C++ Game Development at Blizzard
Posted on Thursday, Mar 16, 2017
Show Notes
Ben started in the games industry in the UK in 1995, when he got hired at Bullfrog straight after graduating from university. While there he worked on several games there like Syndicate Wars and Dungeon Keeper. By the late 1990s he had stopped using C and was allowed to use C++ at work. In 2001 he moved to Kuju Entertainment and did a couple of games on XBox and PS2, then in 2003 he was hired by EA again and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked on the Medal of Honor series. He’s always been a network game programmer, and in 2008 after a project cancellation at EA, he joined Blizzard as a lead engineer on Battle.net, working on technology for all of Blizzard’s games. Today he’s a principal engineer at Blizzard and the technical lead on the Battle.net desktop application. He’s also a functional programming hobbyist who tries to use what he learns in Haskell to write better C++, and in recent years he has given several C++ conference talks at C++Now and CppCon.
News
- Insomniac Games Cache Simulator
- Functors are not dead: the double functor trick
- Pi Day Challenge
- I’m Done - Geschafft: Words about the Future of my Blogs
- Check for const correctness with the C++ Core Guidelines Checker
Ben Deane
Links
- Blizzard Entertainment
- Blizzard Careers
- CppCon 2016: Ben Deane “Using Types Effectively”
- CppCon 2016: Ben Deane “std::accumulate: Exploring an Algorithmic Empire”
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Guests
Ben Deane
C++ wasn’t even among the first 10 languages that Ben learned on his programming journey, but it’s been the one that has paid the bills for the last 20-odd years. He spent most of that time in the games industry; many of the games he worked on used to be fondly remembered but now he’s accepted that they are probably mostly forgotten. These days he works in the finance industry writing high-frequency trading platforms in the most modern C++ that compilers can support.
In his spare time he watches a lot of YouTube’s educational sector, practices the Japanese art of tsundoku, reads about the history of programming, avoids doing DIY, and surprises his wife by waking in the middle of the night yelling, “of course, it’s a monad!” before going back to sleep and dreaming of algorithms.