Blogs on Erik McClure

Aurora Theory has been released!

*"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists

It's standard procedure at the University of Washington to allow a single sheet of handwritten notes during a Mathematics exam.

*"We must be the change we want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi* Given the enormous influence of The Matrix on a lot of what I make, many people assume that it is my favorite movie.

I am, by no means, a very good web developer.

So I have this dll that’s doing a bunch of horrible WinAPI calls for me.

Technology tends to serve one of two purposes - to make us more efficient at some task, or to entertain us in our resulting free time.

[ 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 ] If you are familiar with C#, you should be familiar with the difference between C#’s struct and class declarations.

I see a lot of people get excited about extreme concurrency in modern hardware bringing us closer to the magical holy grail of raytracing.

Today, xkcd featured a comic with a comically large image that is navigated by clicking and dragging.

Today I learned that there are way too many coordinate systems, and that I’m an idiot (but that was already well-established).

It’s almost a tradition.

A couple years ago, when I first started designing a game engine to unify Box2D and my graphics engine, I thought this was a superb opportunity to join all the cool kids and multithread it.

The fact that math, for most people, is about a set of rules, exemplifies how terrible our attempts at teaching it are.

Yesterday, I saw a superb presentation called “When The Consoles Die, What Comes Next?”

So I’d been using the developer preview of VS11 and liked some of its improvements.

For a long time, I have been frustrated with the poor UI design that is rampant in the software industry.

Over the course of 3 hours spent trying to figure out why my Linux Mint 12 KDE installation would to go to a permanent black screen on boot, I managed to overheat part of my computer (at least that is the only thing that could explain this) to the point w…

*"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it

A long, long time ago, in pretty much the same place I’m sitting in right now, I was learning how one would do 2D lighting with soft shadows and discovered the age old adage in 2D graphics: linear gradient lighting looks better than mathematically correct…

Unrelated note: If you title your article “[x] considered harmful”, you are a horrible person with no originality.

[ 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 ] Classes in C#, like most object-oriented languages, are very similar to their C++ counterparts.

If you were to write directly to the screen when drawing a bouncing circle, you would run into some problems.

[ 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 ] We still have a lot of ground to cover on pointers, but before we do, we need to address certain conceptual frameworks missing from C# that one must be intimately familiar with when moving to C++.

[ 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 ] When moving from C# to C++, one must have a very deep knowledge of what C# is actually doing when you run your program.

So I’m rewriting my 2D culling kd-tree for my graphics engine, and a strange bug pops up.

While reconstructing my threaded Red-Black tree data structure, I naturally assumed that due to invalid branch predictions costing significant amounts of performance, by eliminating branching in low-level data structures, one can significant enhance the p…

This is completely insane.

Due to Bandcamp’s sudden threat to turn all of my free downloads into paid ones, I decided to go ahead and start selling my music properly.

There is a documented bug in windows 7 that has pissed me off a few times and recently crippled a friend of mine, where a .wav file with corrupted metadata causes explorer.exe to go into an infinite loop.

After beating World of Goo after stabilizing things in my game and renaming it, I wondered how easy it was to decompile C# applications and simultaneously thought this would be a great opportunity to get pixel perfect hit testing to work on my engine.

Someone linked me to this awesome webpage that uses HTML5 to do 8-bit palette color cycling using Mark Ferrari’s technique and art.

I’m still working on integrating physics into my game, but at some point here I am going to hit on that one major hurdle: syncing one physics environment with another that could be halfway across the globe.

inline unsigned char BSS_FASTCALL asmcas(int *pval, int newval, int oldval) { unsigned char rval; __asm { #ifdef BSS_NO_FASTCALL //if we are using fastcall we don't need these instructions mov EDX, newval mov ECX, pval #endif mov EAX, oldval lock c…

So after a lot of misguided profiling where I ended up just testing the stupid CPU cache and its ability to fucking predict what my code is going to do, I have, for the most part, demonstrated the following: if(!

Ok probably not the most bizarre error ever but it’s definitely the weirdest for me.

Whenever I do intensive performance testing on delicate math operations, the results almost always surprise me.

Syncing a game over a client server connection is not an easy task.