Nicol Bolas

1,978 reputation

1719

bio	website	arcsynthesis.org/gltut
	location	Los Angeles, CA
	age	36
visits	member for	1 year, 11 months
	seen	May 13 at 17:29
stats	profile views	863

I am a game developer with a fairly broad knowledgebase in the fields of animation and graphics, with a touch of AI.

Projects:

A series of tutorials/eBook on graphics programming
The Unofficial OpenGL Software Development Kit
The OpenGL Loader Generator, a much better alternative to GLEW

	1,978 reputation	bio	website	arcsynthesis.org/gltut	visits	member for	1 year, 11 months
1719 badges		location	Los Angeles, CA		seen	May 13 at 17:29

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Jul 10	comment	Options other than C for embedded projects? I hate the preprocessor @michael: the preprocessor does do what it is supposed to do. It builds token lists for the C tokenizer. That's what it is for. Your problem is that it doesn't do things the way you think they should be done, based on a standard you have created yourself. Consider "import." You can't do that with a preprocessor; you need language-level support to make anything like that work in any way different from `include`. `import` is not a part of the preprocessor; it's a part of the compiler.
Jul 9	comment	Options other than C for embedded projects? I hate the preprocessor Michael, you're not going to get a lot of sympathy among programmers when you say that C isn't "modern enough." It's not supposed to be modern. C is what it is; you can either accept it for what it is or reject it. And don't think that eLua is going to save you; mobile platforms have rather low power CPUs, and even Lua's performance isn't going to be enough for anything serious with JIT compilation. Of course, there's LuaJIT, which compiles for ARM platforms...
Jul 8	comment	How to start with 2d or 3d modeling? @Steve314: It's better nowadays in the 2.5x series, but it still has idiosyncrasies and still takes some getting used to. Just not as much as before. You can actually use the interface somewhat well without touching the keyboard now.
Jul 3	comment	Why do game developers prefer Windows? @DMan: Cross-platform compatibility is pretty much the only real strength OpenGL has over D3D; in most other repsects, they're close enough to not matter much. Also, most of OpenGL's problems are in the past; the problem is that the past is often why people use something in the present. And that's what my article was showing: how screwups in the past influenced people to pick D3D.
Jul 2	comment	Does over-reliance on tools imply that you are lazy? @Skeith: Does a database user need to care about how to implement a database? Of course not; the database user uses it. They may need to know some of the details, so that they can optimize their databases, but they shouldn't have to be able to implement it in order to be worthy of using it. Also, a programmer may not know what the word "algorithm" means, but that doesn't mean they don't write them. I was developing and implementing algorithms long before I ever heard the term.
Jul 2	comment	Mercurial branch or rebase? +1: I have seen far too many online resources promoting the "clone to branch" methadology. Mercurial has excellent support for in-repo branches; it's a shame that so many choose not to use it.
Jul 2	awarded	Commentator
Jul 1	answered	Why does DirectX use a left-handed coordinate system?
Jun 30	comment	Why do game developers prefer Windows? @F.Aquino: My point was that you're misassigning blame. The API used to render has nothing to do with aiming precision. It is the engine code that allows this. For whatever reason, Quake1's engine allowed you to do this, while other engines don't. If game developers wanted to allow players to "camp a pixel" (whatever that means), they would code it into their current engines.
Jun 30	comment	Why do game developers prefer Windows? @wrang-wrang: Thanks for the correction.
Jun 30	revised	Why do game developers prefer Windows? Correction, as noted by comment.
Jun 30	comment	OpenGL CPU vs. GPU It's because geometry shaders have terrible tessellation performance. You should never use them to tessellate anything; at least, not on hardware that doesn't also have tessellation shaders. Hardware with tessellation shaders is designed to magnify geometry, so it has memory buffers and such that make this process smooth. Hardware before then does not have these features, so while a geometry shader theoretically can do a 1:400 vertex magnification, you never should.
Jun 29	revised	Why do game developers prefer Windows? Pointing out that Microsoft may have been sabotaging the ARB.
Jun 29	comment	Why do game developers prefer Windows? @Clinton: I mentioned that Microsoft was once on the ARB. But they didn't exactly "leave to work on DirectX"; they were part of the ARB until around the time OpenGL 2.0 came out. By then, D3D was approaching version 9. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if they were part of the reason why the ARB stayed away from shaders for so long. Though I think I'll add a paragraph explaining that speculation.
Jun 29	comment	Why do game developers prefer Windows? @greyfade: GL 4 doesn't appeal to developers anymore than GL 3 did. I stopped where I did because nothing really changed. Yes, GL 4 exposes D3D 11 features, but you could just use D3D 11 to get those. Nothing has changed that has helped or hurt OpenGL's market position. Think of GL 4 as the ARB treading water.
Jun 29	awarded	Great Answer
Jun 29	comment	Why do game developers prefer Windows? @F.Aquino: So you're willing to attribute this to the rendering system that FPS games use, rather than the engine itself? Even though CS is based on Half-Life 1, which is based on Quake? Sorry; not buying it. Granted, I don't buy the premise that new FPSs have no e-sport potential, even though there are plenty of e-sports tournaments centered around newer FPSs. They may not hold the same attraction that CS does to some players, but don't make the mistake of thinking that those players make up all of FPS e-sports.
Jun 29	awarded	Guru
Jun 29	comment	Why do game developers prefer Windows? @Kristofer: I don't know if you can call it "off the top of your head" for something that took an hour or so to compose, but I didn't have it written up somewhere.
Jun 29	awarded	Good Answer