2010-08-10

Assembly 2010


The Assembly 2010 summer event was held last weekend. Once again I did something to contribute in the various competitions held at the event. At right you can see thumbnail from Afrika by Rustbloom & XZM. It’s our try at making a 4 KB intro with semi-abstract/stylized 2D vector graphics and bit of a story. Yes, the executable is only 4089 bytes long (0.004 megabytes). Check it out from Youtube, or download the original executable version (only for Windows). The intro ended up at 5th place of 16 entries, which isn’t bad at all.


Some time before the event I also spent a moment to wade through Box2D physics engine documentation, and made a little prototype game called Luomuheinäseipääntapinheitto (a.k.a. Organic hay pole peg throwing), entering it also to the gamedev contest (placed 8/19). Background music is Test Drive by Zapac. Check out a video from Youtube, or download and try it (only for Windows).

Here’s links (mostly Youtube) to some other highlights from the event: XMunkki’s gamedev entry Raya Racer for N900, Evoflash’s winner Flash demo from wild compo, Archee’s 4k intro with physics and AI, winner 4k, Pier 64k from Hedelmae, Tricky truck – Archee’s winner entry from gamedev, 64k intro compo 1st and 2nd, Fairlight’s demo (2nd in compo), and finally ASD’s winning demo.

Games, Visuals — Comments Off on Assembly 2010

2010-07-04

Various ways to backup

Over the years I have been using several kinds of solutions to backup stuff. Here’s a description of the ones I can remember. Many of them focus on being low-cost, simple and straightforward, but are far from a perfect solution in many other ways.

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Code, Misc. — 2 comments »

2010-06-29

Unwrapping Values – nearest next angle from a previous angle

So, assuming you have angles previousAngle and nextAngle, and you want to transition from the first to the second smoothly. If it’s like from 358 to 2, a simple linear interpolation will awfully go through almost a full circle down from 358 to 2, when a simple four degree transition forward would have been enough, i.e. you should have been going to 362 degrees instead. So, how to figure out what’s the shortest transition?

I remember hitting against this problem numerous times, always remembering that I have solved it previously but always seem unable to find the previous solution. And I still can’t just write it out by heart.

Once again I had to solve this, so this time I tried to Google for it (“angle wrap delta”), and found out that somebody named Jason S had posted a nice generalization to a related question in Stackoverflow.com.

For your convenience, I’m posting a modified C version of the code here.
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Code — 1 comment »

2010-06-27

Buggy software is cheap enough

If software would be made bug-free, that would force prices to be so high that nobody could buy them. How so?

Well, let’s think about what it means to build bug-free software. There actually exists some software, which is built with goal of “zero-defects”. By that, I’m not referring to the constant hype from latest agile method cult who may have some extravagant claims. I mean software where it’s of utmost importance to really have no bugs, no matter the costs. A case where a single bug may mean loss of lives or failure of the whole project. This kind of software is built for space missions, nuclear facilities, and so on. And such a policy on quality is inherently very very expensive.

Imagine if Windows, for example, would have been built with such policy. It’s a really complex and huge piece of software compared to ones normally built with zero-defect policy. But, given the option, would you pay $19,900 of your operating system, if it would never crash? It’s quite a no-brainer that “everybody” would rather pick the same software for $199 and just put up with the few problems they encounter. (The price difference was picked by Stetson-Harrison method. It’s a guess to illustrate the point. The difference could be actually lot worse for niche market software which isn’t aimed for mass market.)

Misc. — Comments Off on Buggy software is cheap enough

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