Saturday, November 26, 2011

On "Book Code"

Ok,
So you buy that nifty new book on Game Programming. One would assume the people writing the chapters would know what they are doing, or at least have used the code in an actual game.  Nope.

Always understand what the code does, and be ready for problems arising from the difference between your goal, to write a working commercial game, and the writer's goal, to write a chapter in a book.

I have run into this in two places recently.  One is the network library MTUDP in

Advanced 3D game programming with DirectX 10.0 and the other has been bullet physics. 

MTUDP is a good idea but not done and tested well. (If you want my rewrite, email me) and bullet physics is a university project to try new ideas in physics.  In my case I want to create a open ended infinite zombie game with on-the-fly AI generation of all game content.

There is an echo here of operating system issues.  Was the OS written to make money for a huge corporation, or by hobbyists to make a system they want to work in and use, or as a fashion statement for elite computer users? (Ok, you guess which three OSs to which I am referring.0

Oh, well, end of rant. And end of three weeks of wasted time trying to debug and make a fundamentally broken library work.

TF

1 comment:

Leott87 said...

Hi there, I was wondering if I could receive your version of the MTUDP rewrite? I am looking to learn more about MTUDP and unfortunately found the bugs in the original code by Peter Walsh. I was also wondering if you had an example of implementing the code within a project also? Many thanks.