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Edgebreaker: 3D Geometry Compression

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:44:32 +0000

Solid 3D shapes can be described using a mesh of triangles. Data for 3D objects can occupy a lot of memory and is thus suitable for compression and the patented Topological Surgery (115 page PDF!) scheme was devised in the late 90s. It's used in MPEG-4 video.

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iOS Game Programming Book Review

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:31:03 +0000

I was really impressed with this book on Learning iOS Game Programming as the author knows his stuff and explains it well.

The book is just about programming one game (which is in the App Store) and covers all aspects of it, including OpenGL, Sound, the lot. If you're interested in game programming this is an excellent way to get started but it's not for anyone new to programming or programming iPhones etc. You need to know a little about using XCode etc.

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The First Asteroids Tutorial Published

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:00:27 +0000

The tutorial includes source code but isn't the full game just some asteroids randomly moving across the screen (no collisions yet or shooting). You have to press t to add new asteroids. It's an early demo.

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Learn C The Hard Way

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 05:03:31 +0000

This is a book by Zed A Shaw that's available in alpha form online. It's for programmers with skills in one other "scripting" language, or who need to relearn C, Objective-C programmers who want better C skills and people who like a challenge.

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Being Subnormal Can be Slow

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:10:36 +0000

Before anyone completely misinterprets the title of this blog entry I am referring to subnormal (aka denormal) numbers. If a floating point number is smaller than the smallest normal number it's called subnormal. These are numbers very close to 0 and held with a special representation compared to the normal range of loating point numbers. But what is a normal number?

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MonoGame - Cross Platform XNA

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:34:29 +0000

XNA is of course for Windows, Windows Phone 7 and XBox 360. But these days anything goes and MonoGame is an open source implementation of the XNA APIs that lets developers build 2D games that run on Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Linux and Windows using the same code base. Or You can reuse existing XNA code that runs on Xbox 360 or Windows Phone 7.

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Read My mind- With Code

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:38:19 +0000

The word Mindset to me means the way someone thinks. It's also the name for a headset that can read EEG (electroencephalogram) for under $200, or the cheaper ($99) Bluetooth MindWave and both can be programmed in C/C++, C# and other programming languages.

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Fluent C# Book Review Published

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:42:05 +0000

As books go Fluent C# a big beast at 850 pages long. It's an interesting book, partially due to its appearence which has a lot of illustrations, probably more than in any other book I've read; though maybe the Head First design series come close. It's also probably the best intro to WPF I've ever read.

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Linq Tutorial Six Published

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:08:25 +0000

In this tutorial I've looked at Aggregation Operators usch as Min(), Max(), Count(), Average() and the quite powerful Aggregate(). It also looks at projection with Select() and SelectMany(). These transform sequences, and there's an example of flattening of a two dimension structure but all have examples.

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Challenges Updated

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:16:08 +0000

There were no entries for Challenge 54 but I've decided to leave it open in case anyone wants to enter. I've also updated next month's challenge (56) with the boards.txt. That starts on March 1st.

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