Advanced Programming Issues for Games

This module will deepen and broaden the students’ knowledge and understanding of advanced topics in computer games programming. It is an agile module that will change content to be at or near the forefront of games software engineering. At time of writing the issues of concurrency, multithreading and distributed programming are of paramount interest in the games community due to the technology in the new generation of consoles.

Learning Outcomes

On completion of the module the student will be able to:

• Apply and evaluate a number of advanced programming issues at or near the forefront of current games development practice, such as distributed programming, multithreading, and cross-platform programming, and their application in computer games software engineering.
• Apply and evaluate software testing techniques and methods appropriate to games software engineering.

Outline Syllabus

• Distributed programming: development of game applications which will run in a distributed environment such as a network. (25%)
• Development of concurrent programs using multithreading techniques, spawning processes and inter-thread communication. (25%)
• Cross-platform game program development and portability of software solutions. (25%)
• Software testing techniques and methods. (25%)