Manuel’s Coding Blog

…coding, development and everything else
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Compiz-like wobbling windows in AS3

This code was intended to be released back in October last year, but i never managed to do it since it needed some refactoring, some changes and had to be quite decent to present: then in November i got the chance to work with some very talented guys over at Jooce, in Paris, so i never got back to write something about it.
Btw, if you never tried Jooce then give it a try, it really deserves it!
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Apple and the iPhone Developer Program

The iPhone it’s quite a nice device to play games on: if it weren’t for the horror with which software developers willing to support the iPhone platform are welcomed: it’s cool, it’s great, it’s the “iPhone Developer Program“!

Hoorah. Hoorah.

Basically, it’s a brutally stupid, slogan-centric three-points-nothing-more way to express the act of developing software: “1. Develop, 2. Test, 3. Distribute“.

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Hello…2008?!

I know that’s a whole year without posting anything but since i taken the previous version down i never got the time to setup it on another host and always missed the chance to get some time for me..

In fact, the past year has been really busy: work and daily life take so much that sometimes you have to fight with yourself to squeeze out every possible free minute to do your own things, so one whole year has gone, but this doesn’t mean i don’t have something to write about, even better, i struggled to post about it from September, and i really mean September 2007, but better late than never!

But what did i do in all this time without even posting a blank post in 300 days? Well, in fact, we are not dead for sure, i’m working really hard on the cross-platform framework of some posts ago and we hope to be able to work full-time on the game idea we had in the past and, best of all, on the iPhone!

Fixed point math in pure CPP

NOTE
This post has been previously published on 2007/Oct/31: due to my move to another server i’m now in the process to manually recover the comments for this article.
Fixed!

Some time ago i was asked to publish my implementation of fixed-point math, mainly regarding embedded architectures where IEEE floating point computations have really bad performances. What i want to give you here is a pure-c++, template-based implementation of a fixed-point datatype: this thing is more of a test in order to see how much an object-oriented implementation can perform, being in contrast to a more traditional implementation. As expected, operator overloading and temporary object creation overhead are the main issues with a full-oo implementation as this one, anyway, its a damn nice way to exercise yourself in writing c++ policy-based templated code ;)

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An AS3 profiler

NOTE
This post has been previously published on 2007/Oct/17: due to my move to another server i’m now in the process to manually recover the comments for this article.
Fixed!

I’m currently working on an early-stage, more of a proof-of-concept thing, but i needed to know more about the code performances: googling for an ActionScript profiler just showed up ASProf, an AS2 profiler. So i decided to port to AS3 the C++ profiler i wrote for Aqua, the cross-platform framework i was working on until April: the original C++ implementation has been developed after being inspired by an article of Steve Rabin in the Game Programming Gems 1 book, that’s a nice one to have on the shelf together with some other great books of which i could post something about them later.
It is always wise to remember that if you are serious about code profiling, you’ll be better to search for some professional tools: in the C++ arena my choice would be this one, but if you plan to have lunch and dinner for the next couple of months give Eletric’s one a try, it really deserves a look.
Unfortunately for the AS3 world, i just haven’t found anything really usable for it up to now, so i just thought to release it under a zlib/png license and some hints on how it works here.


ProfilerConfig.Width = stage.stageWidth;
ProfilerConfig.ShowMinMax = true;
prof = new Profiler( 32 );
addChild( prof );

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