3DM2 installing ( SATA RAID 3ware 9500S-12 Controller)

For some reason (most probably, motherboard issue), my RAID 10 fails: 4th drive was unsynced for a while, once i noticed that i've started the rebuild process and my 3rd drive went offline.

After some strugglings, i decided to buy a 3ware 9500S-12 Controller (price was around $15).

After driver installation (TODO: add link), the first issue i faced is that localhost:888 is unavailable. This post contains the necessary info to fix that: https://blog.shawnhyde.com/post/2012/03/05/3DM2-httplocalhost888-cant-connect-with-Internet-Explorer-Firefox-etc
In short: its needed to replace the default exe with this (reuploaded) : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qVEUzTkXWiI17NkovbJYqG4Wxvl9pPM0

Also, the password for Admin user: 3ware

CV storage for LinkedIn (OneDrive/GoogleDrive/DropBox)

Nowadays, we're living in 21 century, and sending CV via email seems to be as ancient as sharing games via diskettes. In this very case, I'd like to share my CV via LinkedIn and make it nice, shiny and downloadable. Definitely, we want to share a PDF, because all those DOCs/DOCXs can have a format shifts when opened at some specific devices.

LinkedIn - Upload file

So, lets try the most naive way first: upload PDF to LinkedIn profile directly. Go to profile editing, add Summary section, click Add, select Upload file and upload your CV.

Good point is that it has a nice looking preview at the main page:

Bad news is that it is looking quite blurry and there's no direct download link for PDF:

Lets see what we can achieve with OneDrive/GoogleDrive/DropBox.

Finished working with Foodie.fm

That was quite competitive, but i'm pretty pleased with results:

My base task was to "refactor some project's parts", then it evolved to "move the whole project to MVVM", as basically all the code was done in a codebehind - that was quite competitive and took lots of time, but it was extremely useful experience.
Other tasks that i did during last 2 years:
- page navigation with NonLinearNavigationService and advanced data transfer,
- deal with slowpoke WP7's ListBox,
- sync/async lightspeed file storage for WP7,
- a library for effective image caching for WP7,
- a magic queue which would guarantee server requests delivery.

Anyway, that is a great addon to my gamedev skills.

Link for direct downloading Skype (without logging in)

http://www.skype.com/intl/en/get-skype/on-your-computer/windows/downloading/

Windows 8 dual boot fixer

Got some problems after Win8 installation: it didn't see Windows 7.

This software just solved the problem:
http://www.boyans.net/DualBootRepair.html

UPD: If you have a dual-boot Win7 and Win8, and you had installed Win8 after Win7, it would take a while to load Win7: after turning on, Win8 loader would load, then you select Win7, then it would reboot a pc, and then you'll see Win7. A way to fix this is to replace Win8 loader with the one from Win7, which is way faster.

Arcanum Reborn:Riverrise

Присоеденился к разработчикам. На данный момент, проект не ориентирован на прибыль, но мне все же кажется хорошей инвестицией в будущее.
Веб-сайт проекта: http://www.arcreborn.ru/

Скриншоты:

Необходимые ресурсы для геймдизайнеров

В данном топике я хочу представить подборку ресурсов, имеющих непосредственное отношение к дизайну и разработке игр. В первую очередь, эта информация будет полезна начинающим или будущим геймдизайнерам, которые только задумываются о выборе профессии, но, возможно, и профессионалы своего дела найдут что-то полезное или интересное для себя. Кроме того, я предполагаю, что читатели хорошо владеют английским языком, что в наше время для айтишников, настоящих или будущих, подразумевается практически по умолчанию.
Итак, поехали.

Clip2net in Debian

Some articles how to install really usefull software, Clip2net, in Devian.

http://linux-update.blogspot.fi/2010/06/clip2net-fastest-way-to-take-edit-and.html

http://qwe.az/blog/2038.html

Готовые мини-решения (туториалы) для Shiva3d

Автоматический батчинг статических объектов [ru] - статья на http://www.shiva3d.ru
Autimatic batching for static objects [en] - atricle at http://www.stonetrip.com

Уменьшить количесто DrawCalls от hud - статья на http://www.shiva3d.ru 
Профайлинг (отображение ФПС, памяти, draw call)  - статья на http://www.shiva3d.ru 
Глобальный список объектов - статья на http://www.shiva3d.ru
Поиск объекта по имени -  статья на http://www.shiva3d.ru
Получение глобальных координат вертекса - статья на http://www.shiva3d.ru

Tips for Working with Unity (Best Practices)

http://devmag.org.za/2012/07/12/50-tips-for-working-with-unity-best-practices/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qrAcSyLoiVBNzOiJYlC64UiU3ZwDbsw-zSzIeRzZnnE/edit?pli=1

Fade A Whole Scene From Black & White to Colour

This can be done by following these steps. First, you'll need Unity Pro, because modifying the scene with a full screen image effect is a Pro-only feature.

C# List vs LinkedList

Thinking of a linked list as a list can be a bit misleading. It's more like a chain. In fact, in .NET,LinkedList<T> does not even implement IList<T>. There is no real concept of index in a linked list, even though it may seem there is. Certainly none of the methods provided on the class accept indexes.

Linked lists may be singly linked, or doubly linked. This refers to whether each element in the chain has a link only to the next one (singly linked) or to both the prior/next elements (doubly linked).LinkedList<T> is doubly linked.

Internally, List<T> is backed by an array. This provides a very compact representation in memory. Conversely, LinkedList<T> involves additional memory to store the bidirectional links between successive elements. So the memory footprint of a LinkedList<T> will generally be larger than forList<T> (with the caveat that List<T> can have unused internal array elements to improve performance during append operations.)

They have different performance characteristics too:

Procedural terrain. Part 3. Realtime terrain editing.

So, now we have dwarf, which can be ordered to make some holes in the terrain (and to build huge castle, in perspective).

Unity3D colliders benchmark

All tests were done on an intel core2duo 3ghz imac with no rendering, just physics.


Static colliders seem to have such a minimal impact on performance, Upto 60,000 and beyond of all different colliders were causing no noticable effect on the frame time (<3ms)

So I tried testing dynamic colliders instead, much more challenging.

Remember this is just physics, your renderer would bottleneck way before reaching 2500 individual objects.

Procedural terrain. Part 2. Slicing camera, "fog of war"

Spent several hours, planing implementation. Considering stacks, queues, cashes, but decided to play only with visibility at the current moment.

So, here we are: for now, number of visible chunks (in current project, 1 chunk = 1 level of terrain) is depends on camera height. On theese screenshots, positions of the camera are the same, except height.
Next step is to add "fog of war": those cubes, that are incide of the mountain should be brown, and similary, cubes for air should be blue.

Procedural terrain. Part 1. Basic terrain render.

Decided to play with procedural terrain a bit. Terrain's square shouldn't be extremely high, so i decided to set 1 chunk = 1 level.

At first, i'm generating a terrain with Perlin Noise (as a highmap, highlighting it with particles). Then, i convert data to per-layer(matrix) form: now i can access to every layer and get known, where is air and where is ground.
Next step is mesh-creation:

Upper side

Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho

Very good talk and really great and clear example of how juicing a game can make a dull game much more interesting without making any modification to the game mechanic.

Off-by-one error

An off-by-one error (OBOE) is a logic error involving the discrete equivalent of a boundary condition. It often occurs in computer programming when an iterative loop iterates one time too many or too few. Usually this problem arises when a programmer fails to take into account that a sequence starts at zero rather than one (as with array indices in many languages), or makes mistakes such as using "is less than or equal to" where "is less than" should have been used in a comparison. This can also occur in amathematical context.

Consider an array of items, and items m through n (inclusive) are to be processed. How many items are there? An intuitive answer may be n−m, but that is off by one, exhibiting a fencepost error; the correct answer is n−m+1.

For this reason, ranges in computing are often represented by half-open intervals; the range from m to n (inclusive) is represented by the range from m (inclusive) to n+1(exclusive) to avoid fencepost errors. For example, a loop that iterates five times can be written as a half-open interval from 0 to 5:

for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
    /* Body of the loop */
}

Src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error

Тесты на Topcoder.com

Topcoder.com - отличный сайт, предоставляющий платформу для тестирования программерских скиллов.
Рекомендуется при собеседованиях.

Чистка контекстного меню "Создать"

Можно удалить эти пункты из списка Создать, просто удалив подраздел ShellNew из ветви реестра вида HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\«расширение файла».

Да, важно не забывать о резервном копировании реестра :)