March 11, 2007
I'm currently working on yet another tool to grease the wheels of the Team UnrealSP content pipeline. The latest problem is texture packages. For those unfamiliar with the Unreal archive format each unreal archive file list a number of exported objects and a number of imported objects. So a map …
March 04, 2007
Sorry you didn't get a journal entry last week, I've been pretty busy recently and struggling to get back in the swing of writing weekly journal entries since the big GDNet downtime (It's all their fault really, not just me being bone-idle).
Not really much I can talk about at the moment. I'm serio…
Not really much I can talk about at the moment. I'm serio…
February 18, 2007
This journal entry was written a fortnight ago, but couldn't be posted then due to GameDevs downtime. Not much of interest has happened between then and now so I'm posting this old entry tonight and will get back on track next week.
Saving vertices in the problem map turned out not to be possible. …
Saving vertices in the problem map turned out not to be possible. …
January 28, 2007
I spent my free time this week modifying my old Unreal map reader so that it could rebuild the file after parsing it into memory. I then went about investigating whether those vertices I thought were unused really were redundant. Unfortunately it turns out they aren't. I'd forgotten about the co…
January 21, 2007
One of Team UnrealSPs mappers came across an interesting problem this weekend. We already knew about UTs zone limit (64, because a zone mask is stored in a 64 bit integer) and bsp node limit (65535, because bsp node indices are stored in unsigned shorts) but now for the first time we've hit the ve…
January 14, 2007
I've finished (the first pass of) my Jpeg2000 loader. I think I'm going to opt to call it Jackknif. That's Jackknife, the only English word I could find which contains a 'J' followed by two 'k's (J2K, get it?), with the e knocked off to indicate that it's not a complete implementation. Yes, ther…
January 07, 2007
I've broken the back of the Jpeg2000 decoding algorithm. What really rankles is that all the publicly available implementations are at least a hundred thousand lines of code and my nearly complete implementation (admittedly with only a subset of the functionality) is only just about the hit a thou…
December 31, 2006
Not really much to talk about what with Christmas and the new year. I've spent a little free time looking further into Jpeg2000 over the last couple of weeks. I'm now trying to get my head round entropy decoding and the MQ arithmetic decoder. I printed out 22 pages of source code to take away wi…
December 17, 2006
I was off work this week. Tomorrow could be interesting since I think the code I checked in just before I left might have broken the build. It should only be a small break, but unfortunately build success is a binary state - the build is either broken or it's not. I did email them about it with …
December 11, 2006
The observant amongst you will have noticed that it's not Sunday. The even more observant amongst you will have noticed that it's not Sunday and I'm posting a journal entry. The really observant amongst you will notice something odd about this. There is a reason for this. Drum roll please... I …
December 03, 2006
So, it's been three months already since I started my journal. I had hoped that this would become a fairly regular record of my work for Team UnrealSP, with occasional interludes of randomness. Instead it's turning out kind of the opposite. It's been another slow week. I seem to have acquired a…
November 26, 2006
I managed to find a bit of free time to get back to my Jpeg2000 decoder this week. Unfortunately it's so long since I last worked on it I've lost track of where I was. I did have lots of notes, but the source code is so impenetrable it would still take me a while to get back up to speed. I say "…
November 19, 2006
There was another mini SC++L versus do-it-yourself debate in the Beginners forum this week, which got me thinking (again) about the issue of vector and reading from a file. The issue is that there is a simple solution using new which cannot be expressed as efficiently using vector:
std::ifstream re…
November 12, 2006
Medieval II: Total War was released on Friday. I've spent a fair bit of time today clearing out my hard drive to find the 11GB(!) needed to install it. I did get a look at it at work on Friday and it looks very nice. I particularly like the movies you get for certain events. I never played the …
November 05, 2006
I've nearly gotten my triangulation code ported. It's been fun ripping out unused variables, re-factoring five-hundred line functions and modifying everything to work off of dynamically sized zero-based arrays instead of fixed-size one-based arrays. I say fun. What I really mean is it made me wa…
October 29, 2006
I was looking into polygon triangulation algorithms at work this week. It didn't take long to find reference to the optimal version, developed by a guy named Bernard Chazelle, which can triangulate a simple polygon in linear time. The reference also came with a warning that it was not a simple al…
October 22, 2006
Continuing my language-shootout mission I spent what little free time I had this week looking at the issue of threading. This seems to be one area where C++ falls badly behind other languages currently in the shootout. As I understand it this is partly because the standard threading implementatio…
October 15, 2006
I got distracted this week by a couple of thread in General Programming. The first was my c++ d c# benchmark, particularly the links to the Language Shootout. I think benchmarking languages is a fairly nonsensical concept, even benchmarking language implementations. Do you benchmark the speed of…
October 08, 2006
As the title says, this has been a bit of a slow week for me, so I don't have much to talk about. I did manage to embarrass myself at work this week. I coded a fairly simple function which didn't work correctly at first. Nothing new there. A lot of simple code fails to work perfectly first time…
October 01, 2006
The ability to explain something quickly and accurately with a minimum of fuss is usually an advantage. There are exceptions however. My continuing explorations of the JasPer source code are a prime example of that. Too often programmers abbreviate names in source code as if somehow this makes t…
September 24, 2006
This week at work I was asked to profile something from an older codebase. So I opened the project and tried to build it but ended up with compiler errors. After trying a few things to see if it was a problem with my project setup the guy next to me thinks for a bit and then turns to the project …
September 17, 2006
I actually did some work at work this week. Nothing heavy, I'm still getting used to things, but I should get some more complicated things to do from here on in. It's interesting to be working in a real team environment after so long working solo on projects. The only team coding projects I've d…
September 10, 2006
My first week of work was interesting. In a not all that interesting kind of way. It's a new office - I started the day they moved in - so it's taken a little while to get things sorted out plus some key people have been off, so although I've been there a week I've yet to actually do any work.
I s…
I s…
September 03, 2006
So, I have this shiny new GDNet journal just sitting here unused, which seemed a bit of a waste. I guess I'd better try and find something interesting to fill it with. I've added a small section of resources to the header of my journal (hopefully it looks as beautiful under other browsers as it d…
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