Patrick Hughes

1,252 reputation

139

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	age	50
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Coming off a time of experimental game designs, Java and PCG I'm now looking for work in Orange County, CA either in or out of the games business, please feel free to contact me if you have any referrals.

I'm a long time game programmer having worked on many shipped titles, a few AAA releases and one MMO so far. I'm a generalist and my credo has always been that if something needs doing to ship, I'll step up and learn what I need to to get it done.

-Patrick

	1,252 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	1 year, 11 months
139 badges		location			seen	18 mins ago

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May 13	comment	Prevent anomalies caused by signal propagation time The server is its own, self consistent universe. Clients request action, and for the sake of appearances pretend that action has started. Clients do not simulate the reaction and instead wait for the server to tell them what happened. The reason you cannot solve this in most hardware is that there is no central nexus (ie. the server) where transactions happen.
Apr 28	comment	3D Viewer for .Net Helix is mostly just a bunch of handy 3D widgets for building the GUI and a couple model loaders. For your RGBZ data you need to pre-process that with custom code to make it displayable into one of A) a 3d mesh with the RGB applied as a texture or B) a 3d height map with RGB texture, which would be more efficient, or C) a voxel representation. I'd go with B as being easiest to build from your data. Maybe someone else knows a package that supports your data natively, I unfortunately only know the traditional methods.
Apr 27	comment	3D Viewer for .Net Side note: if you don't have much experience with 3D and/or editors then maybe you can look at Unity3D, but that's more of a full "game and visualization" framework that runs on its own and it sounds like you need a component to fit into an existing application so it would not be a great choice if that were the case.
Apr 27	comment	3D Viewer for .Net Model viewing is one thing, adding markers on the fly turns this project into a mini 3D editor for which I think Helix is absolutely the way to go for you. SharpDX/SharpGL are super thin API wrappers over pure rendering libraries that have nothing to do with input & manipulation, content creation, or architecture.
Apr 24	comment	What's a good license for a specification? Confusion reigns. I may be wrong but: A license is a one-way granting of specific rights from the owner to a user, the licensee. A contract is a license with reciprocal rights and responsibilities and an entirely different beast.
Apr 24	comment	What's a good license for a specification? Copyright covers a specific document describing the Javascript spec, but it cannot cover the idea of the spec itself. Take a look at what Google did with their "java-alike" which was to use the specification and API but not the trademarked Java name; they did this, and won a court ruling recently, because API cannot be copyrighted... This is tricksy legal stuff and you'd do well to not ask random people on the intertubes for opinions. As a side note, lawyers specifically will not answer so you're guaranteed amateur information.
Apr 22	comment	How do I Integrate a Former Team Member into the Current Team Actively manage the existing team's (possible) concerns about why this guy was brought back in after abandoning the company and put in a managagement slot. Why were none of them put in that slot, etc... Since he is now a permanent employee again, what happens to their upward mobility, will you always hire from outside instead of raising from within, is this just an example of the "good old buddy" network taking care of their own, all sorts of issues that will probably be unspoken.
Apr 15	comment	How useful is “rubber duck debugging”? Excellent point - not just programmers but copywriters, editors, and I can name a few producers who have refined this to an art form =)
Apr 6	comment	how to stay efficient when a build is almost always broken +9000 for "Stop breaking the build." Seriously. The whole, entire point of continuous integration is to stop breaking the build and, if broken, fix it as fast and as close to the break as possible.
Apr 6	comment	Choosing between Qt/C++ and .NET/C# Qt works fine on mobile platforms, does it not?
Aug 11	comment	Does custom created code for a client imply copyright ownership? I deleted my answer and went with yours as being the most common case to avoid confusion. Copyright ownership won't stop James from modifying the existing website because that's under licensing and has nothing to do with copyright.
Aug 11	comment	Does custom created code for a client imply copyright ownership? Please rephrase your question, which implies that this is about contracts while the meat of your text concerns only copyright ownership. If you're interested in contracts implied verbally or by custom that's another whole ball of wax.
Aug 6	comment	What is the Mars Curiosity Rover's software built in? JPL C language coding standards, specifically for embedded environments instead of "ground software" as they call it. lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf
Jun 17	comment	What is the term for a really BIG source code commit? +1 for the question because I love every answer so far, and have suffered through having committed at least one of the sins at least once in my career and want others to not do that =)
Jun 12	comment	How can I speed up the process of typing up specification during a meeting with developers? Shorthand, scribbles, etc... all faster than typing for note taking. For me, your mileage may vary =) The real question is why isn't the Lead creating this document since he's got the design worked out and is basically just dictating it verbatim to a 1950's secretary?
Jun 12	comment	How can I speed up the process of typing up specification during a meeting with developers? Type? I'm far faster at capturing the intent and specifics on a notepad and then typing it all up later, that may be an option to speed up the process for you.
Jun 12	comment	Is making my own copyright licence safe? It's dangerous to go alone. Take this: stackoverflow.com/questions/713045/…
May 21	comment	Excellent knowledge of C++ Having written both system drivers and game engines I have to side with @Pubby here =)
May 20	comment	Logging asynchronously - how should it be done? Have you profiled the runtime(s) to know that logging has a measurable effect on performance? Computers are just too complex to just think that something might be slow, measure twice and cut once is good advice in any profession =)
May 15	comment	Is it true that first versions of C compilers ran for dozens of minutes and required swapping floppy disks between stages? I've seen modern day C++ projects that a full clean and rebuild takes dozens of minutes, and instead of disc swaps it's doing virtual memory pages automatically via the OS. Why does everyone keep saying computers are so advanced these days? =)