Abstract
While it might seem desirable to “program” games “close to a high-level specification”, the pragmatic reality has not, until very recently, allowed this. In this chapter we discuss the fundamental aspects that define a game and show how these aspects are captured by means of the so-called game development tools. In particular, we show: (i) how the various historical tools have always been intrinsically inspired by the dominant programming languages/paradigms that were the most popular at the time when the tool was developed; and (ii) we discuss these tools by comparing their pro and cons (typically imposed by the chosen language/paradigm or the available hardware) in order to understand the most important requirements for their next generations.
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Notes
- 1.
Components of the state might behave as discrete functions, for example a number that changes according to a timer. To treat such dynamics we treat their functions as piecewise functions.
- 2.
Euler is a numerical approximation, small steps made of small amounts of time are necessary so to avoid to end into a wrong state.
- 3.
For this example we use the syntax of x86 assembly. The x86 assembly language differs from other assemblies, like MIPS assembly for example, and is meant for the class class of x86 processors.
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Abbadi, M. (2016). Taxonomy of Game Development Approaches. In: Dörner, R., Göbel, S., Kickmeier-Rust, M., Masuch, M., Zweig, K. (eds) Entertainment Computing and Serious Games. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9970. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46152-6_6
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