.mischief.mayhem.soap.

Smartness overload – addendum

admin — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:33:52 +0000

In my previous note I mentioned that IDs are my favourite form of weak references. By pure coincidence, just recently Noel made one of his Inner Product articles public and it deals with very related subject. As a matter of fact Noel’s implementation of HandleManager has been a starting point for the one I use [...]

Smartness overload

admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:10:27 +0000

Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of different code bases – open source projects, internal game engines, my own experiments. Some of them were just bad and buggy, but in many situations I found something that could only be described as ‘smartness overload’. An obviously skilled & experienced programmer just tried too hard. There’s a [...]

Optimization 101: ordering conditions

admin — Sat, 15 May 2010 20:22:30 +0000

One of the most basic truths about optimizing existing code is: there are no low hanging fruits. Your coworkers are not stupid, it’s not like you can just add some switch or line and code will magically run two times faster (at least not often). “Easiest” way nowadays is probably some form of parallalization, but [...]

Be nice to your cache

admin — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 01:25:04 +0000

Short list of tips & guidelines that every game developer should keep in mind. No rocket science, common sense, really, but it’s still relatively rare to find codebases that apply to them. It’s especially aimed at gameplay programmers, who operate a little bit further up from the metal. With todays hardware, cache can be your [...]

Venice

admin — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 02:29:52 +0000

Venice is truly one-of-a-kind city. I’ve “been” there almost 8 years ago when returning from Italy by train (long story involving lost plane connection), but it was continental part then (Mestre) and only for 2 hours. For some reason I thought that the rest of the city looks the same, just with some canals here [...]

Back!

admin — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:56:06 +0000

OK, I’m back. Just for a few days, though. I’m crashing at my sister’s place, as our flat is rented. There’s rather crappy internet connection here, so no Venice photos yet. I’ve updated (very roughly) my GDC note. In the meantime – GDC vault has been updated, so you can find most of the papers [...]

GDC update

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:31:45 +0000

As I mentioned – I’m flying for a quick vacations tomorrow, so I will not be able to update the GDC links. This post is mainly to trigger RSS readers, as I’ve added some new stuff during last week. Feel free to add new links in the comments, I will move them to the post [...]

Ten Months in Sweden

admin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:20:36 +0000

About two weeks ago I had my last company beer/good-bye party at Starbreeze. I need to deal with lots of formal stuff in Poland now, then I’ll have a short vacation (flying to Venice next week) and then I will move to Canada to work for Digital Extremes. It really wasn’t easy decision as I [...]

GDC 2010 proceedings

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:49:54 +0000

I’ll keep updating this post with links as I find them. Pål-Kristian Engstad (Naughty Dog) – Introduction to SPU Optimizations, part1 & part2 (not sure if those are official GDC2k10 papers, but have been just released and are great), Glenn Fiedler (Sony Santa Monica), Networking for Physics Programmers (slides + demo), Havok demo videos, Kent [...]

Data breakpoints

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:15:45 +0000

Data breakpoints are one of the most helpful debugger features when trying to hunt for memory overwrites/ninja variable modifications. In majority of cases it’s enough to set them up from debugger, however, there are situations when it’s not possible. Sometimes breaking into debugger changes program behavior (I had this problem just yesterday), sometimes we don’t [...]