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A texture of grass!

August 23, 2010 - 20:54 — jwatte
Here's a texture of a grassy field.
I made it by customizing a downloadable filter for the wonderful FilterForge application (which now comes in version 2!)
I hereby grant this texture into the public domain.
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Digging through older code

August 11, 2010 - 02:24 — jwatte

In my career, I've dug through a number of scene graph renderer internals. Almost always, they claim to be "hardware independent" by abstracting the hardware, and then they go ahead and expose functions like "bindSecondTexture()" and "setAlphaBlendFunc()" to objects, and have objects "render" themselves by calling those functions.

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MD5 hex digests in Erlang

June 10, 2010 - 08:41 — jwatte

In various web APIs, there is some confusion between the representation of a hash value.
There exists APIs where a password is validated as, say, MD5(challenge + MD5(salt + password)).
Let's leave aside the fact that MD5 is not a secure algorithm anymore (you can procedurally generate an input that generates any MD5 hash value you want in cheap-to-compute time).

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The XNA Offline and Online Highscores Component Version 2 (distributed leaderboards, sort-of)

May 30, 2010 - 12:20 — jwatte

XNA Game Studio makes it possible to write games for the Xbox without being a developer with good publisher contacts and lots of money to pay for marketing and Xbox development kits. This is great!

However, because the XNA Indie Games system is not fully controlled by Microsoft, certain features of Xbox Live! are not available, because they would be too easily abused. These features include online Leaderboards, and unlockable Achievements.

The XNA community has developed alternatives to those functions. Many XNA games contain "Awardments" that can be unlocked, and many more XNA games use the XNA Network Highscores component to implement distributed, peer-to-peer highscore sharing. The name for this is generally "Online Highscores" rather than "Leaderboards," because the latter name is reserved for use by Microsoft-certified titles that use the real Xbox Live! functionality.

This article introduces version 2 of the XNA Online highscores component, which is free for you to use in your own game under the terms of the MIT license.

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Structure of a user-hosted client/server network game

May 26, 2010 - 20:59 — jwatte

Recently, a question came up about how to structure a client/server networked game where users can host games that other users can join. I think I did a reasonably concise write-up of a common-sense approach that's been successful for many years, so I'm archiving it here for posterity:

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Android programming, layouts and activities

February 20, 2010 - 23:13 — jwatte

I've been doing some Android programming, trying to get a feel for what an Android app would look like when structured as a main screen, some set-up screens, and a main gameplay screen (which then wants to go back to the main screen). I've fought a bit with the built-in Android layout views. They seem to be missing some capabilities that would be really useful.

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main.cpp

July 22, 2009 - 19:59 — jwatte 

#include "etwork/etwork.h"
#include "etwork/buffer.h"
#include "etwork/errors.h"
#include "etwork/notify.h"
#include "etwork/marshal.h"
 
#include <assert.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string>
#include <math.h>
 
#if defined( NDEBUG )
#pragma warning( disable: 4101 )  //  unreferenced local variable
#endif
 
 
void TestEtworkCreate()
{
  EtworkSettings es;

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tester

July 22, 2009 - 19:58 — jwatte

A simple command-line program that exercises parts of the Etwork API and asserts if something fails. Think of it as an API acceptance test.

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sockimpl.h

July 22, 2009 - 19:57 — jwatte 

#if !defined( etwork_sockimpl_h )
#define etwork_sockimpl_h
 
#include "etwork/etwork.h"
#include "etwork/locker.h"
#include "etwork/buffer.h"
#include "etwork/timer.h"
#include "etwork/errors.h"
#include "etwork/notify.h"
 
#if defined( WIN32 )
#include <windows.h>
#endif
 
#include <stdio.h>  //  for _snprintf
#include <math.h>
 
#include <string>
#include <map>

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socketbase.cpp

July 22, 2009 - 19:42 — jwatte 

#include "sockimpl.h"
 
using namespace etwork;
using namespace etwork::impl;
 
 
SocketManager::SocketManager()
{
  listening_ = INVALID_SOCKET;
  maxNumSocks_ = FD_SETSIZE;
  numSocks_ = 0;
  maxSock_ = 0;
  allSet_ = (fd_set *)::operator new( sizeof(fd_set) );
  FD_ZERO( allSet_ );
  readSet_ = (fd_set *)::operator new( sizeof(fd_set) );
  FD_ZERO( readSet_ );

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