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[oahda]

So I feel like there's stuff to discuss from time to time that neither fits in the happy nor the grumpy programmer room.

I could swear there used to be a neutral programmer room, but I can't find it, so creating a new thread.

If anybody does know of and can find any old thread for this purpose, please do bump that up instead and I'll ask to have this removed again in that case.

Don't have anything on my mind just now tho, but felt like creating this in anticipation of the next time something comes up, and in the meantime perhaps someone else has something interesting to vent!

[_glitch]

The neutral programmer room is here.
It would be useless to bump it.

[ProgramGamer]

Am currently participating in the global game jam at my college. I've made a game about cats that act as nodes for transmitting information, and that information is musical notes. The cats sing the notes to other cats that themselves sing the notes, forming chains and waves of music.

I am tired beyond the point where coffee helps, but I need to keep going in order to finish this thing for tomorrow! Almost done with most core features!

[AaronB]

Speaking of tiredness - it really is productive to take even a short break.

Was working on importing some library source and for the life of me I could not get it to compile out the last few errors - it was driving me nuts. Decided to go out and water the garden, came back in and I immediately noticed that I had two tabs with the same file name in the IDE?  I somehow started editing from the directory in which I unpacked the library archive, instead of the one in the project folder   Everything became clear after that.

[JWki]

I feel this thread should not die so quickly just because we decide to abuse the other threads for discussion, so here's something that's relevant to programmers maybe:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/292382/Devs_can_now_mess_around_with_Valves_free_beta_Steam_Audio_SDK.php

Valve released a solution for advanced audio, featuring spatial simulation propagation and more things.
Unity plugin and C API are already available, UE4 integration yet to come.
I feel this might be beneficial mostly to someone working on a 3D or even VR game.

[oahda]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5508110/why-is-this-program-erroneously-rejected-by-three-c-compilers

[AaronB]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5508110/why-is-this-program-erroneously-rejected-by-three-c-compilers

I'm looking forward to the day when you can input a screenshot of your game and have the compiler produce fully functional source code.

[oahda]

I do want to see if the suggestion to run the image through that Python thing actually works tho!

[ProgramGamer]

helloworld.png

It's like a bad joke or something. "Hello, I've tried compiling this image file into machine code with three different compilers, and none of them work!!! I'm shook!!!!!"

[oahda]

I like the one where pixels with ASCII codes or whatever are being drawn manually into an image which is then opened in a text editor to reveal source code.

[ProgramGamer]

I'd seen that one before, yeah. It's actually pretty impressive that someone is that familiar with file formats to be able to do this.

[oahda]

I just assumed they were looking at a cheat sheet off screen / outside of screen recording bounds. c;

[ProgramGamer]

Still, you have to understand how the two file formats map out to each other to not end up with garbage lol

[Oats]

Today I learnt that Perlin noise is overkill in 3d, blurry white noise gives nicer, more varied results, is computationally cheaper and is still smmoooooth®

[JWki]

TIL Visual Studio 2017's CMake actually works really well. A bit late now that all my projects run on premake but hey it's still nice.

[ferreiradaselva]

TIL Visual Studio 2017's CMake actually works really well. A bit late now that all my projects run on premake but hey it's still nice.

The only reason I wanted to learn CMake was to compile my projects on Windows, but I totally gave up once I learned I can use MinGW on Linux and compile for Windows. Only using Make, now.

[oahda]

http://pstreams.sourceforge.net/

I'll be using a bunch of shell scripts to get my editor to compile stuff, so this seems neat.

[BorisTheBrave]

Looks neat, but it passes stuff to the system shell which is (1) not that portable (2) super dangerous (see this warning). I guess it's ok for an editor, but no way would I include that library in a game.

[oahda]

Yeah, it's not going into the game.

I mean, I could perhaps find a way to do it from C++ instead of bash and batch scripts. It just seems clunky when there are so many useful utils in the shell. But I'd be happy to listen to other suggestions. Running other programs from C++ generally does seem to boil down to system() or popen() as far as I can see, tho... Unless there are system-specific utilities for each OS or something.

[JWki]

Yeah, it's not going into the game.

I mean, I could perhaps find a way to do it from C++ instead of bash and batch scripts. It just seems clunky when there are so many useful utils in the shell. But I'd be happy to listen to other suggestions. Running other programs from C++ generally does seem to boil down to system() or popen() as far as I can see, tho... Unless there are system-specific utilities for each OS or something.

Yeah system() isn't really what you want most of the time because you usually want the application to run in an actual process in parallel.
On windows there's CreateProcess() while on linux, the "standard solution" seems to be a combination of fork() and exec() which sounds pretty fishy to me.