![]() “If you’re writing the game loop itself, garbage collection invariably introduces a pause into the execution,” Butler said. Butler said automatic garbage collection can also be more efficient than doing it manually, because the heap gets cleaned out all at once after enough debris has accumulated, instead of a little at a time.īut for programs that are memory intensive, there is also a latency cost to the automatic process. Garbage collection is generally desirable - it means the developer doesn’t have to spend time allocating and deallocating memory every time, or worry about forgetting to do it and accidentally causing a memory leak in the program. That’s different from higher-level languages like Java and C#, which manage memory behind the scenes by automatically deallocating unused memory, in a process called garbage collection. He picked the language for writing the low-level game engine because it leaves memory management up to the developer. ![]() MORE ON GAME DEVELOPMENT The War Between Web and Game Developersīutler had originally intended to use Rust only for his custom game engine, and Python for the rest of the game, but he enjoyed Rust so much he ended up writing the entire game with it. It’s not the best route for everyone - Butler said it helps to be familiar with useful libraries that already exist, so developers can enjoy the flexibility of creating a custom game engine without getting bogged down in the details of creating every software capability from scratch. Butler said developers add their own logic by writing code in a language like C#, which calls functions from the Unity engine.īut ultimately, Butler just wanted to write his own game engine for the experience of tinkering in the lowest levels of game development. It’s used to write a large portion of mobile app games, and can also create games that run on a variety of platforms. One of the most popular development frameworks for creating games - also known as “game engines” - is the Unity engine. And resolving that is often very difficult.” “But then once you’re six months down the line of the project, you find out the framework just can’t do a certain thing, it has a certain limitation. “They can get you going on an example very fast, which is great,” Butler said. ![]() But because frameworks try to accommodate a wide range of possible projects, they can also feel cumbersome, and they’re not without limitations. Frameworks are like prebuilt foundations and frames of houses - they get a lot of the dirty work done in advance and make it possible for developers to more easily build a variety of different structures. Games are software programs, and just like other software programs, most games are written with the help of development frameworks - standardized coding tools and libraries that others have already written. Writing a game engine from scratch in a language you’ve never used before is certainly not the most common way to go for novice game developers, but that’s what Alex Butler did when he quit his software development job in the fintech industry in 2017 to create a puzzle game using Rust.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |