Erik Novales

I was watching John Carmack’s QuakeCon 2011 keynote, and he mentioned that Rage was currently in the stage where they are creating cert builds, and just fixing bugs like (paraphrased) “getting a multiplayer invite and pulling your memory card out.” Memory card bugs are one of those things that tend to be a big annoyance [...]

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Here’s the official announcement on the Bethesda blog, along with pictures of an awesome Fallout: New Vegas themed cake that one of the designers at Obsidian got for his birthday. I pitched in for a couple of months prior to certification to help get it ready for ship. I hope everyone enjoys playing it once [...]

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From David Chisnall: If you find yourself optimizing your code, then it means that the author of your compiler has failed. This is just very, very untrue. Even if you strike algorithmic optimization from the picture, code optimization is still a very important and useful skill to have no matter what sort of programming you’re [...]

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One of the blogs that I have on my feed list recently reposted this tidbit: There are only two debugging techniques in the universe: printf. /* */ Since I recently posted my own little list of some debugging techniques, I can’t resist weighing in on this assertion. While their list is a bit flip, changing [...]

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Here’s another Reddit stub dealing with a topic that is near and dear to my heart: debugging! Unfortunately, the comments on that article seem to focus more on the “fuzzy” aspects of debugging – the “go home and mull it over while watching TV” kind of stuff, rather than more concrete debugging techniques. Whenever I [...]

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I saw this article posted on Reddit’s programming feed*, which talks about a Visual Studio debugging technique for getting first crack at exceptions, before any upstream handlers run. The Debug->Exceptions dialog can be used to set the debugger to break before any exception handlers fire for a particular exception. This is useful not only for [...]

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Here’s a quick note on a problem I ran into awhile back. I was using the GPPG and GPLEX parser tools as part of a Visual Studio project – the input files for these tools generate C# source files which are then compiled into the project. However, I noticed a problem with the recommended project [...]

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This recent post by Raymond Chen highlights some interesting memory optimization scenarios, and the wide-ranging impact of size optimizations. A quick summary: Changing a structure definition such that a bunch of Win32 BOOLs use one bit each saves memory in the struct, because BOOL is typedef’d as an INT. Accessing the bitfield data members requires [...]

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Braid is a very good game that overcomes some ham-fisted writing and overly ambitious themes. I won’t really dwell on talking about the game in this post other than to say that I recommend it, and that there are some mild spoilers in the remainder of this post. I saw a post by the author [...]

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This time, though, my gripe isn’t with InstallShield, but rather with whoever put together an installer I used recently. As part of my recent hard drive purge, I had to use a partition manager program to reset a drive to NTFS (from extfs) so I could overwrite it with the tools I had at hand. [...]

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