C is almost 50 years old, and C++ is almost 40 years old. While age is usually indicative of mature implementations with decades of optimization under their belts, it also means that the language's feature set is mostly devoid of modern advancements in programming language design. For that reason, you see a great deal of encouragement nowadays to move to newer languages - they're designed with contemporary platforms in mind, rather than working within the limitations of platforms like the PDP-11. Among said "new languages" are Zig, Myrddin, Go, Nim, D, Rust… even languages like Java and Elixir that run on a virtual machine are occasionally suggested as alternatives to the AOT-compiled C and C++.

read more →

My first experiences with Duke Nukem 3D were with EDuke32 ages ago. This was back when I was running Windows Vista, and while my memory is a bit lacking, I swear that I had working music then. Ever since I made the switch to Linux, I haven't had working music playback in EDuke. Frustrated at the fact that my past few years of Duke 3D have been devoid of all sound besides the screams of death and Duke's trash talking, I've finally decided to troubleshoot it.

read more →

It seems that static linking is back in style, or at least popular among all the hip new programming languages of today. I don't have anything against statically linked binaries, nor do I have a problem with larger executables, but I've noticed that the acceptable size for an executable is a lot larger now than it was a few years ago; that is, the new kids on the block have significantly more leeway than their predecessors. For example - a C program that spits out "hello world" is 7 KB when statically linked to musl. It's 12 KB when dynamically linked to glibc. The same program in D, where the reference compiler doesn't allow dynamic linking to the standard library, is 896 KB. A blog post I read recently about certificate chain verification in Go made a point of praising the toolchain for being able to spit out a binary that was "less than 6 MB!" I'm being more facetious than with my D example, as this was statically linked to an SSL-capable web server, but 6 MB is a little over half the size of a fully-functioning operating system. I'm not so interested in why we settle binaries the size of a few videos, but instead I'd like to look at why they're that large to begin with. To peer in and see what wealth of information is stored inside, and how certain programming languages make use of that information.

read more →

To start off, I'd like to say that I know very little about audio programming and digital audio in general. I've never formally studied signal processing, and hell, I haven't even started high school physics yet. This post merely documents what I've learned while trying to get sound working in my game, because there aren't really any other learning resources about this out there.

read more →

About two months have passed since the first release of Nekopack - a tool I wrote for extracting game data from Nekopara's XP3 archives. While the process wasn't an amazing reverse-engineering war story that will keep you on the edge of your seat, I feel it deserves a small blog post explaining how I did it. Additionally, there's no real documentation on the XP3 format as far as I'm aware, so hopefully this post will serve as an informal specification.

read more →

SDL2 is my favorite graphics library right now. It might not be as powerful as something like raw OpenGL, but it's simple. Simple enough that you can just pick it up and start using it. There's a glaring issue with it, though. The documentation is horrible. Absolutely horrible. A lot of it is unfinished, and it doesn't look like it's getting attention any time soon. The SDL1.2 documentation wasn't as bad, but that version of the library is vastly outdated by today's standards. So here's my take on a tutorial for SDL - part 0x00 of a I-don't-know-how-long-I'm-going-to-drag-this-on series. My examples are going to be written in C, because the constructs I show here can still be used verbatim in C++ (and probably SDL's other language bindings as well). This tutorial will be covering the little boilerplate that SDL requires, as well as the basics of windowing and rendering. Let's get into it.

read more →