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GDC2006 Presentations Links

Game Developers Conference 2006 closed its doors last week. Soon or later most of the presentations will be published in the official site. While that comes, I will be posting here links to papers and presentations (only about programming) made public by their authors.

If you are interested you can syndicate yourself to this post.

Microsoft XNA Build Preview

I didn’t think to say anything about this when it was announced in the GDC2006. With Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (XNA is based on this) nearly exiting beta stage (final product was released last week) I didn’t think Microsoft would release anything interesting regarding to XNA (apart from some marketing stuff like this and this). And I was wrong… tonight I have been playing with the XBA Build Preview (I have installed it in a Virtual Machine to avoid any problems. Anyway the integration with previous installation of Visual Studio 2005 doesn’t work in this version).

XNA Build is the first tool released from the XNA Platform. I though that it was only a mere pack of tasks to msbuild. But I must say that it is a lot more. It really rocks! Basically XNA Build offers you a data compiler based on msbuild but with a great GUI based on boxes and visual dependencies so that you can visually design your data pipeline. Makefiles to build data are really going to die with tools like this.

if you have time, have a look at the presentations.

MadriSX & Retro

I assisted a few days ago to MadriSX & Retro retro party. I didn’t know that this sort of events were being celebrated in Madrid. Even more, I didn’t know this events were being cellebrated! It is incredible there is a 8bits scene alive when we are beginning the 64bits one.

Click the photos to get a closer look. You have more in the official site (it is in Spanish).

UnitTest++

I read today in Games from Within that a new unit test framework have been released: UnitTest++, an improved version of CppUnitLite. I’ve been using unit tests for a long time, mostly as a regression error tester and to report bugs in the database. Under the architecture I work, a framework for unit test is not needed. I have all the things I need to create them robustly. Anyway UnitTest may be useful in lots of sceneries.

Things that I would add to this framework that are working sucessfully in my framework:

• Stacktrace in all the error, exceptions and assertions.
• Create an OS exception handler to catch the exceptions generated by the OS (software and hardware) and decorate then with useful information (cpu registers, memory addresses, stacktraces…). For doing this, evil catch(…) would have to be removed from the code.
• Install a memory hook to detect leaks and memory usage in each test.
• Report execution times for each test. Sometimes, passing the test is not enough. With this information you can view the evolution of your code.
• Generate reports in xml including all the information described so that they can be easily integrated in the report of your daily (or incremental) build.

All this can be added in future revisions, the v1.0 is useful enough to give it a try.

The Free Lunch Is Over

The next challenge for programmers is already here: Concurrent Programming. Forget those days where you could double the performance of your programs buying a faster processor. The Free Lunch is Over, is a great article by Herb Sutter describing why concurrency in the next challenge to beat.

With Dual Cores coming to PC, Xbox360 three cores already out and PS3 (and its cell processors) coming this year, concurrent programming is an unavoidable problem for most programmers.

Until compilers are able to automatically parallelize our code, we have OpenMP, a specification (with implementation available in Visual Studio 2005, and Gcc) that can be used to classify sections of code as parallelizable.

By the way, an interesting article by IBM on compilers and concurrency with the Cell technology is cited in Jare’s Blog.

Linux in NintendoDS

I bought a SuperCard for my NintendoDS. I will be playing with the free SDK for the next weeks. Investigating the DS Scene I discovered DSLinux: a linux distribution for Nintento DS. You can’t do great things at the moment (I have been unable to mount the SD card nor connect to my router using then WiFi connection) but the project is friki enough to be commented.

StanHull

John Ratcliff have published a library to build convex hulls (the core implementation have been coded by Stan Melax). It is much better than QHull and really well packaged (1 cpp, 1 h) to be included in your toolbox of things-to-be-needed in the future.

Description from John, in the GDAlgorithms-List:

• Designed to be fast and robust. Rarely if ever fails.
• Allows a user to specify a maximum number of vertices to consider. Eliminates slivers and other problem area.
• Designed to produce hulls optimal for collision detection purposes, not necessarily for general computational geometry solutions.
• Supports ‘skin width’. This is a powerful feature that allows the hull to be extruded so that it has a user specified ‘thickness’ around the hull. This helps with physics engines which use penalty methods for penetration. It can be done on a per-shape basis, avoiding global settings for error tolerances.

The license of this code is free. Thanks to John and Stam.

If you don’t know, convex hulls are used in one of the most optimal algorithms for real time collision detection: GJK and derivates.