Silly thoughts about the history of C/C++ coding

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Note, this is meant to be taken more tongue-in-cheek then seriously, take offense at your own expense 8=).

  • All the fun C library extensions can be blamed on UNIX, less intelligent systems still don’t implement them ^_^.
  • Most of the stupid type systems out there are reminiscent of the Win16 API, watch out for the Hungarians in the group.
  • Too much programming for Windows can lead to strange tattoos, that’ll get you sued unless you’re a pioneer.
  • There’s enough C++ Hungarian in the gaming industry, to make you want to go parler français with the ladies instead.
  • If you want to sit in your own little world, stick to mobiles or Macs; or ask the Free Software Foundation for this weeks KoolAid.
  • It’s alright if you need a road map to find your way through all that DDE/OLE/COM/ActiveX/DCOM mess and their variants, so does Microsoft: that’s why they invented .NET for your InterCOM.
  • Watch out for the babes in the null pointer cafe.
  • sizeof(foo) ≠ sizeof(foo*); unless thou hast vilolated the tenth commandment.

Wew it’s been a jumpin’ hopin’ day!

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I was up all night fiddling with Code::Blocks and Stargella, plus work this morning, and ideas for an interesting project. However it’s a project that would call for C++, and I hate C++, lol. I like C, but hate C++… funny. On the upside, I’ve finally gotten Stargella builds sorted out, and I’m tempted some what to hunt down and eliminate ‘itches’ here and there, but I’m not sure whether or not patches would be welcomed for some things that seem to be, to be good ideas. They’ve accrued a fair number of open patches and bug reports, so I don’t think it’s a highly active project. The code base is only about sixty some thousand lines, not to big for all it does.

Sigh, nothing but work on the horizon o/. At least there’s something on TV tonight that I haven’t seen before, the original Night of the Living Dead. Geeze, what is it with all the zombie flicks lately? Compared to what I’ve seen of the remake (beginning / last half), it certainly has a more spirited beginning, bah I need some pop corn lol. I’ve no idea ottomh what they filmed it in, but it does give an interesting feel to the movie, different then most contemporary films of the era.

A “D’oh!” moment admid success :-/

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Today launched operation breadsticks, a little mission meant to explore the idea, “What if the Haitian earthquake was man made?”. First map was Made of Stone, a map I haven’t really played since before joining [SAS]. I setup the `Tactical Operations Command` centre near the spawn point, and adapted the callsign Valkyrie 62, much like in the LO to China.

Everything went fairly smooth, search team rescued the secret hostage and moved deeper into the building, took a few hard to avoid causalities, and we aced the op. Where things went hairy, was the second map. For some reason only Escrt could spawn correctly and all the terrorists were missing :-S. So after plan B to hot fix it went belly up, I called for plan C and let the members have fun on the first map.

I’m taking the week off from everything except ‘work’ (lol), but intend to sort things in my rest time. Ok, so hacking up a map in unreal ed is not restful… but it’ll be worth it. Because we need to be able to spawn, I have to fix the map to *properly* support multiplayer, it was necessary to postpone map #2. Since there were no tangos either, I’ll have to create a proper scenario; in the mean time, I can just release a tangoless version that people can train on. Then when things are ready, any given weekend, we’re back in action!

🙂

The price of pissing me off.

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A word of warning, this post contains quite a bit of profanity after the jump break

After being up until well past 0400 last night, setting up a decent SCons build set on FreeBSD, for testing— its usefulness to this project. I started setting up the required config tweaks today on the Windows machine.

When suddenly, I found a odd difference between how the same SCons versions behave on FreeBSD/unix and Windows, in fact, this kind of thing is why I’ve given up on the more popular CMake.

lib = os.path.join('#', outdir)
#
# For some really mother fucking stupid reason, Glob('*.$OBJSUFFIX') works
# on FreeBSD scons 1.2.0_20091224 but not on the Win32 scons 1.2.0_d20091224
# from the installer. So we have to use this fucking method, which will require
# us to wrap it in exceptions in case OBJSUFFIX is None or missing totally on 
# platform X.Y.Z. from fucking hell -- I fucking hate software build tools.
#
src = None
try:
    src = os.path.join('#', outdir, '*'+str(env['OBJSUFFIX']))
except:
    print("Fatal error: I can't make libs from object files without a file "
          + "extension. TERMINATING THIS SCONSCRIPT")
    import sys
    sys.exit(127)

env.StaticLibrary(lib, Glob(src))



# edit: an explanation of why subst() isn’t used in place of the [] look up: once you violate the consistency part, I’m not going to trust that there will be an $OBJSUFFIX to subst() on.

I was going to make most of this code a simple library function for the sake of code reuse, instead of having a virtual copy/paste of the same few SConscript files between all my games source modules—after this, I’ll stick to having one of those comment blocks in each source modules SConscript file as appropriate.

Generally I like SCons, it’s rather similar to what I’ve invisioned as the “Perfect build tool”, even though SCons still requires about 3 x the amount of work for Stargellas build system then tmk should. However, SCons is here today, tmk won’t be for a long time. What annoys me, is that SCons is still just as bad as all the other build tools out there.

For crying out loud people, it is the year twenty first fscking century…. and asking some consistency of our modern build tools, still demands limiting ourselves to the 1970s era make tool from PWB/UNIX.


So busy, food even fell by the way side :-S

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I spent yesterday experimenting with DevIL, I rather think that it will be more “To my taste” then using SDL_image for getting easy access to various image files. I only expect to use certain image formats in my games kit, but ahem, if that ever changes, who wants to write per-image-type handling code anew? Hehe. In playing with that, I’ve uncovered a bug in my zipped package handling, and have coded myself into a corner, where in the system would best serve me, by growing a more abstract file handling API—exactly the direction I wanted to go in, hahahaha! TBH, I’ve only ever coded myself into two corners in my life, but this ones a happy case.

Most of the night was used in experimenting with a pair of Integrated Development Environments, CodeLite and Code::Blocks, as possible replacements for existing build.{sh,bat} scripts. There is also a Visual C++ solution and project tree that I whipped up Thursday to replace build.bat, and am still cursing at over its dislike for by build tree o/.  In terms of IDEs, Microsoft has the best, but like visually everything at MS, it’s also as vendor specific as writing machine code in octal 8=).

Really, I can care less about having compiler, editor, debuger, … all integrated—other wise I’d use GNU emacs, screen, toolchain, and their dialect of C, and spit on everyone else’s graves >_>. The thing that interests me is having a suitable build system, one that can handle multiple compilers/configurations and multiple OSes readly, because `tmk` is a project on my back burner, and won’t be completed anything in the short term. Code::Blocks like modern MSVC/VC++, the file format is XML driven and quite easy to modify in a standard text editor.

Installing various libraries on Windows has shown me – most developers don’t know how to create a build system. At least, most open source developers can’t seem to combine computer science 1.0.1 with Visual Studio projects.

Installing various programs on Unix systems, has shown me – many developers don’t understand autotools or it’s just to complex a build system (I vote for both).

Me, I say fuck y’all. Do it right or don’t let it leave your workplace.

And so passes another black day

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I’m rather glad to be heading back to work, and happy to see the 12th go. January is generally regarded as an off month in my family… January 12th, 1989 is the day my father died, as well as my parents wedding anniversary—what a peachy combination!

While I try to respect my families history, it’s also a matter I try not to dwell on for very long. *sighs*.

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Being stuck with walking around the supermarket (baah, humbug!), I tried to devote my trains of thought to Stargella. For me, it is kind of a difficult project; much more complex then most of the things I’ve worked on.

In thinking about how to structure the rendering code, I started to think more on the issue of dealing with the data sets to be rendered, which basically means sprites (2d), models (3d), and rendering the level (2d/3d), and I want as much of the code to be shared between several game projects, which makes baking the lasagna a bit involved. Since my current focus is on the 2D oriented, Stargella, I find it wiser to concentrate on sprites then three dimensional models. At first I was thinking, it would be ideal to represent animations for sprites, as a simple image stack; but I don’t want to go through all that for unanimated sprites, which would still require a singular stack frame. The fix to that is simple, only use stacks for holding the animation details! Then I was thinking, gee, wouldn’t it be cool, if we could attach some type of script or shader program to be run, so a level of progmmability could be used in implementing special effects. For example, using program to stake out the centre of a starship, split it into segments and have them drift away from one another, while interleaving it with an explosion-like image or particle effect. Simple enough to do from C I’m sure, but I would much rather have it be apart of the game data, then the game code. I’m not sure if that would be doable from mating with GLSL files, or if it would mean binding a script with the sprite. Either way, as far as general game scripting goes, it should have some level of access to the graphic stuff as a matter of completeness.

For now, I think I’ll concentrate on resource handling. It should be easy enough, just create dynamic arrays as needed (e.g. of loaded textures), and each time a new texture is loaded, assign it an unique identifier that indexes into the array; …

Honestly, I don’t have a problem with programming in C, other then it can be time consuming at times o/. But, because I have to learn OpenGL along the way, it is, shall we say a freaking lot of docs to parse.

While I’m more familiar with Direct3D then OpenGL, even if you can still get a good bang for you buck out of a DirectX SDK without having to stoop to C++, I’m not willing to write a DirectX backend for my game. Obviously, I want to avoid using glThis and glThat all over the game code, but ahem, the issue of shaders enter the picture. Short of making a definitive choice at compile time, that would have to live for the projects entitiy, the only way to support runtime choice, would also require writing both HLSL (DirectX) and GLSL (OpenGL) code, and that’s a headache I won’t put up with!  As much as I favour the idea of nVidia’s Cg, it is not available on enough platforms, and implementing it where needed, to much trouble.

If people other then me want to play the game, they can buy a graphics card made in the 21st century and install its drivers >_>.

—- this post has been interrupted so many damn rat fucking times by family, that it is unfinished and will likely always remain so. This is one of many reasons why I fucking hate my life.

Bye bye work week!

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Finally finished with a nutty schedule, this week is a bit more free, although I’m still working on the weekends. Things have been erratic lately, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Honestly, I like it when things are shaken up a bit, although routine does help with planning events around working hours!

My dreams have been a rather nasty torrent lately, mixing interesting possibilities with programming, and more moribund territory. On the first, I’ll skip journaling, to the second, it’s mostly revolving around C and OpenGL, I’m even dreaming of coding these days o/, and as to the third, somethings are too grisly to be worth recollection.

I’ve managed to get everything done today, and still find about an hour or so to take a much needed ‘break’, haven’t had one of those in a coon’s age. For now, I’ll probably take in a quick game of Quake or some Raven Shield. Later tonight, I need to mull over some more of the OpenGL issues and such. Oy, scratch that, dinners on the roll. It seems, one thing that never does end, is my ability to think 8=).

All in all, I’m looking foreward to Monday—I’m off work :-D.

*sigh*

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There’s nothing todo, other then pass time and work across open projects :-/. Normally I would be working today, but the snow and ice has pushed into into Saturday, which is probably good fortunate since I’m scheduled for working most of the weekend anyway o/.

I’ve all but been going stir crazy for the last couple of days, although on the productive side, I’ve had some time to study OpenGL in greater depth. Ahh, joy. Can’t even blog in peace…  hours go by through interruptions.

QOTD and a personal favorite

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After stress-testing my last post on a fellow [SAS] member, he asked me if I always thought like a program, or did I used to think like a human. To which I immediately thought of a remark for first Corinthians, and adapted it to suit.

“When I was a human I spoke as a human, I understood as a human, I thought as a human; but when I became a program I put away humanish thing.”

I really don’t like to quote myself, even if it’s a rip off of something St. Paul is credited with, but I really liked that target of opportunity, lol. It was just tooo good to miss!