Next: Contents Contents

Beta release of Data-Oriented Design : Expect errors, spelling and factual. Expect out of date data, or missing stuff. Expect to be bored stiff in some sections, and rushed in others, but most of all, please send any feedback on any of these and any other things that you spot, to support@dataorienteddesign.com

Data-Oriented Design

Richard Fabian

Contents
Introduction
Data-Oriented Design
- It's all about the data
- Data is not the problem domain
- Data and Statistics
- Data changes
- How is data formed?
- The framework
Existence Based Processing
- Why use an if
- Don't use booleans
- Don't use enums
- Prelude to polymorphism
- Dynamic runtime polymorphism
- Event handling
Component Based Objects
- Components in the wild
- Away from the hierarchy
- Towards Managers
- There is no Entity
Hierarchical Level of Detail
- Existence
- Mementos
- JIT Data Generation
- Alternative Axes
Condition Tables
- Building Questions
- Flip it on its head
- Logging decisions for debug
- Branching without branching
Finite State Machines
- Tables as States
- Implementing Transitions
- Condition tables as Triggers
- Conditions as Events
Searching
- Indexes
- data-oriented Lookup
- Finding low and high
- Finding random
Sorting
- Do you need to?
- Maintain by insertion sort or parallel merge sort
- Sorting for your platfom
Relational Databases
- Normalisation
- Implicit Entities
- Components imply entities
- Cosmic Hierarchies
- Structs of Arrays
- Stream Processing
- Beautiful Homogeneity
Optimisations
- Tables
- Transforms
- Spatial sets for collisions
- Lazy Evaluation for the masses
- Not getting what you didn't ask for
- Varying Length Sets
- Bit twiddling decision tables
- Joins as intersections
- Data driven techniques
Concurrency
- Thread-safe
- Inherently concurrent operations
- Gateways
In Practice
- Data-manipulation
- Game entities
Maintenance and reuse
- Debugging
- Reusability
- Unit Testing
- Refactoring
Design Patterns
- What caused design patterns
- Data-Oriented Design Patterns
- Existing design patterns
- Locking out anti-patterns
- Game Development Patterns
What's wrong?
- The Harm
- Mapping the problem
- Internalised state
- Hierarchical design
- Divions of labour
- Reusable generic code
Hardware
- Sequential data
- Deep Pipes
- Microcode
- Single Instruction Multiple Data
- Predictable instructions
Future
- Parallel processing
- Distributed computing
- Runtime hardware configuration
- Data centric development in hardware design
About this document ...

Richard Fabian 2013-06-25