Viewing profile — davidsiems

While this article makes a good point (don't say no just because you're lazy) I think it misses a more important one. Time is incredibly important for projects operating with a sch…

I think the 'best' trick I've seen is using pointer tagging on an object's virtual function table pointer to squeeze in an extra flag during garbage collection. Adding another vari…

If you're looking for a cutting edge whitepaper on this stuff check this out: http://maverick.inria.fr/Publications/2011/Cra11/CCrassinThe...

Cool article, it left out my favorite function though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothstep This is the magic sauce you need. (more visual demo here: http://sol.gfxile.net/inter…

Higher than the Xbox360 indie market, maybe. Definitely not the main XBLA store though. From what I've read it's pretty easy to get up on Steam. Terraria and Magicka are good examp…

I've worked for a few video game 'startups' that tanked or are in the process of tanking. Here are some pitfalls to avoid: * Make sure you focus on the company aspect of things. Wh…

Yeah consoles are rough, high cost of development, and high chance to get overlooked.

Agreed, a good lead would be doing everything within their power to _prevent_ this from happening to themselves and the rest of the team.

Get off your high horse. You could say the exact same thing about books, TV, movies, paintings, etc. Games are just like any other form media. Yes, many of them are superficial, bu…

As a reference point: I have an nontraditional CS degree (DigiPen). I learned a lot of math in school, and programmed a ton. There was emphasis on data structures / algorithms, but…

There's a pretty big difference between making something playable and making something scale-able. When you've got 48 hours to make something playable scaling gets thrown out the w…

I'm a fan of 'Plan together, implement independently.' I don't need someone looking over my shoulder hunting for bugs while I program. What I need is someone to bounce high-level i…

Just as a reference point, in this article [ http://whatgamesare.com/2011/02/you-need-four-coders-product... ] the argument is made that you need four coders to make a game. I thin…

You don't need variable names to understand what the code is doing, it's just harder without them. Try going to google.com with chrome, opening the developer console, going to scri…

Crunch is the unavoidable result of poor project management. Project management in software development is notoriously bad, and in game development we're even behind that curve. Sc…

The first company I worked for had mandatory code reviews, I was on a team of about 20 other programmers and I thought it was a great system. Then I went and worked for a startup v…

I've actually done a fair amount of thinking (and even a little implementation) on this topic so I'll share my thoughts. I've come to the conclusion that my ideal 'game programming…

If you're really trying to write efficient code (which is what this article claims to care about) you don't 'forget' to do things like assert that the data is correct. You _guarant…

You would put an assert inside of the divide function like so: int divide (int x, int y) { defend (y != 0); return x / y; } Now divide is guaranteed to produce a correct result if …

You can accomplish this by using asserts in your code. You don't need exceptions to get a callstack and you can assert that values are valid and force a crash / callstack dump when…

You're absolutely right. It is exclusionary. Participation should be exclusive to those who can vote. This means, no corporations, no organizations, no churches, etc. Individuals _…

This is exactly why we need campaign reform. If you're business X, who's product is something that is provably not in the people's best interest you can ram through its legality wi…

If you've never read it before this book is a very intuitive introduction (and refresher): http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Made-Easy-Silvanus-Thompson/d...

While I agree that attendance should be voluntary this solution doesn't address the whole problem. Part of the problem is that education is not valued - neither by the kids, nor th…

It's actually industry standard for the publishing platform to take ~30% as the article says. XBLA, Steam, and PSN all do this as well. It may seem like a lot, but those users woul…