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That's a great piece. Cranky but good. I will offer one disagreement: he's thinking about single-player games. There're also good jobs available on the server

by BryantD 14y ago

That's a great piece. Cranky but good. I will offer one disagreement: he's thinking about single-player games. There're also good jobs available on the server side for any online game (which is almost all of them these days). Server engineers don't need as much math as game programmers, and there are a lot of system and network administrators working in the game industry. Making games? Not exactly, but certainly working in gaming, with all the pros and cons that go with it.

cuppy 14y ago
There are also web programmers in the game industry.
- BryantD 14y ago
  Yes! Excellent point. Note also that all those careers are fungible insofar as you can take those skills outside the gaming industry relatively easily.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
My work on League of Legends came as a direct result of a contract gig building an extranet for a gas pipeline company: Java and Activescript is Java and Activescript. In fact, you could argue we were solving the much harder problems in that game, since we had to deal with the massive scaling, while the game engine only had to deal with 10 people at a time.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Though the problem space is already partitioned for you, to some extent, on a per-game basis. Have you written anything on it?
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    The game is partitioned, but the lobby is not. The lobby is where all the concurrent players have to split into groups of roughly similar capabilities while now allowing anybody to wait too long. Our team was responsible for partitioning things for the game team. I haven't written anything on it. I'm not convinced my piece of it was really interesting enough to warrant it. :) There were a lot of far smarter people than I on the team (it was one of the best software engineering teams I've ever worked on).
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      I know the guy who writes the GameRanger lobby service (it's literally a single guy - Scott Kevill - for the whole thing). He's got about 3 million users. Not sure how many concurrent users he gets -- probably an order of magnitude or two less than LoL does. Nevertheless, it all runs on I think one or two beefy servers. There's a very high fanout of game-available messages and they need to be addressed based on user-registered preferences as to the games they want to play. From what he tells me, most of his secret sauce is network hackery. Batching up carefully-sized packets and so on. All that stuff I was basically awful at in uni.

by BryantD 14y ago

cuppy 14y ago

There are also web programmers in the game industry.

BryantD 14y ago
Yes! Excellent point. Note also that all those careers are fungible insofar as you can take those skills outside the gaming industry relatively easily.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

My work on League of Legends came as a direct result of a contract gig building an extranet for a gas pipeline company: Java and Activescript is Java and Activescript. In fact, you could argue we were solving the much harder problems in that game, since we had to deal with the massive scaling, while the game engine only had to deal with 10 people at a time.

jacques_chester 14y ago
Though the problem space is already partitioned for you, to some extent, on a per-game basis. Have you written anything on it?
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  The game is partitioned, but the lobby is not. The lobby is where all the concurrent players have to split into groups of roughly similar capabilities while now allowing anybody to wait too long. Our team was responsible for partitioning things for the game team. I haven't written anything on it. I'm not convinced my piece of it was really interesting enough to warrant it. :) There were a lot of far smarter people than I on the team (it was one of the best software engineering teams I've ever worked on).
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    I know the guy who writes the GameRanger lobby service (it's literally a single guy - Scott Kevill - for the whole thing). He's got about 3 million users. Not sure how many concurrent users he gets -- probably an order of magnitude or two less than LoL does. Nevertheless, it all runs on I think one or two beefy servers. There's a very high fanout of game-available messages and they need to be addressed based on user-registered preferences as to the games they want to play. From what he tells me, most of his secret sauce is network hackery. Batching up carefully-sized packets and so on. All that stuff I was basically awful at in uni.