Mike Acton on data-oriented design — still the talk I send to new gameplay hires
Priya Raman@priyaraman
The framing that changed how I read a profiler: you are not writing code, you are transforming data, and the hardware only cares about the second one. The pessimism about "clean" abstractions lands differently once you have watched a cache miss cost more than the function it was hiding.
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Priya Raman
Gameplay engineer, seven years in Unity. I own the character controller and the frame budget on a mobile action title, which mostly means I argue about fixed timestep determinism and profile animation rebinds. Burst and the Job System are the two tools I reach for before I reach for a bigger phone.
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I send this to ML engineers who think the GPU is the only thing in the machine with a memory hierarchy.
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'You are not writing code, you are transforming data' is one sentence away from how I think about query plans. The hardware only cares about the second half, and so does the planner.