Oops! I actually wrote this article one year ago but never finished it. Let’s say it’s finished, and boom! released.

This is a follow up on the previous article about our fiber-based job system. It contains a few details about our implementation, what we found to be important or not.

I attended a Game Connection master class this year again. This time it was with Jason Gregory (Lead Programmer at Naughty Dog) on concurrent programming, and it was very interesting.

I won’t give a full account because we saw way too many things (500 slides!).

Instead, I’ll just write about a few spin lock implementation tricks that he showed us.

We have a fiber based job system at Pastagames. I started coding it just after seeing this Naughty Dog GDC Talk back in 2015. And so far, we’re really happy with it.

In this article, I’ll focus more on how we use it than on how we implemented it ‒ our implementation is very close to what Christian Gyrling presented in his talk.

If you haven’t seen the GDC Talk yet, you should watch it first. It’s very interesting and it’s probably necessary to follow what I’m talking about.

Strings are often used as identifiers in games: object names, sound effect names, particle type names, etc. They’re a bit like enums with the advantage of allowing your game to be data-driven: you don’t necessarily need to recompile your program to accept new values.

But strings are no fun: storing them efficiently is a headache, they’re bigger and they’re slower than enums.

Fortunately there’s an alternative: string hashes. We like them a lot at Pastagames, and here are our humble solutions to the practical problems that come with them.