For several years now I’ve participated in the physics tutorial session at GDC (along with Jim Van Verth, Gino van den Bergen, Erin Catto, Brian ‘Squirrel’ Eiserloh, and Marq Singer). One section I’ve covered in some detail is robustness and within this area I’ve stressed (amongst other things) the importance of distinguishing between absolute and [...]

A while ago a local developer (hi Rick) asked about what I thought was the best way of ordering draw calls for sending to the graphics chip. As the topic came up again in a discussion at work recently, I thought I’d share my thoughts about what I think is the best approach these days. [...]

Third time’s a charm they say, and as I’ve talked about pathfinding twice before (in Don’t follow the shortest path! and Aiding pathfinding with cellular automata) I thought I’d charm everyone with a third pathfinding article. This time I’ll talk about how we can reduce the memory consumption on a commonly used pathfinding algorithm by [...]

Since I’ve dissed patterns and OOP recently (and rightly so) I thought I’d be a little positive and recycle an email I sent a friend a while ago. This someone was curious about functional languages after I had mentioned them over dinner as he had no experience with them. I absolutely think that if all [...]

Some anonymous soul emailed me regarding my “Design patterns are from hell!” post, arguing that “somehow, knowing patterns exist is the same as knowing different data structures exist” and that “understanding the different ways for creating objects (hello creational patterns) is like understanding the implications of deciding to use a dequeue rather than an array [...]

I thought I’d post another summary of some (mostly) recent blog posts and links that are worthy of a read, in case you didn’t read them already. Here goes… Similar Posts: I like spilled beans! A brief graphics blog summary More Capcom/CEDEC bean-spilling Reading comprehension skills are down My recommended books

When did “rewrite” become “rewrite from scratch?!” In my 30 years of writing code, rewrite never meant rewriting from scratch — until the programming cults arrived on the scene at the beginning of the century, that is. Before them, “rewrite from scratch” meant — lo and behold — rewrite from scratch, and a plain “rewrite” [...]

There are lots of things I think a good programmer should understand, and understand well. One, of course, is that OOP amounts to BSE for programmers. Another, and the topic of today, is that good programmers should know how to manipulate bits in their sleep. (No, not those bits!)Similar Posts: Crunching your abs Secrets of a scalar [...]

It’s SIGGRAPH 2008 time! That’s exciting to me, but not for the reason you think. I really couldn’t care much less for the conference itself. I mean, who needs to hear about yet another shadow mapping algorithm, when we know there will be another 10 presented in the next year, and 10 more in the [...]

It is very easy for programmers to be seduced by pretty tech. Case in point: graph-based shader systems. Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you must have noticed that these systems have become haute couture in the rendering world. Just so we’re clear, what I’m talking about are systems where you can construct shaders [...]