February 2010
1 post
this blog is moving to a cooler home! →
after a short but sweet existence, all the content here has been moved to a much prettier home, http://www.mediamolecule.com/lab/ - where you can also see less geeky posts by the whole mm dev team. also, check out the mm_lab on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mm_lab - HUZZAH INFOFEED WIN
January 2010
9 posts
down with 64 bit pointers, up with 32 bit indices
lately I’ve been experimenting with a trick to save space on 64 bit architectures: rather than using pointers (which take 8 bytes of memory! 8! bytes! omg!), I’m using 32 bit indices into a single, gigantic 32 gig block I allocate at startup. as in:
u64 *bigblock=malloc(32*1024*1024*1024); // at startup. or choose a number smaller than 32 :)
struct foo { int x, y, whatever, whatever;...
2 tags
Untitled Document Syndrome →
this post is pretty on the money - but it goes further. how many times have you been forced to name a project before you can start? too many. littlebigplanet, the multi-million-selling-product, still has the project name ‘ps3test1’ - yes, it really can trace its roots back to the first code we ever wrote on ps3. at the time I named that, I had *no* idea that it would grow into the...
2 tags
c trick
I love indexing constant strings, I’m sad like that.
for example,
char c=”0123456789abcdef”[b&15];
converts the low nybble of byte b into its hex character.
oldie, but goldie.
siggraph 2009 course including mm content →
at siggraph 2009, Natasha Tatarchuk invited several games industry graphics types to give a course on ‘advances in real-time rendernig in 3d graphics and games’. Follow the link for lots of lovely stuff, including a set of slides about graphics techniques used in LBP.
Luscious luscious fluids
MMM so tasty!
http://people.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/
“goto considered harmful? rubbish - it’s fine”
– Anton Kirczenow
tiling window util for big monitors on windows →
for those of you who use a wide-screen monitor, managing windows can be a bit annoying. oh for a tiling window manager for windows! ah well, this is nearly as good: it maps Ctrl+Alt+numeric keypad such that the current window snaps to the relevant half or quarter of the screen. makes it very easy to quickly organise your windows into tiles, without having to touch the mouse (as you do with windows...
3 tags
warning signs
when I’m coding, sometimes I get warning signs that I haven’t understood the problem fully. Normally, they take the form of gross looking code - ‘-1’ or ‘+1’ hanging round in loop limits, even worse, seemingly arbitrary constants, large amounts of unavoidable pointer dereferencing,…
nearlly always this is a sign that either I’m doing it wrong, or I...
Highcharts →
Cool interactive JavaScript charts
December 2009
3 posts
LLVM Project Blog →
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
– H.L. Mencken