Ramblings of Sean Middleditch, Game Developer and Student

Posts in category Tutorials

C++ Metadata – Part II, Inheritance, Dynamic Casting, and Allocation

Jan21
2012 Leave a Comment Written by sean

In Part I in the series on C++ Metadata, I explored how to build the basics of a runtime metadata system for C++ types, including custom classes, third-party libraries’ classes, and even C++ primitives. The article detailed building the low-level facilities to have metadata, but did not cover any real-world uses of metadata. Today’s article is going to cover adding inheritance information to the metadata, using that information to construct a dynamic_cast<> work-alike, and adding a simple allocation helper.
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Posted in C++, Software

C++ Metadata – Part I, Singletons and Lookup

Jan13
2012 Leave a Comment Written by sean

Class metadata systems allow C++ applications to have a sizable fraction of the runtime reflection and introspection available in other high level languages, such as C#, Python, or Java. While C++ does not offer any true metadata system itself (excluding the nearly useless typeinfo/RTTI system, which is barely enough to handle dynamic_cast<>‘s needs), it’s certainly possible to build a system that gets the job done and maintains sufficient levels of performance and ease of use. Given what a huge topic this is, I’m going to break this article up into a series. Today I’m going to talk about the singleton patterns most useful for a metadata system, as well as go over some introductory topics and alternatives.
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Posted in C++, Software

Custom Containers in C++11

Jan02
2012 2 Comments Written by sean

C++11 has brought us a few significant language and library improvements which can make for greatly increased API ease of use and performance. Several of these features have a huge impact on how we write custom containers. Since I haven’t seen any in-depth articles on this topic, and honestly haven’t seen any truly in-depth articles on writing custom containers even for older versions of C++, I decided it was time to share some of my recent experience working on a custom high-performance, C++11-friendly container library for my current game project.

Be warned: this is a particularly long article and delves into a fair bit of C++ magic.

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Posted in C++, Software

Object-Oriented C Programming – Part I

Dec12
2010 1 Comment Written by sean

To say that the object-oriented programming paradigm is the most popular and widely supported method of creating software today would be an extreme under-statement. Not only entire sets of tools but entire organizational development processes are built around the object-oriented model. The popularity of languages like C++, Java, C#, and other object-oriented languages has skyrocketed over the last two decades, while the popularity of the venerable C programming language has slowly but surely dwindled.
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Posted in Software, Tips

Safe and Efficient Lua Integration

Oct18
2009 Leave a Comment Written by sean

Lua is a popular scripting language in the games industry.  It has an easy to use C API, a decently fast virtual machine, and as fully featured language environment.

Unfortunately, as with all sufficiently advanced technologies, there are some things to watch out for when integrating Lua into your own game engine.  The trickiest to deal with properly is handling safe access to your game objects from Lua.  Lua implements its own garbage collector which doesn’t know anything about the life cycle management of your game objects, and its not hard at all to end up in a situation where Lua tries to access an object you’ve already deallocated in your game engine proper.
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Posted in Article Links - Tagged