Archive for April, 2008
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
Found an interesting article at Escapist. It's a story of Muckyfoot, now-defunct gamedev company founded by some of the Bullfrog veterans. (Side note: the power of the original Bullfrog team is really impressive... they went on to found Lionhead, Elixir, Muckyfoot, Media Molecule (that's ex-Lionhead, but still counts :) ...
Posted in Gamedev | No Comments »
Monday, April 28th, 2008
There are several approaches to implementing a hash map. Main difference is in the way we handle collisions between entries falling the the same bucket. Probably the most popular and elegant is "chaining", where for every slot we have a linked list of entries. In case collision we just enqueue ...
Posted in Gamedev, General programming, RDESTL | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
I think I've already posted links to some videos from Google Tech Talks, but I've been catching up recently and found some other interesting movies. They all have a nice, distinct geek spirit... Where else can you find 50 minute presentation about the beauty of quicksort implemention?
Three Beautiful Quicksorts (Jon ...
Posted in General programming, Links | 3 Comments »
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
OK, so how does this snippet work? There's a function that takes array of N elements as an argument. It returns an array of N chars. Assuming sizeof(char) == 1, size of the return type for this function is N. There's no function body, because it's not needed, function is ...
Posted in Crazy snippets, General programming | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Mario would be proud. (...they could spare this comment about fat kids, tho).
Posted in Gamedev | No Comments »
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
(or one more reason to love C++).
Problem: how to find out number of elements in a C++ array? The most popular form is probably: [code lang="C++"]#define RDE_COUNT_OF(arr) (sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]))
...
Foo myTab[10];
size_t numElems = RDE_COUNT_OF(myTab);
assert(numElems == 10); [/code]
It's being widely used, however most people do not realize the potential danger with this small ...
Posted in Crazy snippets, General programming | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
(yeah, the title is stupid)
After I got a little bored with memory experiment I moved on to something more interesting - lock free containers and multi-threaded tasks/jobs. This is all rather new to me, so it seemed like an interesting stuff. What we have here is simple system for distributing ...
Posted in Gamedev, General programming | 7 Comments »
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
You may remember my proof-of-concept experiment - MemTracer. It started as a hobby project, but recently I had chance to test it in a real world application. It quickly turned out there's a big difference between my simple test program and full blown game performing hundreds of memory operations per ...
Posted in Gamedev, General programming, MemTracer | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
There's a very interesting interview with Tim Sweeney at Team Xbox. It's quite old, so chances are you already read it, if not - do it now. The part that caught my eye is where Tim says that programming for multicore architectures is, just, hard. What's more, from their experience ...
Posted in Gamedev | 2 Comments »
