A couple of weeks ago I participated in a 48-hour game jam hosted by PlayFab here in Seattle, with fellow procedural planet veteran Alex Peterson, my good friend and composer href="http://leolangingermusic.com/" target="_blank">Leo Langinger, and the fortunate l…

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a 48-hour game jam hosted by PlayFab here in Seattle, with fellow procedural planet veteran Alex Peterson, my good friend and composer Leo Langinger, and the fortunate last minute addition of artist Brent Rawls.

We were both surprised and excited to have wo…

When Google VP Vint Cerf warned that increased dependence on technology could lead to a 'digital dark age', he merely echoed the concern of everyone involved in the preservation of information in a digital world. While it is expedient to dismiss his claim as sensationalist and/or paranoid, Google's…

I'm working on developing a novel programming language, working title 'aevum'. As part of that process, I'll be writing a series of articles about various aspects of language design and development.

Every long running computer program is going to need to obtain a variety of resources, and those reso…

This thread over at GameDev got me thinking, "can one assign Python-like tuples in C++?"

I don't want to pollute the thread in For Beginners with that discussion, but the answer is yes, even without C++11 initialiser lists:

#include struct A { A &operator = (int i) { std::cout <<…

Although I am gainfully employed at present, in the past I have made a good portion of my living in freelance work: websites, Facebook applications, database tools - even the odd carpentry project. The most essential skill involved in freelancing any field? Communication. But the next most importan…

I have been playing around with distance field rendering, inspired by some of Inigo Quilez's work. Along the way I needed to define analytic distance functions for a number of fairly esoteric geometric primitives, among them the logarithmic spiral:

The distance function for this spiral is not partic…

I recently installed the beta of Microsoft Office 2010, and the first thing that struck me is how it performs noticeably worse on my 3.0 GHz quad-core AMD gaming rig, than Office '98 performed on a now 12-year-old PowerBook G3, powered by a little 250 MHz PPC processor.

You can probably guess the ne…

This one goes out to all the networking students in the house:

Wired reports that a firm in South Africa successfully demonstrated that data transmission via flash drive equipped carrier pigeon is faster than their existing internet service (source).

Of course, any networking student worth his salt s…

New in this version:

• Support for multiple windows
• Java-style flow layout
• Full batching
• Numerous performance enhancements and bug fixes
• Minor theme tweaks
• setuptools/easy_install supportGiven the speed of development, simplui has moved to its own googlecode project:
  
  http://simplui.googlecode.com
  
  You can obt…