Kreation’s Edge

Been so busy with different things haven’t really had much time to update my own site. Got myself hooked on Fable 2. I’m on my second play now. Just got Saints Row 2 and Deadspace as well. It’s going to be tricky making time for all these great games…

What I’ve noticed at a lot of places there is usually always a bottleneck. In the case of game development, this bottleneck is usually a text file that people have to lock in order to add/update/delete entries. This may not be feasible for maps and resources like that- but in the case of data files it would be preferred if a database could be utilized.

On one particular project I worked on, we used databases pretty extensively for resources. This worked really well and no one on the project got held up waiting on a resource to become unlocked.

Would be interesting to see this get investigated for Maps and such items as well. But that might be a bit too ideal there

Good programming question that we were just discussing today. Wikipedia has the solution

Was planning on completing Herb Sutter’s 2 hour presentation he made on C++ Futures and multicore technology before I wrote my next blog entry. However, I’ve been real busy working on various things so haven’t had time to finish watching the presentation. However, I’ve attended a few lectures and presentations based on the material so I’m pretty sure what the whole thing is about.

Was really just curious in particular how he setup his C++ Future templates. Personally, the way I write my Futures is a bit similar to Java 1.4+ API style whereas you can pass a reference/pointer to a non-copyable Future object into a thread. The thread populates the future with the requested resource. Since the future has atomic locks, another thread can at anytime query the Future to determine if it’s done and then retrieve the data.

Very cool concept it’s very multithread platform friendly. Click here to download the C++ sources.

Interesting, I gave a talk at EA-Los Angeles a few months ago about a similar topic. And since that time, my thoughts on parallel programming patterns extended to such concepts as Futures, Jobs, Agents, and Atomics. This talk appears to discuss this issue on a more higher level.

I like a lot of the comments he gave during the presentation such as “You learn by making mistakes” and many of the other unique viewpoints Ralph had. I also agree with one of the comments someone posted on Herb’s site whereas he would like to see more great books like Effective C++ (ah I see people discussing an upcoming Effective Concurrency book from him). I read that book cover to cover many years ago and I recall Design Patterns was the next book I planned to acquire (but forgot). So it was nice watching this presentation which helped toggle my memory

One of the main points he hit upon around Slide 13 (40:00) was avoiding data race conditions. That is one my biggest fears personally when I sit down and architect a parallel system. I think about what data needs to be shared, how to avoid locking access to this data, etc. So it’s always interesting to hear other viewpoints on this issue

Spellborn has been gaining speed recently and has announced a shipping date in North America around November 27. It recently received an award for most innovative fantasy based MMORPG as well due to its unique combat system and AI. I’m sure the freedom to design what your avatar wears also helped though (guess).

Darksiders has also been getting a lot of nice attention lately at PAX 2008 earning a lot of favorable comparisons to The Legend of Zelda and God of War

Played through Crysis Warhead and beat the single player campaign. That was a lot of fun

Got a creature I’m currently working on in Spore. I’ve been taking my time, plowing through the Creature stage as a carnivore. Tempted to restart and try to become an omnivore…


Fred * const ptr = NULL;
const Fred * ptr = NULL;


Q: Do these lines have the same meaning?
A: No. The first line declares a const pointer meaning the value of ptr cannot be reassigned. The second line means that the Fred object itself is const and it cannot be altered unless it has a mutable member declared (mutable members can be altered in const functions)

A lot of people no doubt miss this one. Read bout const correctness here

Figured I’d compose a list of some of my recent favorite comic book novels: Zendra, Battle Gods, The MetaBarons, and Micheal Turner’s Fathom. If you haven’t checked those out you are probably missing out.

Favorite series I wish to see completed: BattleChasers (come on Joe Mad, finish it), Plasm (Jim Shooter / Defiant), The First (CrossGen), Echo by Pat Lee…

Regular series that I follow or loved: All the stuff Jim Shooter did at Valiant, Defiant, and now DC Comics writing Legion of Super Heroes. Used to get all the hot Marvel stuff back in the day (pre-Image Comics) when Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Micheal Turner, Jae Lee, Erik Larson, and Chris Claremont all resided there. Naturally when many of the artists left to form Image, I started grabbing up all of their titles. Later, got really into CrossGen comics for while but after they went under I sort of dropped comics altogether for awhile. Yep I was pretty disappointed I was very fond of their universe.

But eventually returned to the scene, attending San Diego Comic Con ‘07 and started playing catchup.

Been playing around with NVPerfHUD lately. It’s a pretty cool tool that provides a lot of useful stats. Below is a sample pic of the tech demo running on it. It’s been tricky learning how to use this profiling tool. I’ve grown quite used to PiX for the xbox 360 in which every developer knows is beyond incredible. I’m sure this one is too- just need to learn how to make maximum use of it