Back to The Future (Part 1)

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. â€“ (attributed) Albert Einstein

How would you like to be able to reproduce every crash report that QA adds to the bug database quickly and reliably? How useful would it be to be able to put a breakpoint the frame before a crash bug happens?

You can do all that and more if your game is deterministic and you feed it the same inputs as an earlier run. Sounds easy? It is, if you implement it early on and you keep it that way during development. If you choose not to make your game deterministic, your team will go insane by Einsteinâ€™s definition, and maybe by a few other definitions as well by the time the project ends. Continue reading →

The Measure Of Code

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how big our codebase is, how fast does it build, how many tests we have… Fear not, Gentle Reader, all your burning questions will be answered here. Continue reading →

What’s Your Pain Threshold?

Mine is two seconds.

Here at Power of Two Games, we write all our code with test-driven development. C++ tests use the fantastic UnitTest++ framework (no big surprise there 🙂 ) and we run all unit tests automatically as the last step of our build process. That means that every time we build anything, the tests for that library or program get executed. Every time. No exceptions. Continue reading →

Stupid C++ Tricks #2: Better Enums

So much for the new year’s resolution to write some sort of an update every week. That went out the window pretty quickly. Especially now that I’ve taken over the Inner Product column for Game Developer Magazine and that’s taking away some of my writing time (check out the May issue for my first column!).

It turns out that Charles’ old article Stupid C++ Tricks: Adventures in Assert is one of our most viewed entries, even after all this time. So I figured I’d follow it up with a really, really simple C++ trick. It’s almost trivial, really, but I’ve totally fallen in love with it. At first, when Charles introduced me to it, I was kind of lukewarm. But now I’m finding myself going through refactoring rampages in the code changing things to be this way. Intrigued? Read on. Continue reading →

LeChimp’s Secret Weapon: Lint

LeChimp has been rocking my world lately. I’ve been checking in code that passes all the unit tests, confident that everything was fine, just to find out the functional test fails loudly and obnoxiously [1]. The other day it even managed to put the game in an infinite loop (yes, my fault). It might sound annoying, but I love it how LeChimp keeps us honest and makes subtle problems immediately obvious.

A couple of months ago something unusual happened: The functional test failed but I wasn’t able to reproduce the problem right away. The failure was not a crash, but an object in the world ending up in a different state than expected. That’s always tougher to track down. To make things even more fun, was object was affected changed depending on whether the game was run from the command line or the debugger. Oh, and did I mention it only happened in release mode? I’ve got a baaad feeling about this! Continue reading →