Articles

Articles are single-page pieces that give a whirlwind tour of a specific topic.

They're different from series, which go very in-depth, taking many detours.

🗓️ August 2015

*andfall

Welp, I did it again - I released an album: it's named *andfall, a play on the word "landfall", and I wrote it in one week-end, for @McFunkyPants' entry in the Ludum Dare 33 game jam.

It's my first solo album, the previous ones were collaborations with @bigsylvain and @geckojsc. It feels a bit weird to release an album alone - there's nobody to blame for the flaws, and nobody to praise for the good parts!

🗓️ January 2015

ooc generics and flawed designs

ooc is perhaps one of my proudest achievements, but at the same time it's one of the most annoying thorns in my side.

The main reason is that its design is flawed, and some things can't be easily fixed at this point. Now don't get me wrong: every design is flawed to some extent. Design, either when done by a lone coder, or by a committee, never comes out "perfect" — ignoring the fact there is no universal/objective measure of "perfectness".

🗓️ November 2014

S-exps in your browser

The front end of the pool

I've been interested in reactive JavaScript for a while. At memoways, we strive to build snappy user interfaces for clients who like to interact with their data with as little latency as possible.

In the past two years, I learned front-end development on-the-fly, as the needs of the clients required it. Two years ago, I was still using jQuery. Then, I discovered thanks to my colleague Nicolas. It was nice to have proper 'view' objects, and use jQuery's event system to have messages propagate throughout a hierarchy.

🗓️ September 2014

Happy stay with us day

I didn't really know what to do for "World Suicide Prevention Day 2014".

First off, I didn't know it existed at all. Like, c'mon, know your audience, if you have a party like that, I want in!

Second, it's a terrible name: I hereby propose "stay with us day" in place. Nevermind the "world" part because, hey, we're on the internet, the "suicide" part because, well, avoiding that is just the very start of a long uphill battle, and let's keep the "day" part because, honest, if we can attract people's attention for even a single day per year, it'll be nothing short of a miracle.

🗓️ August 2014

Cross-compilation notes

I'll keep updating this article as I go, just to put stuff in all the same place.

Platforms

Cross-compiling for Linux

I'm pretty sure it's possible to cross-compile for Linux on other OSes, seeing as everything is open-source, but I have never done it - and why would I want to? Linux is the friendliest to build on, so it's better to use it as a build environment.

🗓️ February 2014

On the subject of time

It's a fine Wednesday of February, and I'm sitting in my living room at four in the morning, typing these words. Just a few minutes ago, I poured myself a half glass of wine and smoked a cigarette, celebrating the end of "my first week", as a matter of saying. I'm done with paid work for the week, and I get a few days to enjoy doing what I'm really interested in these days: creating games.

Three gamedev surprises

Despite their peaceful appearance, game developers actually lead thrilling lives! Here are three things I learned (or re-learned) about yesterday that I'd like to share with you, in the form of assumptions that revealed false.

VSync is relatively straightforward. Right?

As an obsessive-compulsive, bipolar, perfectionist game dev, getting your game to run smoothly on all kinds of operating systems, graphics cards, and drivers combination is something of a holy grail. Many look for it, but let's be honest here, it never really turns out as expected.

Fast font packing for fun and profit

Being creative is hard work, let's go optimizing instead! My graphics engine dye was pretty naive about displaying text, and it was wasteful. Let's see how I made it all better with this one weird tip.

Disclaimer: Even after a few years I'm still very much an OpenGL newbie. Please don't hit me with crowbars.

Once upon a time, OpenGL was easy to use - and also falling out of relevancy as far as high-performance 3D graphics were concerned. But it wasn't all bad! You could basically pick up any library out there and integrate it with your existing GL project. Not that it's a good idea, but it usually just worked.