Recently in Coding Category

Determinism in the game itself can be used to easier reproduce bugs, gather performance data and even for gameplay itself. In modern games it does take a little bit of work if you have not had continuous tests during development to catch errors like when a game diverges. Recently I've had to do this as part of our graphics tests at work where we run the game in a special test mode and make sure that recent changes have not broken any rendering features.

Regular expressions is somewhat of an oxymoron. They are anything but regular, they are strange beasts that you can write wonderful things in that you won't understand fully yourself after you've written them. I blame (as most things) perl for most of the evolution of regular expressions, they ones contained in perl are very powerful, but with great power comes an awful lot of responsibility spaghetti.

I'm going to do something different today, instead of bashing on C++ as I usually do, I'm going to point at some good things about it. In fact, it's even involving templates, my old archenemy (Bowser is nothing compared to them). So while I'm happily downloading The Orange Box on Steam, I'm writing this very quick and dirty post.

Ever since I took the leap from Basic V2 to 6510 assembly on my old Commodore 64, I've had a hate/love relationship with assembly. It allowed me back then to do things that were not possibly through any other means (vblank handler, raster coppers etc). My second foray into assembly was through Turbo Pascal funny enough. Turbo Pascal had this really easy mechanism to escape into inline assembly so that you could write your high level constructs in Pascal and then write the guts in assembly. This worked really well for me for a long while, even though real mode x86 assembly is kind of a pain.

One of my (maybe bad) pet peeves are compiler warnings. I try to compile cleanly at the highest warning level and go through all the warnings one by one and really understand what they are fuzzing about. And then fix them. The reasoning behind this is that the compiler writers are usually much much better at the language than I am. If they bother enough to put in a warning message, then there is probably a catch somewhere. Dismissing it out of hand as stupid is done at your own peril. Every now and then there is some subtle gotcha that the compiler writers understand but you have yet to grasp about the language. And boy do you feel stupid after a monster debug session only to find that the bug you were searching for was already flagged by the compiler in a warning that you ignored!

There are some things that you take for granted but then again you meet blank stares when you talk about it as it was a given. It is very easy to forget that some things that you take for granted, others have not yet seen or thought about and vice versa. We're all colored by our own quirky way through the maze towards programming enlightenment. My own path has taught me the following of build configurations: Debug and Release are not enough.

I've got this dual monitor setup at home, a widescreen monitor and a standard aspect monitor rotated 90 degrees. Every now and then I'd like to change my desktop background and I have quite an extensive collection of images that I've taken that I'd like to rotate around. So how do you do it?

STL has an unfairly bad reputation in games development circles in my opinion. People that got burnt on the old HP stl that shipped with gcc 2.7.x series was on many platform the norm and that particular implementation coupled with the poor compiler probably left a sour taste for many developers. I think STL as many other things has a place in C++ development, for tools certainly it's a productivity boost and as many of us run their tools on the win32 platform, most of the concerns that we have on consoles are not the dominant part of execution time.

My very good friend Andreas Brinck and I have been working for some time now on a hobby project on our spare time. It all started out as a very large project, we had a game design and all for a rather ambitious platform game. We quickly realized that we would not be able to pull it off with just two programmers, so we kind of changed gears and decided to try a simple puzzle game with minimal art resources....

Ever after the radioactive TDD bug bit me and I'm now infected with that mode of development I've become more and more interested in good unittest frameworks to help me develop bugfree code fast. If you have not yet experienced Test Driven Development, I'd recommend reading up a little bit on it before continuing with this article, see the resources at the end of the page. One thing that still is lacking is a good solid unittest framework for shader development...