A presentation by Insomniac Games

Mike Acton from Insomniac Games, creators of Ratchet & Clank, gave a talk at this years Game Developer’s Conference. This blog post bares the same title as the presentation.

Though I wish I could hear the talk, the slides (pdf) from the talk available from Insomniac’s blog seem to capture the main points well.

Instead of designing your code around the model of the world (presumably with OO), Acton suggests to come up with way to transform the data given the constraints of the platform (hardware). They also equate World Modeling to “self helf books for programming.”

Thinking about your program as a series of transforms is the standard mind-set employed people doing functional style programming. Sometimes the language doesn’t leave you much choice, because everything is immutable. In game programming you have as much mutable state as you can. But according to Mike Acton, thinking in terms of explicit data transforms can bring us a lot of value: in performance and ease of maintenance.

That’s just a quick summary, see the slides for a more complete debunking of the Three Big lies.