I fly kites, make video games and do other fun things
by Steve Pavlina, founder of Dexterity Software. Reproduced with permission. This article is part of a series. You worked hard to create a quality product. You promoted it using every means at your disposal: submitting to hundreds of download sites, soliciting reviews, issuing a press release, improving your web site, creating a compelling shareware version, and …
by Steve Pavlina, founder of Dexterity Software. Reproduced with permission. This article is part of a series. In my corner of the software industry, I will work from six months to a couple years to develop and release a new computer game. I can sell sequels or expansion packs, but I generally cannot sell upgrades as …
I love flying sport kites, and every flyer I know has their own favorite fields. When starting out or when traveling somewhere new you need to find a new field, and sometimes you can’t find locals who know the best spots.
Working with games means programming, but it is also a special kind of programming. When working on a game you know will be used for competitive play in some ways is like the Formula One race cars; everything you do needs to consider performance. When working on a game you may know that the game is going …
In my last article I wrote a little about the initialization side of RAII, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization, in this one I will talk about the flip side, RAII is also about destruction and cleanup.
Over on gamedev.net there have been several questions lately about RAII, or the philosophy of Resource Acquisition Is Initialization. The common discussion question is: What does initialized mean, exactly?
On gamedev.net recently there have been several questions about game objects. What are they? How do they work with the rest of the system? What belongs in the object? When should they be created and destroyed? This week I’ll be addressing a few of these.
Today at work we had a big discussion about annotations in some Java code. These wonderful little inventions save a time and make life much easier for programmers, but they are also the source of terrible nightmares. To get into the subject, I’ll need to explain a few things for the audience.