This list is provided as a guide for tools engineers of all skill levels looking for jobs in the game industry. It's meant as a guide to topics that should be pursued broadly in order to be well spoken in an interview. I doubt any hiring manager requires deep knowedge across every topic, but an ideal candidate would be somewhat knowledgable (aware of its existence if asked directly) with all topics here.
Each list of bullets increases in difficulty, so later bullets are more applicable to senior (or even director) level candidates.
Good luck.
@gorlak
Numbers
- Radix (2: binary, 10: decimal, 16: hexadecimal)
Alegbra
- Polynomials
- Conic sections
Linear Algebra
- Matrices for representing systems of equations
- The determinant and what it tells you about a matrix
Trigonometry:
- All the trigonometric functions
- How each trig function relates to coordinate components on the unit circle
ℝ3 and affine transformations:
- Fundamental vector operations: addition, subtraction, dot product, cross product
- Vectors that are "normalized," "orthogonal," and "ortho-normalized"
- Basis vectors of a matrix
- Row-major vs. column-major notation
- The plane equation, and its related to the dot product
- Affine transform composition: scale, rotation, translation
- Affine transform concatenation: global/parent/object space
- Affine transform inversion
- Affine transform decomposition
Rotations
- Euler angles, axis-angle, quaternion, rotation matrices
- 3-by-3 Rotation matrices (matrices, normal and non-normal, orthogonal and non-orthogonal)
- How euler angles are short-hand for rotation matrices
- How to intuit a rotation from a 3-by-3 ortho-normalized matrix
- Euler angle static and rotating frame conventions
Pipeline
- Object, parent, global, camera, projection, viewport transforms
- Point un-projection into rays, rect un-projection into frustums
- Ray/frustum instersection vs. point, sphere, line, triangle
- Clip space and screen-space primitive clipping
Rendering
- Vertex buffers and common vertex attributes
- Backface culling and winding order
- Depth buffers, depth-test renderstate, depth prepass
- Alpha values and blending functions
- Sorting for rendering passes
- Command buffers and immediate/deferred contexts
- Examples of typical passes (as parts of a forward vs deferred frame)
Shaders
- General graphics shader types and their args and results
- Fixed function GPU hardware and how they speed up passes
- How branches work, what they cost
- Async compute
Numbers
- Unsigned vs. signed, twos compliment
- IEEE-754 floating point components
- Floating point accuracy and large cardinality floating point numbers
ISA
- Endianness
- Pipelining
- Instrution latency
- Memory prefetch
Atomics
- Increment, decrement, compare-exchange
- Spin-locks and latency trade-offs
Cache
- Typical cache sizes
- The memory hierarchy and relative costs
- Necessity/benefit of memory alignment
- "Ways" and cache eviction policies
Concepts
- File descriptors, HANDLEs
- Blocking vs. non-blocking I/O requests
- The fundamental sync primitives and wait functions
- Manual and automatic condition/event primitives
- Syscall overhead
- Memory protection and superuser instructions
- Exceptions and interrupt service routines
Threads
- Memory contention and the basic dangers of threads
- OS-implemented mutex objects and the thread/process scheduler
- Thread local storage
Sockets
- TCP vs. UDP
- Network order
- Latency with select-polling vs. blocking waits vs. async
Virtual Memory
- How virtual memory is related to physical memory, swap
- How CPU hardware makes virtual memory performant
Modules
- Shared objects vs. static libraries
- Styles of "dynamic linking" on windows
- Practicality of code unloading
- Jump tables
- Process loading and the dynamic loader
- Pages inherently shared vs. non-shared across processes
- Page protections, JIT
Functions
- Recursion, best practices
- Inlining and optimization
- Function arguments and CPU stack machine (push + jump)
- Stack memory allocation and deallocation
- C89 variable declaration rules
- setjmp/longjmp
Strutures
- Alignment and padding
- Unions
- Brace initialization
Arrays
- Countof
Pointers
- Pointer arithmetic
restrictand aliasing
Memory
allocavs.malloc
Objects
- Implicit
this - Overloading and overload resolution
- Constructor and destructor (implications for
this's virtuals, exceptions)
Virtuals
- vtable: when is it set, how is it found, and what does it contain
- vtable: what are the implications of multiple inheritance
Generics
- Function templates, class templates, concerns about code bloat
- Runtime type information (vs. reflection), type traits
- Template meta-programming, constexpr
Garbage Collectors
- Pro/con to reference counting
- Mark/sweep
- Implications for deadline-based programs
C#
- Destructors vs. Finalizers
- IDisposable
- Pinning
Techniques
- Instrumented profilers, hit counters, time accumulators
- Obfuscated handle systems (vs. pointer)
- Pointer-to-implementation/PIMPL benefits and costs
- Delegates, multicast delegates and events
- Retained mode vs. immediate mode graphical user interfaces
- Event-loop programming w/ all nonblocking I/O routines
- Type reflection/introspection for program automation
- Program binding time (bind at compile time, link time, run time)
- Out-of-schema (blind) data retention, version interop
- Object-relational-mapping (and pitfalls with polymorphism)
- Runtime compiled code
Debugging
- Breakpoints
- Conditional breakpoints
- Hardware breakpoints
- Tracepoints
- Debugger implementation of breakpoints
- Code with timeouts and debuggability
Determinism
- Definition and the desire to achieve it
- Typical pitfalls in C/C++
Concurrency
- The difference between concurrency and parallelism
- Job/task graph systems
- Fibers and implications for stack, TLS risks
Merging
- The three parts of a three way merge
- Topics branches and good development practices
- Knowing when to stash/shelve work in progress
- Branching for every version vs. pipeline strategies