Creating games, art, and technology.
Prologue When I was a young Rustacean, I can remember being profoundly confused by lifetime annotations. The concept is incredibly simple, and I don't believe it's a major concern for students to understand: the borrow cannot outlive the value. This is especially obvious for anyone coming from a C background. Less obvious is that this is an invocation of subtyping in Rust [1] . So, why did I find…
The most important piece of software I ever released was a Nintendo GameCube debugger over 20 years ago. It was not a financial success, receiving roughly $200 in donations. The initial version was released in full and for free on 2004-03-31, around 9 months after development began. The Seed Planted I was a bit of a boaster. After several years of creating cheat device codes [1] that were a bit…
In response to Goto is Not a Horror , I must implore you witness: func main() { var i = 0 loop: i += 1 if i > 10 { goto done } fmt.Println("Hello, world", i) goto loop done: } You might say, "that isn't fair, this is just bad code using bad practices". And you would be half correct. Goto can be used for evil. And it is. Too often, goto is abused. But here's the thing: Goto can only be abused. The…
I was dissatisfied with argument parsing crates. There didn't seem to be one that checked all the boxes I cared about: Simple. Don't overcomplicate it! All I want to do is provide a rudimentary human interface to my app. If I wanted interface complexity, I'd put a whole TUI library in it. Don't make me repeat myself, and don't make me write unnecessary boilerplate. The only thing a parser needs to…
I usually write about Rust, but today I want to discuss something broader; flexibility in software, particularly in design and architecture. To begin, let's focus briefly on versioning. Versioning Prior to semantic versioning , version numbering conventions used in software releases were nearly as numerous as the releases themselves. Some had implied meaning for releases with odd vs even numbers,…
In Rust, it is well-known that static mut is dangerous. The docs for the static keyword have this to say about mutable statics: If a static item is declared with the mut keyword, then it is allowed to be modified by the program. However, accessing mutable static s can cause undefined behavior in a number of ways, for example due to data races in a multithreaded context. As such, all accesses to…
This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, so the clickbait title should be appropriate! I've been learning and using Rust for nearly four and a half years, since version 1.6. That's a good amount of time to become familiar with some of the troubles of the language, the tooling, and the ecosystem. But this is a slightly different story, this is a dissent to a common criticism that the compiler…
The reason I have been so quiet recently is because I've been working on a very dry subject; testing. Unit tests are probably the most uninteresting thing I do on a daily basis as a software architect. Create some fixtures, write some assertions, run the test suite, fix any issues, repeat. It makes me cringe, just thinking about it. But here I am, blogging about how I've been writing tests in my…
It's shader time! I finished the simple sunbeam, which I think looks quite nice in motion. It could use a little work on the gradient, and some extra geometry wouldn't hurt. There are four sunbeams in this test scene. Each is just a plane (two triangles). I'm thinking of splitting the plane into thirds (vertically) so I can shape it more into a semi-circle, instead of just laying flat in the…
Oh hey, look at that! I changed the CSS on my blog a smidge. It's worth mentioning, anyway. Say hello to the Blipjoy Invader! You can just make it out on the left side, there. (Depending on your screen resolution, it might be behind the post content, whoops!) I also finalized the programmable pipeline on the 3D renderer, thanks to @vitalyd over at the Rust user's forum for the hint I needed to…
If you've been following my blog, you'll know that I've been writing a 3D renderer in Rust. This is my first real experience using the language. I dabbled a bit in Rust on a project in January 2016, where I was challenged by lifetime annotations, and gave up. This time around, I've managed to write a complete software renderer with all the bells and whistles of a modern shader model, without the…
Yesterday I finally got around to adding some simple animations. The app was always rendering at 60 fps, but the image was static because there was no animation. That's why I've only been posting PNG images of progress so far. But now I can do this: This was my first ever foray into quaternions! And I must admit, learning about quaternions suuuuuuucks . Surprisingly, this is one area where I would…
I had a long week on vacation, and was able to do a little bit of coding almost every night. There was a lot of time spent doing touristy things, so my coding opportunities were limited. I had a good solid 4 hours of nothing but coding time on the plane, though! Both ways. On my departure flight, I managed to finally fix the aspect ratio (as far as I can tell). This was just a matter of adjusting…
This weekend I was distracted by a well-intentioned good friend of mine who suggested solving a chess puzzle described as " deceptively simple ". Unfortunately, the article is criminally misleading. Therein it is claimed that computers cannot "solve the conundrum quickly and efficiently". The article is misleading because it is in fact trivial to solve the puzzle in linear time with constant space…
Today, it's interpolating normals to render smooth lighting. That's right; Gouraud Shading in full effect. Two screenshots to start with; first is a view with diffuse disabled, to show the full effect of the shading. Followed by fully textured. Surprising that the texture is so dark. But it is what it is. I think this test model has just about reached the end of its usefulness for the project.…
I was surprised by how easy it was to interpolate over the texture coordinates, given the barycentric coordinate space. I have more boilerplate code to convert the mesh vertices into cgmath vectors than there is code to interpolate the triangles! I'll refactor it all away after the renderer's features begin to stabilize. With a little gamma and luminance love, I now have nearest-neighbor texture…
Dithering is an important post processing technique for color quantization, and is especially useful for smoothing gradients with a low precision color space. I got ahead of myself a little bit on the 3D renderer development, and decided to research and experiment with various dithering algorithms. The most popular algorithm is arguably Floyd-Steinberg , which is based upon error diffusion. I used…
It's hard to believe that it has been two years since my last blog update. A lot has happened since then, but nothing to write about. I have done surprisingly little in the way of game development or hobby programming since js13k-2015. I experimented with Rust a bit, kept up on some minor maintenance work for my nodeJS Capstone bindings , and I've played a whole lot of Rocket League . But today I…
After Liberated Pixel Cup , I promised myself I would never again enter a month-long game jam competition. It was just too exhausting. And then I discovered js13k . I guess I can't refuse a challenge. I also noticed the numerology around the number 13. I dig it! That's my number. To make matters even better, the competition deadline fell on my birthday (today). What Is It? The theme word announced…
Let's continue talking WebGL. The original WebGL article was split into two parts, as the material covered too much ground. In the first half, WebGL was described in agonizing detail. In this second half, the WebGL theory takes a backseat to melonJS. This time around, there are a lot of high-level details revolving around rendering a scene in melonJS using all those crazy triangles. As always, you…
Let's talk WebGL. In the last *All About Speed* article, I resurrected an old draft and retooled it to fit the series. It asserted that a clever algorithm to skip logic updates on objects that won't need it would be a nice win for performance. While I still believe this is the case, we should first look at other bottlenecks that can be eliminated with a greater overall impact. Of course I'm…
We've reached Part 4 of the melonJS performance improvement series! In the last post, I discussed some benefits that we can get out of WebGL, and wrapped up the inheritance improvements with some simple benchmark numbers. We've seen remarkable speed increases so far, and there's no reason to stop there! Today we'll discuss the game loop, one of the hottest parts of the framework (in terms of…
In the first two parts of this blog series, I discussed classical inheritance and object pooling. You can find links to both parts below. Part 1 : http://blog.kodewerx.org/2014/03/melonjs-should-be-all-about-speed.html Part 2 : http://blog.kodewerx.org/2014/04/melonjs-should-be-all-about-speed-part-2.html Inheritance Wrap-Up After a long hiatus, I'm back to work on melonJS. Continuing with the…
It may be difficult to tell from my blog alone, but I have a strong passion for debuggers. Especially in the context of reverse engineering; analyzing software at the machine level. Today I shall step outside of video game development and write about debuggers, code analysis, and assembly hacking. All of the fun stuff that I grew up with! Yesterday I released the first version of node-capstone , a…
This should be a solved problem, by now. It's 2014, for crying out loud! Documenting source code in other languages is pretty much trivial; for Python there's Sphinx, Ruby has RDoc, for Java you have JavaDoc, and then there's Doxygen if you need to document C/C++ code. These are all pretty much de facto standards in their respective realms. What do we have for JavaScript? A horrible wart called…