Archive for June, 2011
Classic Pipeline Case Study Part I
I was discussing some partnerships with www.gamedev.net, and someone brought up www.gamepitches.com. This site contains links to design documents, game pitches, etc. One of relevance is the Content/Art Pipeline for Radical Entertainment’s Dark Angel, released in 2002. I’m going to break down the design doc, all 125 pages of it,...
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Relearning python, part 9: Conclusions
Relearning python has been an enlightening and exciting exercise. It has, without a doubt, made me a better programmer. It’s exposed me to things like unit testing, and better documentation practices, that I probably would have continued to avoid with C#. It exposed me to alternative UI frameworks with...
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What would a browser-based pipeline look like?
So I’m fully on the browser-based app bandwagon, but what would that technology look like implemented in a traditional game pipeline? You have a totally portable UI. To some extent, you can get this with 3ds Max and .NET, or Maya and PyQt. With both of those, though, there...
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My new pyjamas (python->javascript/html)
I mentioned I used pyjamas for building my content aggregator UI. Now that the UI is built, and I’m happy with it, I feel more confident weighing in more strongly about pyjamas. Pyjamas is awesome. There, I said it. I’m not going to go deep into what pyjamas is:...
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I booted up VS2010 today…
And I’m still waiting for it to load. Even though I love all of Visual Studio’s features, my god, I forgot how big and heavy it is. Having a light IDE and a system where I don’t need to create a new project (several more minutes) to just scribble...
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Blog roll: Joe Duffy
Another awesome blog totally worth reading is by Joe Duffy, who is a Lead Architect at Microsoft, and an expert in concurrency, performance, and memory. Calling it a blog is unfair to bloggers- he really doesn’t update it often. But the articles he has on there are incredibly lucid...
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Server/Client apps as an abstraction exercise
My last couple personal/work projects have involved creating remote services and local clients (as well as interfacing with other remote services). It’s been an interesting exercise in creating well-abstracted interfaces, because 1) network transfer is slow, so you want to limit the amount of data you send, and 2)...
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Code metrics, requiring a culture of quality
Last time I went over how adhering to things like code quality metrics that are objective and ‘scientific’ is the key to creating and sustaining a strong codebase. The difficulty comes with actually implementing that process and behavior wherever you work. There is no shortage of obstacles: 1. Convoluted...
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Code metrics, the only ‘right constant’
I wrote recently about the experience of running a code analysis tool on a codebase and hinted at the difficulties involved with refactoring the problems. There are far smarter people than me who have given much more thought to the technical problems and strategies involved. I want to explore,...
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Blog roll: CodeBetter.com
I am going to start making some blog posts about other blogs when I don’t have time for bigger posts. The first blog up is www.codebetter.com, which covers a variety of code quality and .NET topics. It is contributed to by a number of people, so there’s a pretty...