAN library, or Ruby's RubyForge. If you need an add-on to C++, you simply have to hit Google and hope your search comes up good.

In fact, the first chapter in Buckland's book spends a fair chunk of time with the implementation of message passing and writing dispatcher code. Syntheticist has seen this before... it is included for free in Mac OS Xs Cocoa libraries, and the syntax was far more understandable and documented than a homebrew version. This is not a slight on Buckland, who does a pretty fantastic job of illustrating what is happening, but this is something that should be available for free somewhere. Syntheticist wants to design AI routines, not implement the foundations every time. Syntheticist can only presume that C++ programmers keep libraries of their own homebrew versions of everything many graduates expect to find in their language libraries.

C++ is an anachronism to many computer science graduates; neither as object-orientated as Java, or as clean as C. Objective-C is more object-orientated, but lets you write in full ANSI C code for the portions of execution that are the most performance-critical. Yet for now, C++ overall is the fastest language to develop and execute programs, so of course it is the de-facto standard for video game development.

If you are learning C++, as Syntheticist is now destined to attempt once more, the C++ How to Program books by Deitel & Deitel are very well written, and do as good a job as can be hoped for when it comes to introducing you slowly to the task at hand.

If anyone would like Syntheticist to expand on this post with a few examples, leave a comment below. Syntheticist will keep you updated as the progression through the book continues.