Abstract
Over the past 30 years, software developers have been conveniently taking advantage of hardware performance increase, giving little consideration to internal architecture changes of the hardware. However, hardware architectural changes like central processing unit will affect software architectures and can no longer be ignored. This is especially true for real-time applications, including computer games, which tend to push the limits of hardware and take the most advantage of available resources. By applying the concepts of concurrency, multithreading and multi-core Central Processing Unit (CPU) technology, this paper redefines the existing linear architecture of game engines as a generic concurrent and multi-core friendly architecture. Major game engine modules and their inter-dependencies are identified in order to design the new architecture. A sample game was developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture. The comparison of the test results provided in this paper indicates noticeable improvements (5.1 % to 61.2 %) in the concurrent architecture over the conventional linear approach. User acceptance evaluation with several industry experts also showed encouraging feedback.
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Mohebali, A., Chiew, T.K. (2015). Redefining Game Engine Architecture Through Concurrency. In: Fujita, H., Selamat, A. (eds) Intelligent Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques. SoMeT 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 513. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17530-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17530-0_11
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