Data oriented design in video games

Object-Oriented Programming is the paradigm currently used in the video-game industry, and learnt by students or people wanting to become a video-game developer. Said methodology primary characteristics, and how they are used, can be considered its own flaws, often overlooked due to the rapid capability advances in hardware. This situation may not be considered sustainable, so in this thesis the Data-Oriented Design paradigm is presented as an alternative, offering a better hardware control resulting in a more efficient product. To test whether such a method is indeed more efficient, two projects have been developed with one paradigm each, using C/C++ in the Visual Studio environment. In them, the simple structure defined by each paradigm in order to have entities has been created. By defining a maximum of objects to simulate and a time limit, along with a time control based code insertion, the applications themselves derive update time metrics for analysis. Moreover, a profiler has been used to benchmark the L1 cache usage to check which of them makes a better usage of cache. The gathered data has been studied using RStudio, and the cache metrics have been presented, showing that Data-Oriented Design is indeed more efficient and cache friendly, becoming a great paradigm contender if given the chance, demonstrating being up to 70 times faster than ObjectOriented Programming in the case of study