One of the common requirements in game development is that we need to load large blocks of (usually) compressed data in as little time as possible. This, however, is somewhat easier said than done. Ideally, what we're looking for is a simple asynchronous I/O API. ... Read more

One of the things that comes up when sending data over the internet is verifying that it hasn't been corrupted. This is generally a simple thing to resolve: send the data and a good hash (MD5 or SHA-1) of the data together. Recompute the hash on the client side and compare it to the hash you sent. If any bits have changed, the two won't match, and you know you need to redownload the file. I suppose it's possible both the data and hash could be corrupted in such a way that they match, but if your hash function is any good then the likelihood of this happening by chance is so astonishingly low that it doesn't bear consideration. ... Read more

From a game developer's perspective, the English language is incredibly simple. Our grammar is only minimally inflected, making it easy to author strings like "@(PLAYER) runs away!" and "Give this to @(TARGET)." and use simple text substitution to replace tokens like "@(TARGET)" with the name of a player, NPC, or object as needed. There are some places where this doesn't quite work (dealing with numbers and plurals or dialog which might be referring to either males or females), but they're either uncommon or easy to ignore (in many cases it's unlikely the player will have just one of something and we can just use the plural). ... Read more