C++

Whippet

I made a semi-cache coherent container which provides an Entity-Component-System. These are the bones of contemporary game-engines. This post is a bit crude; I keep thinking about it then adding features to Whippet instead of writing this up. Whippet on GitHub Google built CORGI which isn’t (yet?) trying to act cache coherent. It also is more than trivial to build, and suffers from NIH for me. Actually; that last bit isn’t likely to be a problem for most, but I didn’t like their license.

Of Entity-Component-Systems

I made a semi-cache coherent container which provides an Entity-Component-System. These are the bones of modern game-engines. This post is largely a gooey weasel opinion piece. It started as an introduction that grew out of control. So, for now, it’s just a bit of rambling while I clean-up the documentation for my tool. Of Entity-Component-Systems Among other things, Jason Gregory’s book Game Engine Architecture discusses the concept of a data-driven architecture for game software.

Pipe Sink

I had an idea/desire for a “simple” template class that’d work as my OpenGL thread. A contemporary design for multi-threaded 3D games10 seems to be pooling work and processing it in whatever threads are available. IME OpenGL/GLFW are not re-entrant; Apple2 and GLFW3 explicitly states that it won’t work - so it seems safe to assume that I shouldn’t call functions from different threads. So to make a super-fast 3D game (or whatever) I need to do less work on the thread which is running OpenGL while allowing other threads to send it whatever work they please.

Single Header Bullet

https://github.com/g-pechorin/bullet2stripped What? I reduced Bullet 2.83 to a single C++ header file. Why? Largely to see if I could … hey - SQLite saw a 5% - 10% speed boost when they did this right? … oh - and to ease adoption I guess … maybe … How? I used a slightly complicated Scala script that I’m not interested in examining again … for now … Basically; I took the 2.

Hungarian Notation

In which I pontificate on the subject of Hungarian Notation Hungarian Notation is a contentious topic It boils down to an ambiguity for the word “type” within English / C++. MicroSfot’s modern style-guide says not to use “Abbreviations and Acronyms” or “Hungarian Notation” - originally Hungarian Notation was a style of abbreviation. I’m going to paraphrase a long blog post by Joel on Software and summarize my thoughts at the end.

Swag

You don’t need members when you’ve got SWAG! Actually … you don’t get many members with this idea. By casting this I can pass around an immutable structure of up-to sizeof(void*) bytes. Gist; https://gist.github.com/g-pechorin/d5eb8a1a770f783943a0

First Post

Can I use polymorphic-static-templates to automagically wire meta-functions into a Lua allocator? Presently I’m using several “make—” functions to “decorate” objects after allocation and enable get/set/run meta-functions. I keep feeling the “smell” that some esoteric template thingies could be used to make these steps declarative (or maybe automatic!)