Les Bons Beignets

LUA scripts have a better compression rate than its bytecode

Atleast with ZLib ! I didn’t test with other compression algorithms. But the result will probably be the same for all others compressions.

So why ?

The reason is simple: most of algorithms can compress very efficiently text but when it comes to binary data, they just suck.

So check it by your self:

1. Strip your scripts by removing comments, useless spaces and carriage returns
2. Compress it
3. Compile the same strip script
4. Compress it

You’ll see that you can gain up to 75% the size of the compressed byte-code.

It could interest people trying to save memory in their resource script managers or loading time from DVD or any slow IO device.

Good tools in production: General rules

Having a kick-ass next-gen engine with awesome features like parallax-mapping, HDR rendering, MegaTexture and so on … won’t help you to ship your game in reasonable times. For example, I worked on a game with really good graphic features for its time. It took 4 years to be shipped when it could have take two or less.

So what could do the difference ? My answer is: The tools used in production.

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Eclipse 3.4 and CDT 5.0

When I was just about to write a post about the lack of a good and complete (and bug-free) C++ IDE under Linux, the Eclipse Foundation just released Ganymede. Ganymede is the annual release of Eclipse and its 23 sub-projects (Java Development Kit, C++ Development Kit, Subversive (SVN plugin).

For me it was really interesting because they did an effort to release the last CDT (C++ Development Tooling) in the same time. So here my review about Eclipse 3.4 and CDT 5.0.

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Back to the basics: Projection Matrix

I finally have the time to demysthify the rendering pipeline. For that, you have to understand everything about matrices (and quaternions if you want).

It was easy to find resources for matrices and quaternions, for view matrices and transformation matrices. But the most difficult one was still a mystery.

So check this page out:

http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/misc/math/article.php/c10123__1/

And you’ll discover everything explained in details (and most important with the mathematics proofs).

Finally ! New site design !

I just imported and modified one of the free themes from BlogOh!Blog. Thanks to them !

What about “beignets” ? I don’t know probably a psycho-fixation.

Some nice blogs about game development

Pierre Tierdman is clearly a guy you would like to have in your team if you miss a strong experienced programmer. His work on Opcode (collision detection library) is just awesome. Don’t miss the others articles on his website like the radix sort on float.

http://www.codercorner.com/blog/

Here is a complete fan of agile development and test units. It’s the blog of a brand new video game studio and it’s interesting to see their experience on building their technology with rarely used methodologies in video games.

http://powerof2games.com/

The previous blog of the same guy of power of 2 games. A lot of interesting articles about software engineering in game development.

http://www.gamesfromwithin.com/

Some interesting reflections high level of video game production. Only in French but intersting.

http://jeremy.chatelaine.name/blog/

Welcome !

A traditional welcome post to introduce you my new web site