yoklov

33 ms·

331.
by yoklov 11y ago
Autovectorization is hard and fragile in the best of times -- tight stable loops with no (or few) branches and little/no memory access that may be aliased, etc. For a dynamic language JIT this is pretty much infeasible (as I understand
332.
by yoklov 11y ago
I don't know enough about SHA256 to say whether or not it's good enough, I'll assume it is. Performant enough strongly depends on the game. However looking at the implementation of the algorithm on wikipedia[0], that looks ex
333.
by yoklov 11y ago
As a shameless plug, I wrote a JS port of this RNG algorithm a while back: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pcg-random .
334.
by yoklov 11y ago
For games, the most important features (other than the features of an RNG that all applications desire, such as good performance, high period, etc.) are being able to seed the state, and save/restore the state (required for save game s
335.
by yoklov 11y ago
FWIW The sniper battle vs The End (hoping that was his name) is legitimately one of the best boss fight's in any game I've ever played (if only for replay). Making it optional was very smart, but IMO it catches a lot of undue flak
336.
by yoklov 11y ago
Honestly neither are great ways to interview someone. The first is better, sure, but it doesn't actually tell you if they're a good programmer. The only thing I've found that does work is asking them about problems they'
337.
by yoklov 11y ago
Context2D is slow and lacks a lot of features present in flash. It's not even really close. If you're willing to put in the (large amount of) legwork, WebGL solves this, but it works on far fewer machines (even assuming up to date
338.
by yoklov 11y ago
Vector operations are already possible in hardware using the fast, well, vector hardware in the cpu. And ime the speed up from using integers is minor and often not the cost from conversion (to e.g 28.4 fixed or similar), since you often ne
339.
by yoklov 11y ago
You (or anybody else, for that matter) don't happen to know of something similar for geometric algebra, do you?
340.
by yoklov 11y ago
Start small, work up to bigger projects. By small, I mean 300-1kloc. Or whatever you can bang out in a single sitting. It needs to be cool enough that you feel motivated to finish it too. Accept that you can probably only get ~8-12hrs of go
341.
by yoklov 11y ago
While theres a small but of truth in that, unfortunately reality is much more nuanced than this -- at least, it is when performance is non-negotiable. Optimization, when done correctly, is a feedback loop between your assumptions and the pr
342.
by yoklov 11y ago
> One API for all platforms Last I heard, Apple was not going to support Vulkan. So for iOS and OS X, you'd be SOL. Please correct me if I'm wrong though, I'd very much like to be.
343.
by yoklov 11y ago
Agreed. Despite the debacle with the paid skyrim mods (which I still think would be a good thing...), Bethesda definitely understands how important the modding community are to their games.
344.
by yoklov 11y ago
IIRC Valve uses SDL for some things but also goes around it and uses platform APIs for other things.
345.
by yoklov 11y ago
I'd definitely argue that needing a CSRNG is more niche than needing a fast RNG.
346.
by yoklov 11y ago
> But that says more about their own problems and unwillingness than it does about MS. Not sure I agree. In a lot of cases they earned this reputation by leaving developers SOL when they abandoned software or APIs. Personally I don&#x27
347.
by yoklov 11y ago
The reason is that there are tradeoffs. Fixing the timestep guarantees a frame of latency, but most (all?) integration methods used to simulate physics break down with wildly variable timesteps. Tying simulation to framerate is often the be
348.
by yoklov 11y ago
Depends. For indies it can be substantially less expensive. If you go early access you can skimp on QA, you don't need expensive (well, not that expensive) devkits, you might even only have one target platform, which has obvious bene
349.
by yoklov 11y ago
Even if there's no existing game engine, it's almost certainly written in C++. There are toolchain requirements that push in this direction, but honestly I doubt they make any significant difference in the matter.
350.
by yoklov 11y ago
Not a fan of mongo's query format/language, but I have to agree. It's always bugged me that so much work has gone into relational databases, and yet the only way anybody interfaces with them is by using an extremely quirky pr
351.
by yoklov 11y ago
You're much better off putting them up, even if people might think they're biased. Without any benchmarks, it just seems like you want this to be faster, without providing any evidence that it is.
352.
by yoklov 11y ago
I work in an area where unit testing is, generally speaking, more effort than its worth (game programming -- the state space is generally too huge for unit tests to be really practical). So I can't really comment on the effectiveness o
353.
by yoklov 11y ago
Great article. A similar, but much more in depth look at the GPU pipeline is available here [0] for those interested. [0]: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...
354.
by yoklov 11y ago
Have you ever used a good visual debugger? I find that command line debuggers require you to keep too much state in your head at once, and even if you have a great memory and this isn't a problem, they still require you to query the ne
355.
by yoklov 11y ago
There are several tradeoffs here. Yes, this has a readability benefit, and helps ease developers into the module, especially if they're not familiar with it to start with. A good argument in favor of not breaking them into separate fun
356.
by yoklov 11y ago
> Modularity, indirection and abstraction are not panaceas for this problem. In most cases they reduce local complexity at the cost of global complexity. This is a decision that should be consciously weighed in each case rather than assu
357.
by yoklov 11y ago
You can't use LGPL libraries in the iOS App Store. (Well, I'm no lawyer but that was what I've been told in the past)
358.
by yoklov 11y ago
Probably, sans some randomness. (I'd hope that any animation standard has the ability to move things up and down over time, which is the only part of this performed by the JavaScript) My understanding is that SVG animation (SMIL) suppo
359.
by yoklov 11y ago
The clipping path was to ensure that the goo stayed inside the lava lamp -- the well-defined edges were the result of the color matrix. You can see this easily by deleting those two parts of the pen (This is one of the great things about co
360.
by yoklov 11y ago
I don't think the article as advocating pure functional programming. More of a data oriented/array programming style, which has been gaining traction among game programming. There are similarities but more differences than similar

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