research-article

Declarative processing for computer games

Authors:

Benjamin Sowell,

Johannes Gehrke,

Alan DemersAuthors Info & Claims

Sandbox '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Video games

Pages 23 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/1401843.1401847

Published: 09 August 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Most game developers think of databases as nothing more than a persistence solution. However, database research is concerned with the wider problem of declarative processing. In this paper we demonstrate how declarative processing can be applied to computer games. We introduce the state-effect pattern, a design pattern that allows game developers to design parts of their game declaratively. We present SGL, a special scripting language which supports this design pattern and which can be compiled to a declarative language like SQL. We show how database techniques can process this design pattern in a way that improves performance by an order of magnitude or more. Finally, we discuss some design decisions that developers must make in order to adopt this pattern effectively.

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Cited By

Machado TGopstein DNealen ANov OTogelius J(2018)AI-Assisted Game Debugging with Cicero2018 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)10.1109/CEC.2018.8477829(1-8)Online publication date: Jul-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/CEC.2018.8477829
Halvorsen SRaaen K(2014)Games for Research: A Comparative Study of Open Source Game ProjectsEuro-Par 2013: Parallel Processing Workshops10.1007/978-3-642-54420-0_35(353-362)Online publication date: 2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54420-0_35
Raaen KEspeland HStensland HPetlund AHalvorsen PGriwodz C(2012)LEARSProceedings of the 2012 41st International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops10.1109/ICPPW.2012.55(382-389)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPPW.2012.55
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Declarative processing for computer games
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

Sandbox '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Video games

August 2008

183 pages

ISBN:9781605581736

DOI:10.1145/1401843

Conference Chair:
David Schwartz
Rochester Institute of Technology
,
Program Chairs:
Karen Schrier
Scholastic/Columbia University
,
Chris Swain
USC School of Cinematic Arts
,
Michael Wagner
Danube University Krems

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGGRAPH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 August 2008

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Sandbox '08

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Sandbox '08: An ACM SIGGRAPH Video Game Symposium

August 9 - 10, 2008

California, Los Angeles

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Cited By

Machado TGopstein DNealen ANov OTogelius J(2018)AI-Assisted Game Debugging with Cicero2018 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)10.1109/CEC.2018.8477829(1-8)Online publication date: Jul-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/CEC.2018.8477829
Halvorsen SRaaen K(2014)Games for Research: A Comparative Study of Open Source Game ProjectsEuro-Par 2013: Parallel Processing Workshops10.1007/978-3-642-54420-0_35(353-362)Online publication date: 2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54420-0_35
Raaen KEspeland HStensland HPetlund AHalvorsen PGriwodz C(2012)LEARSProceedings of the 2012 41st International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops10.1109/ICPPW.2012.55(382-389)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPPW.2012.55
Anderson E(2011)A Classification of Scripting Systems for Entertainment and Serious Computer GamesProceedings of the 2011 Third International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications10.1109/VS-GAMES.2011.13(47-54)Online publication date: 4-May-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/VS-GAMES.2011.13
Wang GSalles MSowell BWang XCao TDemers AGehrke JWhite W(2010)Behavioral simulations in MapReduceProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/1920841.19209623:1-2(952-963)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/1920841.1920962
Hellerstein J(2010)The declarative imperativeACM SIGMOD Record10.1145/1860702.186070439:1(5-19)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1860702.1860704
White WKoch CGehrke JDemers A(2009)Better scripts, better gamesCommunications of the ACM10.1145/1467247.146726252:3(42-47)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1467247.1467262
White WKoch CGehrke JDemers A(2008)Better Scripts, Better GamesQueue10.1145/1483101.14831066:7(18-25)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1483101.1483106

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