yordan gyurchev : articles

Here you will find a list of Yordan's writings:

Animation System: Performance & Concurency PDF
Skeletal animation system that has separation of user interfaces facade (high utilazation of OO design) and high-performance (less OO designed) backend. System utilizes local processor memory, handles multiple processors and dynamic task scheduling. Animate more characters than you can afford to render. (11/2005)

Relocatable Data Structures PDF
Relocatable structures are ones that can be easiliy moved in memory without much performance and maintanance penalty. They also improve memory locality and access patterns. (08/2005)

NPC Mechanics and Actions PDF
This document discusses the way we approached low level behaviours development. It separates high-leve AI from low-level NPC mechanics (like animation control for example). System is built around basic object orientation principles. Primary focus was robustness and ease of development (and prototyping). (08/2005)

Can we "handle" it? DOC
This article was written in the late summer of 2001 and is about management of game resources: graphics, sounds, data, etc. However, as the time passed by and Yordan learned more he kept thinking that it was not good enough to be released (although Scott Bilas gave it quite positive review and that meant a lot to Yordan).

Reading For Programmers DOC
This is a rant that yordan wrote in his frustration. He'd been trying to convince people to read more about programming and improve their programming skills. This rant was no more but a try to achieve this. It also contains a list of Yordan's favorite books although, since a few more have cropped up in the list.

Deleting pointers PS
Summarizes several techniques for writing SafeDelete function for dynamically (new) allocated pointers. Ownership and STL issues. Points possible headaches. (Yordan actually wrote to Angelica Langer with regads to some dark corners of STL concerning "for_each" vs. "transform" use).

Roam Implementation Optimizations article at flipcode
Explains a number of optimization techniques for use with hardware accelerated implementations of terrain rendering algorithms, such as ROAM. Compares the perfromance of static and dynamic (a.k.a. VLOD) algorithms. This is the most popular of Yordan's articles for some strange reason.

Generating Terrain Textures article/tutorial at flipcode
Describes a technique for generating terrain "realistic" textures from height maps.

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