CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++"

Summary

Event context & speaker background

• The keynote is introduced as coming from the games industry, which is largely C++-based.
• Mike Acton (Engine Director at Insomniac Games) is highlighted for both engineering output and technology sharing.

Insomniac Games / Mike Acton credibility & tech sharing

• Insomniac titles mentioned:
  • Resistance
  • Ratchet & Clank
  • Fuse
  • Sunset Overdrive
• Initiatives mentioned for sharing performance engineering knowledge:
  • A Cell performance website for people working on PlayStation 3’s Cell chips and researchers.
  • AltDevBlogADay, encouraging games-industry contributors to publish one blog entry per day on a shared site.
• Insomniac’s site also contains papers describing their research and successes.

Keynote positioning: what the engine team builds

Mike Acton states that his team builds runtime systems for the parts of games that are:

• Most performance-critical
• Most frequently used
• Involving the largest amount of transformed data

Runtime system examples listed:

• Rendering
• Animation and gestures
• Streaming
• Cinematics
• Visual effects and post-processing effects (post fx)
• Navigation
• Localization

He clarifies that these systems generally are not the “game itself” logic, but foundational engine subsystems.

Tooling and pipelines (development tools)

The same team also develops internal studio tools, including:

• Level creation tools
• Lighting tools
• Material editing tools
• Visual effects creation tools
• Animation/state machine tools for animators
• Visual scripting
• Scene painting
• Cinematics tools

The scale is emphasized: hundreds of tools.

Main speakers / sources (end)

• Alex Rosenberg (Manager of Platform Architecture, Sony PlayStation) — introducer
• Mike Acton (Engine Director, Insomniac Games) — keynote speaker