.mischief.mayhem.soap.

A Decade

admin — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:48:13 +0000

I can’t remember the exact date, but I know it was early May or the end of April, 2002. I’ve just realized I had started my gamedev adventure almost exactly 10 years ago. It seemed like a logical step, never really considered any other career choice, it was my dream job and quite natural progression [...]

Null references – addendum

admin — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 04:11:16 +0000

My recent article turned out to be quite popular, however it seems that people focus on the problem of undefined behavior rather than optimization itself. Quick clarification then, so that we’re all on the same page. I do not advocate relying on undefined behaviors. They are… undefined (duh). I merely noticed in practice you can [...]

Compressing integers

admin — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 03:31:47 +0000

Programming games is an uphill battle. We always try to fight for more, but our resources are limited. There’s never enough RAM, the CPUs are never too powerful and obviously same thing applies to bandwidth – we could always use some more. The eternal problem of mutiplayer game is trying to send as much information [...]

Null references

admin — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 18:35:32 +0000

One of the most popular questions that fresh C++ programmers ask is about differences between pointers and references and which one to use. One of the differences people cite is “references can never be NULL”. That’s true in theory and according to the standard, but in practice, especially when mixing pointers and references there’s nothing [...]

GDC 2012/Mexico

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 04:17:04 +0000

Usually, around this time, I publish my collection of links to GDC presentations. This year however haven’t been really paying too much attention, took a week off and went to Mexico. I’ve only started to catch up… Do not despair, though, Jare has done a great job and you can find links at his blog. [...]

Darkness 2

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:14:46 +0000

Few days ago, we released Darkness 2, the game I’ve been working on for the past 18 months. I won’t write too much about the game itself, if you’re interested, you probably know about it already, if not – check out the demo. Usually, once the game is on the market, devs will keep on [...]

Resolving PS3 callstacks

admin — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:06:47 +0000

Hopefully, your engine includes a crash handler. If it does not, stop reading, add one (here’s simple example) and then continue. In most cases, when something goes wrong, log files contains fully resolved callstack. However, sometimes, especially at the last stage and (semi) final builds, crash reporter might be disabled and now all we have [...]

The Broken Windows Theory

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:43:42 +0000

The broken windows theory is a criminological theory first introduced in 1982 article by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The gist of it is given in this example: “Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. [...]

Trailer time!

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 03:49:06 +0000

Two trailers released recently. Starbreeze showed first footage of their Syndicate remake: I mostly worked on cancelled Bourne project when I was there, but lots of friends still at SBZ, so I’m glad to see their hard work is coming to fruition. Few days before, 2K released trailer for the game I’ve been working on [...]

Optimizing without fear

admin — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 16:59:28 +0000

As you can probably tell from this blog, I spent fair chunk of my time optimizing code/thinking about optimizations. One of the main problems with optimizing code is making sure we didn’t break anything in the process. It might be tricky, especially when modifying algorithms with many edge cases, but even simple changes are dangerous, [...]