Lesson to learn in the 25th anniversary of “Prince of Persia”

Prince of Persia is a fantasy platform game, originally developed by Jordan Mechner and released in 1989 for the Apple II, that represented a great leap forward in the quality of animation seen in video games. On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia.

Many gamers remember this amazing game, and maybe some of you played with it for many months. Continue reading “Lesson to learn in the 25th anniversary of “Prince of Persia””

Lessons to learn from Oculus development team when using the “Modern C++” approach.

In the previous post about Doom3, we discovered that it was developed using the “C with Classes” approach. John Carmack is the main developer and it was between 2000 and 2004, what explains why “Modern C++” approach was not adopted. And, even if “C with Classes” is not recommended, he made some good decisions to have clean code.

John Carmack is now the oculus VR CTO, Oculus VR is an American virtual reality technology company founded by Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe. Their first product, still in development, is the Oculus Rift, a head-mounted display for immersive virtual reality (VR). Continue reading “Lessons to learn from Oculus development team when using the “Modern C++” approach.”

Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works.

If you search on the web for the best C++ source code. The Doom3 source code is mentioned many times, with testimonials  like this one.

I spent a bit of time going through the Doom3 source code. It’s probably the cleanest and nicest looking code I’ve ever seen.

Doom 3 is a video game developed by id Software and published by Activision.The game was a  commercial success for id Software; with more than 3.5 million copies of the game were sold. Continue reading “Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works.”

The passion is an important ingredient to produce a code with good quality

Quality is not something that can be easily added later. It’s preferable to take care of it from the beginning. Many companies dedicated a big budget to purchase tools with many thousands of dollars, and called upon independent consultants to audit their code base and produce some reports. This is still a good initiative to improve the code quality.

However, after few years of the analysis of many open source projects developed with C/C++, Objective C and java we can confirm that most of them are well designed and implemented despite the fact that the open source contributors do not have resources like companies. Most of them work only at night or on holidays and they produce a very good code. Continue reading “The passion is an important ingredient to produce a code with good quality”

Which kinds of C++ projects will most benefit from the new standards?

After many years of the C++ standardization stagnation, the amazing story of modernizing it has just began. The standardization committee has now a mature process to deliver periodically new features and the known compilers are very reactive to implement them. Many new features are planned for C++17 and others will come in the next few years. Continue reading “Which kinds of C++ projects will most benefit from the new standards?”

XRay Unreal Engine 4.5 source code

The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealthMMORPGs, and other RPGs.

Its code is written in C++ and  it’s used by many game developers today. Its source code is available from GitHub and it’s free for students. Many amazing games were developed using this engine, it permits to produce very realistic rendering like this one. Continue reading “XRay Unreal Engine 4.5 source code”