The “Design Patterns” book is one of the worst programming books ever. Yes, really. I’m 100% dead serious when I say that I think it has set (and will continue to set) the progress of software development back by decades. Why?! Let me offer up a parable; I will call it “The Plank.”

With the signal-to-noise ratio of the internet at an all-time low, here are some fairly recent graphics-related blog posts from across the world that I think contributed positively to the SNR. Just in case you missed them the first time around.

A foolproof way of separating the men from the boys, the women from the girls, or perhaps just an old programmer from a not quite so old programmer, is to mention the books Basic Computer Games and More Basic Computer Games and see if it results in frowning never-heard-of-them faces or strange dreamy looks of [...]

If you’re reading this blog, other than clearly being a person of integrity and impeccable taste, odds are you’re a programmer. As such, I thought I’d take the opportunity to mention that we have a few really nifty programmer openings on the God of War III (PS3) team that could just be the perfect thing [...]

That min() and max() are highly related to each other probably doesn’t come as a surprise to many people. After all, we have some pretty obvious identities such as: min(a,b) = -max(-a,-b) max(a,b) = -min(-a,-b) What may not be as immediately apparent is

We ran into an interesting problem at work the other day, where we had some geometry partitioning code that gave vastly different results on the same tessellated plane, depending on the scale factor that was applied to the plane. That would be fine, of course, if the code was taking size into consideration when partitioning, [...]

So, the reason I haven’t blogged in quite a while is that I had my external HD crash on me; said HD containing, amongst other things, my scribbles on things to blog about that might hopefully be of value or interest to people. While it turns out I didn’t lose any data, thanks to [...]

There are many possible collision geometry representations. One representation is the triangle soup: an unordered collection of triangles. The triangle soup is great in the sense it is easy for artists and designers to create, edit, and apply collsion materials to the triangles. A not-so-great property is that the triangle soup does not define a [...]

Hacker’s Delight (in homage to the excellent book of the same name) is a pretty cool, sporadically-run coding challenge organized by Jim Hejl (previously of EA Tiburon, now Director of Rendering Technology out of EA in Vancouver). Each new HD challenge provides an interesting optimization problem to solve, where you have to consider both choice [...]

I sort of implied this in passing in my triangle-triangle tests post, but let’s state it officially: coplanarity (or collinearity) in your inputs will almost always screw you over in one way or another! Here’s another example of what can go wrong: this time performing continuous collision detection between a moving point and a moving [...]