Erik Novales

Game and Software Development, plus other stuff

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Entries Tagged as 'Development'

A Gross Overgeneralization

May 11th, 2010 · No Comments

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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Tags: Development

More about debugging.

February 14th, 2010 · No Comments

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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Tags: Development

Debugging!

January 24th, 2010 · 1 Comment

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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Tags: Development

First Chance .NET Exception Handling

January 21st, 2010 · No Comments

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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Tags: Development

Using GPPG and GPLEX with Visual Studio

June 27th, 2009 · 1 Comment

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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Tags: Development

Optimization Tradeoffs

December 1st, 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: Development

Braid

August 16th, 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: Development · Games

Installers. Again.

July 27th, 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: Development

InstallShield Wastes My Valuable Time (Which I Could Be Using To Play a Game)

May 17th, 2008 · 1 Comment

I’ve had to use InstallShield to create installers a couple of times. These were fairly unpleasant experiences — while InstallShield is indeed a pretty flexible tool, it also takes a lot of work to get anything accomplished. Their habit of releasing new versions of the package every year (and completely abandoning the previous versions) makes [...]

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Tags: Development · Games

Bad Release Practices

March 13th, 2008 · No Comments

I recently ran into some issues with installing PHP on an IIS server, and, in the process of tracking down the problems, came to the conclusion that the PHP Group doesn’t do enough (any?) release testing, and still treats the Windows platform (regardless of whether or not Apache is used) as a second-class citizen. Why? [...]

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Tags: Development