Tag Archives: data-oriented design

Implementing a semi-automatic structure-of-arrays data container

Posted on by
24

In performance-sensitive applications like games it is crucial to access data in a cache-friendly manner. Especially when dealing with a large number of objects of the same type, e.g. individual components in an entity-component-architecture, we should make sure to read as little data as possible. However, simple arrays-of-structures are often not suited for this, with structures-of-arrays yielding better performance. But the latter are not natively supported by the C++ language.

Continue reading →

Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 4: Skinning it to 11

Posted on by
11

Having finished the third part of this series about data ownership, we will turn our attention to performance optimizations and data layout again in this post. More specifically, we will detail how character skinning can be optimized with a few simple code and data changes.

Continue reading →

Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 3c: External References

Posted on by
93

In the last installment of this series, we talked about handles/internal references in the Molecule Engine, and discussed their advantages over raw pointers and plain indices.

In a nutshell, handles are able to detect double-deletes, accesses to freed data, and cannot be accidentally freed – please read the previous blog post for all the details.

Continue reading →

Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 1: Mesh data

Posted on by
34

Let’s face it, performance on modern processors (be it PCs, consoles or mobiles) is mostly governed by memory access patterns. Still, data-oriented design is considered something new and novel, and only slowly creeps into programmers’ brains, and this really needs to change. Having co-workers fix your code and improving its performance really is no excuse for writing crappy code (from a performance point-of-view) in the first place.

Continue reading →