Well, as predicted, I didn’t end up with very much time to work on Argus and SNAFU this last week.
I did however, have a couple stretches (mostly on Saturday) where I was able to buckle down and really hammer away, though.
Month: October 2015
Development progress report, week 12
So, it’s the start of development week 13, and I’m looking back on week 12, trying to figure out how it all went.
At first, I wasn’t exactly super-satisfied with it, but I’ve changed my mind.
Show me the code: cpuid and popcount
So, modern CPUs have built-in functions for a lot of things, these days, which can offer you blisteringly fast access to some otherwise rather awkward and slow algorithms.
In my case, I wanted to access the CPU’s popcount function (count how many set bits there are in a value). The trick is that either the CPU supports it or it doesn’t, and different systems have different ways of testing if it does, and accessing it if it does. Of course if the CPU doesn’t support it, you still have to do it in software anyway.
So, I thought I’d write something extensible, and I thought I’d share.
Romance without routes. Breaking the CYOA/VN formula
Choice-based interactive-fiction comes in a whole bunch of narrative models. If you haven’t read the These Heterogenous Tasks article, Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games, you should run right out and do that. It’s excellent, and I’ll be making some references to it. I’ll wait. Promise.
Done that? Good, let’s move along.
Continue reading Romance without routes. Breaking the CYOA/VN formula