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In Praise of Idleness
“I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised...
View Article[Video] Why Salt is good for you: Handling password security in web applications
Inspired by the recent LinkedIn password hack, I give an intro into the topic of web-app password security, and suggest a strategy for salting that is elegant and more secure than the naive “lets...
View ArticleThe Costco-ification of Leaderboards
TL;DR It’s beneficial, sometimes, to buy in bulk. Or in this case, to rank in bulk. I’ll take a look at a recent improvement to our open source leaderboard library to show significant improvement when...
View ArticleOn Simplexity
I just wanted to write a short note about simplexity. As stated by Anders Hejlsberg: “When you take something incredibly complex and try to wrap it in something simpler, you often just shroud the...
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Photon Mapping Part 1
Introduction In this generation of computer graphics, global illumination (GI) is an important technique which calculate indirect lighting within a scene. Photon mapping is one of the GI technique...
View ArticleSmoothsort vs. Timsort
I recently found out an interesting sorting algorithm called Smoothsort, originally created by the legendary Dijkstra. Again, my favorite algorithm guy, Keith Schwarz has a detailed explanation about...
View ArticleWriting portable code: A process full of gain
Lately, I am spending some of my time into porting my game engine to the Android platform. It is a rather refreshing, interesting, rewarding and also frustrating experience. All at the same time. The...
View ArticleHack Day Report
Last Friday, we had our second hack day (aka do-what-you-want day, aka google day) at the office. Different companies seem to take different approaches to hack days. At some places it just means that...
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WPA–Xperf Trace Analysis Reimagined
For many years xperfview.exe has been the main tool for analyzing xperf/ETW traces. However starting last fall the Windows Performance Toolkit started including wpa.exe as an alternative. While the...
View ArticleNever build upon closed-source frameworks
A poster on tech-artists.org who is using Autodesk’s CAT asks: The problem I´m having: I can control the ears now manually, after setting up the reactions, but apparently the CAT system isn´t...
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Localization Pipeline
In my previous post on localization I talked about some of my experiences localizing games for different languages / regions. This time I wanted to expand upon those notes a little and talk more about...
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Photon Mapping Part 2
Introduction Continue with previous post, this post will describe how light map is calculated from the photon map. My light map stores incoming radiance of indirect lighting on a surface which are...
View ArticleThe less the code, the better
Subtitle: how to encourage simple code even if it may slow you down in the short term Less is More!? For some time, I’ve had a thought that no source code is the best source code. Obviously it has no...
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Matrices, Rotation, Scale and Drifting
If you are using Matrix4x4s to store your node transforms and want to support scaling you are facing an annoying numerical problem: rotating a node causes its scale to drift from the original value....
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When Even Crashing Doesn’t Work
I’ve written previously about the importance of crashing in order to improve code quality. However even the seemingly simple task of crashing can be more error prone than you might expect. I’ve...
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Unity, Replayed
Replaying actions in a game is a surprisingly common feature. There are match replays of course, but recorded actions are also used in cutscenes, ‘ghost’ players in racing games, and a variety of...
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More Adventures in Failing to Crash Properly
In last week’s episode we discussed how 32-bit processes on 64-bit Windows might corrupt the exception state after a crash, and how any processes on 64-bit Windows might actually continue running after...
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Four Tips for Porting Your Game to the Web with Native Client
When people hear ‘web gaming,’ they usually get the image of a 2D game with bad artwork and simplistic gameplay. With the power of Chrome and Native Client, however, you can bring console-quality...
View ArticleShader Generator
Introduction In the last few weeks, I was busy with rewriting my iPhone engine so that it can also run on the Windows platform (so that I can use Visual Studio in stead of Xcode~) and most importantly,...
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Porting your game from iOS to Android
So you created a C/C++ game for iOS that gives joy to iPhone and iPad gamers from around the world. How can you deny this joy from all loyal Android users? I can’t, so I had to port Pop Corny to the...
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