Back in October 2019, when things were just bad, not outright terrible, I got sent a request to review a game called Superliminal, by Pillow Castle. As usual, I don’t take up such requests because I don’t want to become beholden to the publisher in anyway and so I politely declined (by ignoring completely). I had seen some trailer footage, and certainly there was a suspicious “hype” campaign, and in all honesty I just dismissed it as yet another “indie” game trying to make a splash. Quickly, it left my radar and I forgot about it.
Continue reading “Game Review: Superliminal (Spoiler-Free)”Unpopular Opinion #2: Open World Games Suck
The premise of living an alternate life in a different universe is enthralling. It’s what as gamers, we all desire. Those of us of a certain age used our imaginations (self constructed images and thoughts in your head) to try and make the best of what was available to us, in the hope that some day, just maybe, we will be able to actually inhabit the game. Oh it was exciting! As the years passed, we saw glimpses into the future, and it was happening! Finally, our dreams were coming true! Then, it happened, open world games arrived…
Continue reading “Unpopular Opinion #2: Open World Games Suck”Unpopular Opinion #1: Teach Raw Pointers First
Being the administrator of a large programming Discord server, and the owner of a YouTube channel with a large audience of programming beginners, it is with some frequency that questions about the basics of programming are asked. In fact, it’s often the same questions. This is perfectly fine, after all, the ethos of One Lone Coder can be encapsulated in the phrase:
Continue reading “Unpopular Opinion #1: Teach Raw Pointers First”Javidx9 Top 5’s
It would seem people are quite curious about things I like, so I thought it would be useful to have a page that I can point such individuals towards. Here are my Top 5 “things” in various categories.
Continue reading “Javidx9 Top 5’s”Intrinsic Functions – “Easy” Parallelism
This is a follow on video by viewer request where I explain how I implemented the Mandelbrot fractal using the AVX2 extension set on my CPU. It also acts as an introduction to intrinsic functions in general.
How to attribute/credit/cite the olc::PixelGameEngine
Hello! Firstly a big thank you, the fact that you are reading this means you actually care about doing the right thing, and want to acknowledge the software you have used from other developers.
The olc::PixelGameEngine is open source and is released under the OLC-3 licence. This means you can use it freely, even for commercial projects. However, the licence requires that appropriate attribution is required.
Continue reading “How to attribute/credit/cite the olc::PixelGameEngine”Using parallel processing on your CPU to render a Mandelbrot Fractal
Using SIMD processing and multi-threading to smash through calculations!
Pseudo 3D Techniques For Dungeon Crawler
olc::PixelGameEngine 2.0 is here!
After quite a few late nights, it’s finally here! PGE 2.0 is a significant upgrade on its predecessor, and is 100% backward compatible. This major revision brings in hardware accelerated sprites in the form of the olc::Decal, multiple rendering layers, and has been completely re-organised to make it easy to port to other platforms.
The features added were in response to the fantastic feedback from this community. You guys wanted to use it as a genuine game engine? Now you can.
Download from the Github Repo and try for yourself!
Enough! Why rand() cant compress!!!
Unless you are born an information theory genius, at some point during your programming learning you might have considered the following hypothesis:
“A file is a sequence of bytes. If I could find the appropriate seed for srand(), surely I could generate the file, just by successively calling rand() % 256? Therefore I could represent the file with just the seed and the expected file length.“
Continue reading “Enough! Why rand() cant compress!!!”