Today I’d like to share with you an idiom I’ve been enjoying more and more. I doubt it is novel, but I haven’t heard about it before. It all started while authoring a new domain-specific scripting language and its compiler/data-generator. I was fighting with google flatbuffers limitations when a virus (aka idea) entered my mind. Why use a separate schema notation and schema compiler to generate C++ serialization code, when we can do it all in C++ directly?

A list of free, cross-platform GUI solutions for C++. If you don’t like Qt, or other major GUI frameworks like wxWidgets or GTK, the choices available to you are a bit overwhelming.

A lot of times, I find myself using std::function to document APIs and prescribe specific callback signatures. The problem with std::function is its type-erasure, which makes it quite slow compared to other callback techniques. If you need ABI stability, say you are exporting a function for a DLL, you cannot use standard types anyways. They do not ascribe to any ABI standard. So in that case, you’d probably use a good old raw function pointer.

Yes, you read that title right. While working on a new way to create finite state machines (fsm), I inadvertently designed a state machine you can execute at compile-time. With branching and everything. Today, allow me to pull you down my rabbit hole. It’s always nicer with company down here.

Let’s go, Alice!

A long long time ago, after years and years of fighting with software that doesn’t build, I made a life changing decision. Any and every software I write must download, install and setup its dependencies without requiring user interaction. All of them. Allways. When combined with other build best-practices, not pasting dependencies in your source tree and locally installing your dependencies, the rule has led to some interesting CMake usage.

There’s recently been some outcry from the gaming industry regarding C++’s direction. I share some of the views expressed, but since I mostly write functional code for my engine, my expectations are somewhat different. I have certainly drunk the Kool-Aid.

To me, if constexpr and aligned new are real demonstrations the standard committee understands our woes. Once we get static reflection, hopefully before I retire, the need for template metaprogramming should be greatly dimished. One way the committee wishes to improve the language for gaming is through SG14.

I recently posted about defensive programming, and how you can create an easy to use, low friction library of high level defensive rules. These rules prevent “silent” modification of your class constructors and help enforce a class design by declaring compile-time validation rules. The idea was well received, but some astute readers correctly pointed out the rule of 5 implementation was lacking. Today, we fix that.

A few months back, I learned about defensive programming at a local C++ meetup. The idea took a little while to sink in. I now rarely write any code without using defensive programming in some way or another. However, it does become tedious to write, especially if you write good error messages. Before delving too deep into the subject, lets discuss the basics.

Functional APIs are a joy to work with. Not only do they help eliminate certain bug categories, but they tend to be very flexible and reusable. Today I present a technique that has emerged while I was simplifying some lambda based APIs. C++17 makes template meta-programming much more palatable, I dare not imagine what this would look like in C++11.

My latest little experiment relates to compile-time options and eliminating preprocessor checks in user code. I’m not a big fan of MACROs, especially when they are simply used to make compile-time branches. I am also not a fan of other techniques used to minimize this problem. With C++17, we now have a beautiful and simple tool that can help remove all these preprocessor checks, if constexpr.

In the past months, I’ve rewritten the entity-component system of my engine pet project about three times. Finally, something that ticks all the boxes has emerged. Today, I’d like to present this architecture. So far it has worked wonders for me, though I wouldn’t guarantee this to scale up to AAA sized projects. I still have much testing to do.

Update : Walter Brown has come up with a much much more elegant way to do this. You can find the updated technique at the bottom of this post, or read more about it on cppreference.

A little while ago, I watched Jason Turner’s great cppcon talk, where he uses C++17 to write a commodore game. At that point, I decided it was quite time I confirm my (now proven false) beliefs on templates. If you ever want to convince a game programmer that templates are fine, show him that talk, and some assembly ;)

When working with SIMD intrinsics, it helps to have a thorough understanding of computer memory. In this post, I hope to shed some light on a really simple but essential operation to figure out if memory is aligned at a 16 byte boundary.

An inclusive reference of transformation matrices for basic OpenGL work. It is intended as a quick reference while coding OpenGL without libraries.

A good friend challenged me while we where investigating vtables and various ways to create a reflection system without macros. He stated, “It is impossible to store a virtual method pointer in a C callback”. I decided to prove him wrong. Here, I present the result of this investigation.

I’ve seen a lot of examples, tutorials and open-source code that use quotes to assign their shader programs to a const char*. Fully fledged engines would have a way to parse text-files, but if you are doing quick and dirty tests like me, you can use this macro to make editing easier.

I’ve recently started playing old gems, classics, in an effort to further my game design knowledge, ideas and culture. The games I have chosen are completely new to me. It is truly interesting to delve into very old titles, especially when you remove the nostalgia factor. Here I write my thoughts, impressions and lessons learned from some of these games.

This simple guide doesn’t require any third-party tools or apps.

A quick guide to help you get the most out of your monitors and Eve. Once you’ve played the game in all its dual screen glory, you will never go back. Lets get started!

Somehow, due to either miss-information or a change it twitch’s apis, the web is filled with false information about livestreamer and downloading twitch replays. Lets fix that.

We’ve all been there; you import a font into Unity3D, write some UI text and… its blurry [sadface]. Here is a quick reference on how to get buutiful crispy text in the engine.

N.B. This solution is completely free and only requires iShowU Audio Capture.

So I recently upgraded to El Capitan and I need desktop audio capture for Open Broadcaster Software. The new OS X release only authorizes signed kext, which is a good thing. Unfortunately that breaks Soundflower or WavTap.

I’ve recently subscribed for another month of Eve Online. I played a long time ago, and quit after space life got extremely boring and lonely. Last time I logged in, I did so with 4 friends during a discount period. What I write here are my personal thoughts, and some echoes of these long gone pilots. Once my gaming friends left Eve, everything changed. Why the game didn’t appeal to them could fuel a discussion on its’ own.

I’ve recently gotten more and more involved with the Wine project. I am a gamer, after all, and having only a Mac laptop and OS X makes it somewhat hard to play games. While debugging wine logs, I’ve encountered a problem many face when using +relay. You can’t just ignore those 4 GB logs, as they often contain the exact reason, or more precisely, the exact location your game/software crashed. I use Sublime Text to read those, it is so far the most performant editor when handling huge text files, quickly and easily dealing with gigabytes of logs. Consider me impressed.

I am hitting many of the imposed limits on my free blog. I recently wanted to share a ton of textures, but since they were to big for the free space allowed, I resorted to a little “trick” if you will. I ended up creating a script to generate a huge html thumbnail gallery, using a table. It seemed like the best of the available options.

A while back I was working on some audio prototyping. I made a simple audio player prototype and was experiencing with different audio plugin APIs. I decided to use libAV (not libavcodec from ffmpeg) for the simple reason that its’ documentation is much much better than ffmpeg. I highly recommend to take advantage of that. There are many examples, code snippets and explanations here. Of course, API documentation is a bit dry when you first start using a library, so here is a tutorial and a good base you can use to build upon.

A few years back, I released 2 tracks on OpenGameArt. I hadn’t composed any musical pieces in many years, and I took the opportunity to try something new. Not only dip my toes into musical composition again, but also share my work with the world. All my previous songs had never been heard by anyone other than close friends. The experience was nerve-racking but very satisfying.