{"id":2031,"date":"2011-06-13T23:40:01","date_gmt":"2011-06-13T13:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=2031"},"modified":"2011-06-13T23:40:01","modified_gmt":"2011-06-13T13:40:01","slug":"todays-progress-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2011\/06\/13\/todays-progress-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Today&#8217;s progress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So for the first time in many months, I&#8217;ve spent the day sitting in front of the television, working on an old laptop instead of my normal desktop development machine.<\/p>\n<p>Comments, in point form:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>As &#8220;background noise&#8221; behind programming, television seems to work a lot better than music for me.<\/li>\n<li>My laptop really is a lot slower than the desktop machine. \u00a0Also, its keyboard is really unpleasant to type on. \u00a0(Full disclosure: \u00a0I&#8217;m an unrepentant keyboard snob. \u00a0If it isn&#8217;t mechanical, then it&#8217;s awful for programming. \u00a0Yes, I provide my own keyboards for use at work, because no development studios ever provide anything but the most horrible and ancient Logitech rubber-dome keyboards)<\/li>\n<li>As a result of the above two points, I should really consider buying a TV tuner card for the desktop machine. \u00a0Kind of expensive, though.<\/li>\n<li>Today I created the source code repository for storing 104 (whatever it ends up being named), and the initial project framework. \u00a0It does run, although right now it only displays the word &#8220;Test&#8221;. \u00a0I&#8217;m starting to really think that it takes too long to create new projects in VectorStorm. \u00a0I should really have a standard &#8220;starting&#8221; project, instead of having to spend an hour on it every time I start something new.<\/li>\n<li>The folks at my current workplace are big proponents of strong pointers. \u00a0There are a lot of good arguments for using strong pointers, most notably that they perform a sort of poor man&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)\">garbage collection<\/a>, automatically destroying objects which are no longer in use, whereas ordinarily in C++ you need to explicitly destroy objects once you&#8217;re finished with them. \u00a0The downside, of course, is a performance cost in using the smart pointer. \u00a0And for that matter, they do make debugging a little more annoying for a couple of reasons. \u00a0But man, after a few months of writing code using smart pointers, it&#8217;s really easy to get out of practice with remembering to explicitly destroy every object you create. \u00a0I&#8217;m really glad that VectorStorm has built-in memory leak detection, or I&#8217;d be in serious trouble.<\/li>\n<li>Every one of my classes always begins with a two or three letter prefix, telling where that class comes from. \u00a0For example, VectorStorm library files all begin with &#8220;vs&#8221;. \u00a0Source files in MMORPG Tycoon all begin with &#8220;mmo&#8221;. \u00a0I was at a loss, though, for what to call the files for 104, since it&#8217;s not legal to use numbers to name classes in C++. \u00a0In the end, I went with the roman numberals &#8220;civ&#8221;. \u00a0Even though the game will most definitely not be Civilization.<\/li>\n<li>Have brought all the accumulated VectorStorm changes from MMORPG Tycoon 2 into the live trunk. \u00a0No new features, but vsRenderTarget is halfway to being exposed for use by games, for offscreen rendering. \u00a0It&#8217;s already being used by the vector glow effect.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I still don&#8217;t know what 104 will actually be. \u00a0Been thinking about &#8220;hundred&#8221; and &#8220;four&#8221; as being separate things. \u00a0Maybe not even quantities, but instead, names for things. \u00a0But I don&#8217;t have a real answer yet. \u00a0But there&#8217;s still plenty of time to figure out a design!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So for the first time in many months, I&#8217;ve spent the day sitting in front of the television, working on an old laptop instead of my normal desktop development machine. Comments, in point form: As &#8220;background noise&#8221; behind programming, television seems to work a lot better than music for me. My laptop really is a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[37,17],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-wL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}