The Real Slim Shader

The Flow System An object-oriented coding schema for game logic in memory-managed systems. Monologue (n): A long, tedious speech given by one person. This is the first in a series of monologues about various game-related coding tricks and techniques that I've blundered across over the past few years. They're intended to be thought-provoking rather than authoritative, and if you find any of them novel I expect a diligent enough search will yield articles more thorough and informative. Code snippets are not written in any particular language and are intended to illustrate, not compile. I'm starting with the Flow system, an embarrassingly simple idea that managed to elude me for over thirty years. As you already know, programming is the process of breaking a problem down until each piece can be solved with a line of code. But the fault-lines along which the problem of making a game naturally breaks down rarely correspond with the conceptual states as experienced by th...