Dirty Coding Tricks

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If you haven’t read it already on Game Developer Magazine, don’t miss the Dirty Coding Tricks feature article on Gamasutra. I contributed two “dirty tricks” used in some of my past projects.

Identity Crisis deals with the horrors of a CRC clash on a resource right before submitting the gold master. And The Programming Antihero shows a fairly common trick in the games industry to get that extra memory after the artists and designers swear up and down that they can’t cut any more content.

Nothing like a good dose of reality to make everybody feel better about their own code :-)

  • mos

    I noticed Ken Demarest was one of the first commenters. One of his dirty tricks was to sprinkle sleeps throughout the code. When it came time to fix up the framerate, reducing or eliminating those sleeps always seemed to do the trick (and make Ken the hero, too!).

    I always thought it was a little “shady”, not “dirty”. Or maybe “dirty” is the right word, just not the same connotation.

  • http://www.gamesfromwithin.com Noel

    Yeah, that’s pretty great too. I’ve never seen the sleep trick, but I’ve heard of people doing float fps = GetFPS() – 5.0f; and just “fixing” the counter when it looked like it was impossible to get any more performance back. LOL!

  • Michael

    I definitely “like” the static char buffer trick. Seems like “reserving” 2 megs might be a good idea… Hmmmm…

  • http://www.gamesfromwithin.com Noel

    Better do it right now, early in the project, before anyone notices! :-)

  • RV

    I definitely “like” the static char buffer trick. Seems like “reserving” 2 megs might be a good idea… Hmmmm…