http://www.programmicon.com Exploring programming. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:20:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In my last installment, we added the ability to create new steering behaviors to Bayts using the Lua scripting language. Unfortunately, the resulting implementation was horribly slow. So today we'll explore using a very important tool: the profiler. For this article, I'll be using Shark, Apple's free profiler. These techniques ... http://www.programmicon.com/2008/02/13/improving-luad-bayts-performance/ Before I start, I want to share some pretty important news. On January 8, 2008 at 7:45 PM Central, my son Sean was born. He was about 3 weeks early, but is nonetheless a healthy and (apparently) happy baby. You can read more about him at my wife's blog, yellowpop. Lua ... http://www.programmicon.com/2008/01/29/luad-bayts/ It's time to introduce another 3rd party library that some of the code we work on here will depend on: Boost. Hopefully, many of you are already familiar with Boost, and already have an up-to-date version of it installed. For those of you who don't already know about it, I ... http://www.programmicon.com/2007/11/28/boost/ Pretty well any major game needs some sort of scripting ability. You may be able to get by without it in some very simple games, but even, say, a classic shoot-em-up could benefit. Think, for instance, of scripted boss battles. You may well disagree, and that's fine, but I'm going ... http://www.programmicon.com/2007/09/25/script/ The code base for any given modern video game is a huge, complicated beast. There are countless code paths, and many actions are deferred, so the code that acts on a piece of data may well be far removed, both in space and time, from the code which created the ... http://www.programmicon.com/2007/09/12/introducing-bayts/ As I mentioned in Where's The Code, I will be posting code from this blog up on a Google code svn server. You may notice a new sidebar, which contains the information you'll need to retrieve the code. I'd also like to point out that all of the projects I'll be ... http://www.programmicon.com/2007/08/27/some-notes/ It has been said that laziness, to a point, is a virtue for programmers. Actually, most people leave out the "to a point" part, but I'm guessing it's implied. As I've mentioned before, I take this philosophy pretty seriously. If I can avoid writing code well, by golly, I'll avoid ... http://www.programmicon.com/2007/04/27/laziness-ie-using-someone-elses-code/ People who are interested in game programming typically have one or two specific areas that they consider The Fun Stuff. For many, it's the graphics stuff, trying to figure out how to push more polys, with more detail while maintaining a reasonable framerate. For others, it's AI, building smarter, nastier ... http://www.programmicon.com/2007/03/07/the-un-fun-stuff/ Most of the code I talk about here can be found at the The Programmicon Google Code page under the Source tab. You'll need an SVN client of some sort. All of the code is released under the New BSD License. http://www.programmicon.com/2007/02/22/wheres-the-code/ Well, what I'm going to talk about today isn't really magic, but it does illustrate some things you can do with C++ templates that, while certainly not uncommon, may not come immediately to mind. We're going to use templates to implement some code for dealing with byte-swapping (endianness issues). I ... http://www.programmicon.com/2007/02/22/template-magic/