Tout vient d’la cache

Quand Eric parlait de faire des mises à jour à la volée de la mémoire au fil de l'animation des sprites, je pensais spontanément à un système semblable à celui de Donkey Kong Country: chaque personnage se voit attribué un emplacement en VRAM et les mises à jours pour ce personnage-là viennent systématiquement à l'emplacement …

Tests passed, Guru still meditating.

It's a bit disappointing: I set up an environment to stress-test the code, make sure uninitialized memory has garbage content, etc, and everything runs fine. I use the same code in SchoolTest (rush) application on real hardware and it crash before starting to run the title screen. What else could I do but add the …

Je peux améliorer mon C++

Grande différence entre mon "nouveau" boulot (depuis Mars 2014) et mon ancien poste universitaire: ici, il y a des revues de code. Et mes collègues "Hergé et Jigé" ont un sacrément haut niveau en C++ comparé au mien. Alors autant profiter de mes deux semaines de "Super Papa Bros" pour essayer de remanier le code …

Usage: 15% ; Leakage: 12%

I guess you all know what a "memory leak" is. Well, you might not have a lot of gameplay updates in the following weeks: I just enabled a sort of report that measures how much of the state created when parsing the title screen of School Rush. 12%. I've got some code-cleanup to go through.Bon, …

The missing frame.

Why is my backtrace-recording code not properly recording backtrace ? And the true question is ... is it really not back-tracing correctly ?malloc < new() < __gnu_cxx::new_allocator < Vector_base < std::vector ... " is missing __gnu_cxx::new_allocator."malloc < new() < TestBasicScript() < main() is missing TestBasicScript.malloc < GameScript ctor < TestBasicScript is complete. good.malloc < operator …

Emunit-testing

I am stuck with bugs in the two approaches I planned to use to allow shop-for-bonus in-between levels. Kind of bugs that are difficult to track with regular debugging, and that may even crash the emulator or the debugger itself.So it's time for me to start doing more professional testing on my code base, dropping …

reverse emulator bug ?

Je connaissais le bug d'émulation. Vous savez, ce genre de bug qui ne se produit jamais quand vous testez sur émulateur et qui crashe lamentablement le programme dès qu'il tourne sur une vraie plate-forme (généralement parce qu'elle a de la vraie mémoire).Why? I can explain easily a bug that happens only on bare metal, but …

Automated OAMs management

Over the summer, I crafted plans for managing larger levels, that would use more than 128 hardware sprites (the OAMs in DS parlance) for all the monsters. Some of those plans use the notion of a "Gob Group", that could be used to spawn several objects at once, at level-specific locations by having them statically …

1 day left

I have quirks in moving inkjets and the pendat doesn't feel like progressing forward right now (nor left now, afaik). There's a more concerning issue, however: I will have to cut the number of monsters present in the level. With pendat reaching up to 6 or 7 "limbs", and each limb being an individual OAM, …

More slopes

J'ai envie d'avoir plus de souplesse dans les pentes que juste "45° dans quel sens?". Si ça n'apporte pas grand-chose au niveau du gameplay en tant que tel (un ennemi-marcheur en haut d'une pente garde un avantage stratégique même pour d'autres formes de pentes), ça permet de construire des niveaux plus "organiques", ce qui n'est …