Data Oriented Design: A Way of Thinking
For the past few years, together with my team, I had the opportunity to build a brand-new AI Framework. A framework to power our future games at IO Interactive. To solve a lot of practical challenges, we utilized Data Oriented Design, when appropriate. I want to share what I learned. And I want to explore areas that I have not had a chance to dive in yet. I’ll do my best to explore the entire space as deep as my abilities allow it.
Although a lot of my experiences and opinions on the topic were formed during my time developing the AI Framework at IO Interactive, all opinions in this article are my own . I will use Data Oriented Design and DOD interchangeably. The same goes for Data Oriented Programming and DOP, Object Oriented Design and OOD, and Object Oriented Programming and OOP.
If topics like CPU cache utilization, simpler to reason about code, clearer code, utilizing CPU cores and modularity are important for you, then you will find the information here useful.
