So, Gamasutra is on Twitter too. You may recognize them, or at least you should if you have any business as a video game developer/designer. Gamasutra is one of the most popular game-oriented websites with full-featured articles and commentaries on the state of the industry, game reviews, yadda yadda yadda. So now you can check out not only the website, but also the Twitter feed. Oops, sorry if that last link didn't work; I suppose I should have linked it the proper way: @Gamasutra!
Enough hype, this post is mostly me checking in for a quick progress update. I blasted through reading about lighting, textures, blending, and stenciling in my Direct3D book and then found out the exercises required a fair deal of re-reading. Lesson learned, I have to work through chapter exercises before moving on to more difficult chapters! The same applies to the Game Design Concepts course I'm taking -- it's much easier to keep up with the readings than work through the exercises, some of which I have to skip. FYI, you can follow discussion for the course on Twitter too; just search for #GDCU!
The topic of my next post will be the power of sine waves. Yep, I'm talking about those tricky oscillating waves you learned about way back in high school. I've found some interesting applications and want to show off some of the cool stuff you can do with them. And now that I'm finally understanding the basics of HLSL (High Level Shader Language) shaders, the part that tripped me up big time in the last book I read, you can expect some posts on that stuff too.
Just curious, when was the last time you used something from high school you never thought you would need again? What's the trickiest math you've used in game development, and does calculus ever figure into the equation (pun... fully... intended!)?
It's not the end result, but rather the journey that matters most!
Learning the Art of Game Programming
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
The Problem with the Mythical Black Box
In programming, we occasionally make use of something known as a "black box." This Mythical Black Box is any library or chunk of code written by someone else that allows us to abstract a problem so we don't have to understand the details of solving it. For example, if we pass the values 3 and 4 to a "calculator black box", which might be a class library written by another developer, we would expect it to return the value 12 for multiplication. We don't care how it works internally, whether it computes 3+3+3+3 or 4+4+4; all we care is that it returns the correct value. A black box diagram for an encryption algorithm might look something like the following.
Password => { Encryption Black Box } => Encrypted Password
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has recently expressed seemingly contrasting views on this topic, both touting and refuting the benefits of abstraction. And for good reason, because it can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on whose library you choose. For one thing, you should never introduce code into your project if you aren't 100% certain it will fulfill its promise. Many developers (myself included) prefer the "roll your own" method for most tasks simply because you know you can trust your own code (not that it will be error-free, just that it won't be malicious). But sometimes it makes sense to use a well-tested library from another developer, such as the ever-popular JQuery library for Javascript development. In such cases I suggest ensuring you trust the developer (e.g. they're well known, such as Microsoft, and would be ridiculed if the library failed) or that you have full access to the source code. Many open source projects are reviewed by large numbers of people such that bugs are caught and fixed quickly.
Unfortunately, even if you take my suggestions your black box may someday fail. The whole reason I bring this up is that I faced this exact problem with my SkyCop demo. I developed it using the Common Files Framework presented in Engel's Beginning Direct3D Game Programming, 2nd Edition and provided in a specific version of the Microsoft DirectX SDK. When I ugraded to the most recent build of the SDK, my demo suddently stopped working and I started getting reports of others not being able to run it either. I ran into numerous problems trying to get it to work with the latest DirectX SDK and believe the Common Files Framework was removed altogether in the latest version. Having relied too heavily on that framework, I wasn't sure how to resolve the compilation errors and feared I would have to scrap the project altogether.
Fortunately, in his Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach, Frank Luna fully describes a working game framework instead of glossing over it and providing another black box. I was able to essentially rip out the core of my SkyCop demo, converting it to use the new framework, and am pleased to have an updated demo below that should work on any DirectX 9 (or newer) version, but let me know if you still have any trouble running it.
SkyCop v1.1 Demo Download
Black boxes can be a good thing when they're well-written by a trusted developer, but it's also a good idea to review the code (if possible) and at least have a basic understanding of how it works. In my case, as a learning newbie, I was happy to avoid the initial complexity and that later bit me from behind. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that black boxes come in many shapes and sizes. My black box was a game framework but the concept could also apply to a game engine, a single portion (Renderer, Physics, Sound, etc.) of a game engine, or some other game components I'm not even aware of yet.
Do you know what's going on under the hood of your game framework/engine? What black boxes are you relying on to develop your games?
Password => { Encryption Black Box } => Encrypted Password
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has recently expressed seemingly contrasting views on this topic, both touting and refuting the benefits of abstraction. And for good reason, because it can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on whose library you choose. For one thing, you should never introduce code into your project if you aren't 100% certain it will fulfill its promise. Many developers (myself included) prefer the "roll your own" method for most tasks simply because you know you can trust your own code (not that it will be error-free, just that it won't be malicious). But sometimes it makes sense to use a well-tested library from another developer, such as the ever-popular JQuery library for Javascript development. In such cases I suggest ensuring you trust the developer (e.g. they're well known, such as Microsoft, and would be ridiculed if the library failed) or that you have full access to the source code. Many open source projects are reviewed by large numbers of people such that bugs are caught and fixed quickly.
Unfortunately, even if you take my suggestions your black box may someday fail. The whole reason I bring this up is that I faced this exact problem with my SkyCop demo. I developed it using the Common Files Framework presented in Engel's Beginning Direct3D Game Programming, 2nd Edition and provided in a specific version of the Microsoft DirectX SDK. When I ugraded to the most recent build of the SDK, my demo suddently stopped working and I started getting reports of others not being able to run it either. I ran into numerous problems trying to get it to work with the latest DirectX SDK and believe the Common Files Framework was removed altogether in the latest version. Having relied too heavily on that framework, I wasn't sure how to resolve the compilation errors and feared I would have to scrap the project altogether.
Fortunately, in his Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach, Frank Luna fully describes a working game framework instead of glossing over it and providing another black box. I was able to essentially rip out the core of my SkyCop demo, converting it to use the new framework, and am pleased to have an updated demo below that should work on any DirectX 9 (or newer) version, but let me know if you still have any trouble running it.
SkyCop v1.1 Demo Download
Black boxes can be a good thing when they're well-written by a trusted developer, but it's also a good idea to review the code (if possible) and at least have a basic understanding of how it works. In my case, as a learning newbie, I was happy to avoid the initial complexity and that later bit me from behind. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that black boxes come in many shapes and sizes. My black box was a game framework but the concept could also apply to a game engine, a single portion (Renderer, Physics, Sound, etc.) of a game engine, or some other game components I'm not even aware of yet.
Do you know what's going on under the hood of your game framework/engine? What black boxes are you relying on to develop your games?
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