Parallel Game Engine

[appel]

I'm been doing a little bit of reading on this topic and I'm a bit intrigued.

Probably the best resource I've seen is here at Intel:

Smoke - Game Technology Demo
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/smoke-game-technology-demo/

Here's the article describing the system:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/designing-the-framework-of-a-parallel-game-engine


Just wanted to kick off some discussion about this, with Java in mind.

[JL235]

As it happens I'm currently building a highly concurrent framework in Erlang for my final year project at uni. It's only for simple games and so doesn't provide AI or Physics. It just concentrates on parrallalising updating the game state whilst pipelining it with the drawing code.

[Orangy Tang]

iD have quite a nice presentation on the parallization they've been doing in Rage: http://s09.idav.ucdavis.edu/talks/05-JP_id_Tech_5_Challenges.pdf

Job-based seems to be the way to go IMHO, as it scales much better (both in terms of dealing with varying number of cores/task and in terms of programming complexity). Having said that, it's not something I've considered doing for my own games since they're not usually CPU-intensive enough to warrant it. Usually I only move things off into threads to avoid blocking the main thread's execution rather than trying to make maximally effective use of multiple cores.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[appel]

My main reason for being interested in this topic is not because I need this for any particular game I'm working on, it's just a technical curiosity. I'd like to be able to build a basic game engine using parallelism, just to open some doors in regards of knowledge and expertise.


It'd be fun to start an open-source java project to make something like this...

[JL235]

It'd be fun to start an open-source java project to make something like this...

That's something I've been interested in for a while, and would love to get involved in. But I'm waaaay too busy to commit to anything.

[DzzD]

 what a revolution.... heu... I did not kwnew that there is anoter way than this one to make multithread application, this is just the most logical way ? no ?

EDIT: sorry I had a bad day.....

[gouessej]

EDIT: sorry I had a bad day.....

I wish you a better night.

It'd be fun to start an open-source java project to make something like this...

Maybe you could contribute to an existing project, couldn't you?

[appel]

Maybe you could contribute to an existing project, couldn't you?

Depends on the project.