Tutorials and musings on game design, programming, art, and Amazon Lumberyard.
What Is A Thread Context And What Can I Do With It? A Thread Context is a global structure that stores data specific to the current thread, it can be referenced and modified without having to synchronise with other threads. What should go in the context is up to you and the needs of your … Continue reading Introducing A Thread Context
This is a very short and sweet blog on a neat few lines of PowerShell I have been using to help focus on what matters in the output The D.R.G. Initiative creates. $AbsoluteFilePath = "C:\SomeLogFileFromYourGame.log" if([System.IO.File]::Exists($AbsoluteFilePath)) { gc $AbsoluteFilePath -wait | where {($_ -match "Error") -or ($_ -match "Assert"))} | Tee-Object -file "C:\SomeOutputFile.customlog" } That's … Continue reading Using PowerShell to Parse Log Files
One of the first tools that we developed in-house was used to distribute test builds of DRG before release. We called it Beam, which naturally comes from the U.F.O. tractor beams which are used to move the build from the servers to the desktop. The tool was initially built in around two weeks over the … Continue reading The beauty of tools development – Pt 2/3 Beam
In this micro-blog, I'll showcase how we at Third Kind Games implemented better logging in our Lua scripts. In order to log something to TTY from Lua you'll typically do that following: Debug.Log("Output to TTY please!") Which is OK and will do what it says, however, in order to disable that particular piece of logging, … Continue reading Bark at the Moon: Better Lua Logging
A few years back I was heading up an in-house team of tools specialists at a major video game publisher. We created a huge range of applications, everything from behind the scenes automation to fully-blown level editors and content creation tools. You won't be surprised to hear then that I've always stood by the importance of … Continue reading The beauty of tools development – Pt 1/3
Lumberyard uses Lua as its main scripting language (flowgraph and script canvas notwithstanding). Here is a great little 30-minute video which new programmers in Lumberyard may find helpful! https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/CppCon-2017/101
At Third Kind Games, we made the decision to not employ a rigorous (and often tedious) buddy review system - rather, we have relied on other methods of ensuring code quality: Swarm tightly integrated into our Slack messaging system Programmers are responsible for understanding when they need help or advice, whether in their own systems or … Continue reading I’m Not Your Buddy, Pal
Lumberyard uses a bunch of modern C++ idioms so I have recently been brushing up on my modern C++ and making sure I keep abreast of all the latest library and language updates. As such, I stumbled across this fantastic summary of modern c++ features and felt compelled to make a few posters which I could use as my … Continue reading A Bunch of Modern C++ Posters
I recently found my Evernote login and much to my delight it still had a plethora of old notes I had written up about various programming presentations I had watched from conferences such as CPPCon, CPPNow, GDC, etc. Here are a couple of them, I thought maybe it was time to do some sharing! Writing … Continue reading Some Great Programming Videos