How To
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Sequels: Hubris, Distraction, and Obsession
What makes a game franchise live or die? Most discussion about game franchise deaths are by players and press. Sometimes, there are industry post mortems. Rarely, developers complain about management or team. My career intersects four 20+ year game franchises: Tribes, Marble Blast, Zap, and Blockland. Over the decades, I’ve had time to reflect on…
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Code Caving
https://twitter.com/AngryMooseZA/status/638232075649347584 https://twitter.com/AngryMooseZA/status/638233684982779904 Lately, we’ve been doing a lot of code caving at The Engine Co. Expert code explorers, like Fabien Sanglard, have an amazing ability to take very complex codebases and understand their core concepts. They can extend them and make them turn all kinds of tricks. While you shouldn’t miss Fabien’s analysis of Quake 3,…
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Flatten Your Conditionals!
Deep nesting is a pet peeve of mine. I’m going to show you what deeply nested code is and discuss some strategies for keeping things tidy. It’s my opinion that deep nesting is a sign of sloppy code. You know, code like this (with my condolences to the author): This code is hard to understand.…
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I Wrote A Book: Video Game Optimization
More precisely, Eric Preisz and I wrote a book! The book is called Video Game Optimization, and it covers everything you need to know to get maximum performance from any software project – but especially games. If you’re struggling with getting a great framerate out of your game, I highly recommend checking it out. 😉…
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3D in Flash 10 & Git
I spent a little time with Flash 10’s 3d features recently. Since Flash 10.1 is imminent and FP10 has been at 90%+ penetration for a while now, it’s probably safe to start looking at using FP10 stuff in my projects. 🙂 I also used this as an opportunity to try out git. It was easy…
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Tip: Setting Up Flex Builder The Sane Way
There is a right and a wrong way to set up Flex Builder. The wrong way is to get the Flex Builder package from the Adobe site. It’s running on a super old version of Eclipse, and it lacks a lot of useful editors and functionality. I have lost many man-hours of productivity to this…
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Working with the Apple Remote on Boot Camp
Maybe you want to listen to ALL the events that come in off the Apple Remote. I don’t know how to do that under OS X, but here’s how to do it under Windows with Boot Camp: Open up the System icon from the Control Panel. Choose the Hardware tab. Click on the Device Manager…
Ben Garney 