CGDC '97 Roundtable Report

The broad goal of this roundtable was for developers who are producing game titles for the Windows 95/NT platform to share real-world experiences, problems and solutions, undocumented tricks, gotchas and workarounds, etc. Participants were also encouraged to ask questions of other participants in areas where they may currently having difficulties and seeking solutions or advice on various aspects of Windows multimedia software development.

In order to keep the roundtable focused, I broke the discussion into four distinct topics:

*Win32 Operating System and general Windows API

What kinds of problems or opportunities exist in the Win32 operating system? How much overhead does the OS eat? How efficient are threads, and what special problems are associated with their use? What is the best API for reading files from hard disk or CD? What are the options for allocating memory? What are the tricks for using VxDs to access low-level "under-the-hood" services?

*DirectX, ActiveMovie, ActiveX and other game/multimedia specific APIs

What kinds of special "undocumented" problems or solutions have the participants encountered in using the special multimedia APIs? What kinds of cool tricks have been developed utilizing these technologies? How many people ignore DirectDraw and just program to GDI?

*PC Hardware

Programming for Windows means programming for the IBM-PC compatible hardware platform (not too many people are making their fortunes writing games for MIPS or DEC Alphas running NT). So what have people discovered about Pentium optimizations, MMX, third-party (non-Intel) processor compatibility issues, CD, DVD, low-level hardware access, device drivers, etc.?

*Development environments

The tools that are available for creating game software for Windows, including compilers, assemblers, IDE's, debugging aids, multimedia asset processing tools, etc.

I seeded the beginning of each topic with something that my team had discovered over the past year, and kept each topic going 15 minutes or until discussion on the topic began to peter out. At the end of each roundtable, I provided addresses of appropriate game and Windows development newsgroups on the Internet.

There was a considerable amount of information shared about the OS and hardware; these seemed to be the most popular topics. A fair amount of information was shared about DirectX, etc., it may be that Microsoft's beta program (and bug reporting mechanism) may provide enough of an outlet to address concerns and get questions answered. I was surprised to discover that few participants had much to say about development tools, other than the inevitable discussion about the bugs in the latest release of Microsoft Visual C++. I would have liked to have seen more feedback and good/bad testimonials about such things as Bounds Checker, Soft Ice, Source Safe, etc. In any event, the number and scope of topics seemed to be an appropriate fit for the hour-long sessions; none of the topics dragged on to fill time or seemed to be too rushed to cover to everyone's satisfaction.

The roundtables were attended by both neophytes and experienced Windows developers in what I felt was a good mix. The "newbies" asked some good questions and, for the most part, got good answers. There was enough frantic note-taking in the sessions to lead me to believe that most attendees learned something they felt was of value.