Momentary Fascinations Topics that held my interest, if only for a time. by

programming

How To Use Mercurial For Local Source Code Management With A Public Subversion Server

categories: programming   ·   originally posted 2007-01-05 17:25:30   ·   last edit 2007-01-08 12:27:35   ·   permalink

I'm working on contributing some patches to Python. According to the Python patch submission guidelines:

• We like unified diffs. We grudgingly accept contextual diffs. Straight ("ed-style") diffs are right out!
• If you send diffs for multiple files, concatenate all the diffs in a single text file.
• We appreciate it if you send patches relative to the current svn tree.

If you're like most people, you don't have Subversion checkin privileges for Python. That...

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64-Bit Color... And 16-Bit Floats

categories: programming   ·   originally posted 2006-01-24 21:37:38   ·   last edit 2007-03-04 06:40:30   ·   permalink

Have you seen the HDR rendering in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast? That is possible because of the next big thing in graphics: going from 32-bit color to 64-bit color. But this revolution in color isn't as simple as just making everything twice as big.

32-bit color uses four 8-bit integers to represent red, green, blue, and alpha. (Alpha means whatever you need it to mean; most commonly it's used for opacity.) Thus, each of the four values can go from...

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Shrinky-Dink Python

categories: programming   ·   originally posted 2006-01-11 22:25:08   ·   last edit 2006-01-12 00:25:08   ·   permalink

About eighteen months ago, I realized that my plan for level creation for my game was just not going to be feasible. I'd planned to write all levels as FORTH scripts, and... well, not only is that a totally un-visual way of designing fun levels, but I was constantly tripping over the programming differences between FORTH and C (between FORTH and every other language under the sun, really). I'd wanted to use Python for scripting in my game, but the runtime was just too big. ...

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A Magical C++ State Machine Implementation

categories: programming   ·   originally posted 2005-06-14 13:54:22   ·   last edit 2005-06-14 14:54:22   ·   permalink

And by magical I mean uses heavy C++ wizardry and probably shouldn't be used. I am abandoning this approach in the interests of code maintainability; this code is clever, and these days whenever I write something clever I feel ashamed.

Here's the source code, which compiles under Windows, GCC 2 and GCC 3 under Linux, and GCC 4 on Mac OS X:

// Proof-of-concept for a magical approach to state machines in C++

// Written by Larry Hastings,

...

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The D Programming Language, and my video game engine

categories: programming   ·   originally posted 2005-04-13 19:20:31   ·   last edit 2006-02-26 07:37:40   ·   permalink

I've been writing a video game for Windows for more than two years now. At its heart is a game engine of my own fiendish design. I say "fiendish" because it's, well, awful. I plan on finishing my current game, then doing another game with this source tree. After that, if I am any sort of even mild success at this, I shall throw away this source tree and begin anew—which is something I'm quite looking forward to.

In my current engine, I wrote nearly everything myself. I feel...

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