| >the ECS I wrote in C was terrible in part because I only understood the high-level ideas at the time—the whole thing was (hysterically, when looking back now) implemented with linked lists, as I was approaching systems design in terms of API, instead of actual functionality. well that sounds awful. I wasn't making too deep a thought on which topics I'd throw onto a curriculum, but I'd hope that they wouldn't treat ECS like some pattern to memorize like some design patterns in my SWE course (literally called "software engineering". Quite confusing in retrospect). It should be treated as a way to apply and understand some data oriented design so you can make informed decisions on how to implement things. I'm especially a fan of always identifying any and all shortcomings of an approach too. Because there's no better way to understand an approach than to reason about with its weaknesses. ECS is nice but you shouldn't try to shove it in stuff that requires tight complex coupling (e.g. a playercontroller), nor for random, infrequent events (UI input). And of course, if you are making a small game that can almost entirely fit in RAM anyways (well, in theory. Desktop OS's wouldn't allow this, obviosuly) these patterns are overkill and a half >of course, the resulting student games whose screenshots and video clips you gather to use for promotional material for your school wouldn't be as flashy well that is reflective of the modern game industry, haha. I imagine even in a place like digipen where you are working with motivated game artists that there's still technical constraints to consider with the art team (especially students). And building tools to help with that would take as long as the small game. I did ponder if it'd be a good idea to have a CS game dev course each some basic 2d/3d art, and vice versa for an artist learning some CS101 style stuff. But the CS curriculum was already jam packed as is, at least at my alma mater. I believe the average course work required 170 units and CS (like other engineering degrees) was topping out at 190. |