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Readers Open Source Projects Revisited

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:39:04 +0000

As I said a couple of weeks back, if anyone wrote to me about their open source projects in C, C++ and C#, I'd give them publicity and the first three are now up on a new open source projects page and all are in C++. It makes me wonder if this is just a statistical quirk ( that most open source projects are in C++), perhaps because ones in C (Apache, Linux, MySQL) started ages ago and C# hasn't been around as long as C++. Looking at the code library page the ratio is roughly 5:4:3 (C++ to C to C#) but that probably indicates my trying to be even handed. As the numbers increase I'll split them into a page for each language.

Also lots more entries for Challenge 29 so I'll update those by tomorrow night. Keep sending them in! Both open Source Project information and Challenge 29 entries.

Link to Open Source Projects

Readers Open Source Projects Revisited originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 15:39:04.

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FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:46:52 +0000

FreeSpace 2 was released in October 2000 and was considered one of the best space sims with a rating of 9.4 on gamespot.com. You can still buy the game from a legitimate download site gog.com for $5.99 but commercially it wasn't a success and the company Volition Inc was acquired by THQ.

The source code (in C) was released in 2002 and the individual programmers who were enhancing the original code soon organized themselves into the FreeSpace Source Code Project and kept on working. Judging by the forum activity, it's still going strong.

What makes this different from other games whose source code has been released is that

You can get the game graphics from the retail game.
Ongoing development of FreeSpace Open
Development of FreeSpace open has been extensively documented on the Wiki.

There have been several total conversions (replacing all the original files) e.g. the Babylon Project with over a 100 models based on the the Babylon 5 universe. Getting involved with release commercial game source can be overwhelming but at least here there is help and documentation. If you know of any other similar type projects built around released game source, please let me know.

Link to C Games Code Library

FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 17:46:52.

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Curling up With a Good Package

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:44:58 +0000

Confusingly there exists both cURL and Curl, with the latter being a commercial interactive web language and the former an open source command line tool for file transfer that works with url based file transfer. It lets you script file transfers very easily with proxies, most internet protocols (FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, FILE, LDAP and LDAPS) and works on virtually every platform in existence except perhaps iPhone.

Both FTP and Telnet hearken back to a more innocent time when passwords could be sent safely in plaintext so use these with caution or beefed up security with SFTP and SSL. These require 3rd party open source libraries.

The engine in cURL is libcurl which lets you use its capabilities in your software and includes multi-file transfer. Both cURL and libcurl are written in C but there are bindings for over 40 languages including C, C++ (via the C binding or via a 3rd party OO curlpp) and .NET. I can recommend this library, particularly if you are writing multi-platform code.

Link to C Code Library

Curling up With a Good Package originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 17:44:58.

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An Astonishingly Simple Concept

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:03:44 +0000

There is a simple technique that anyone can use to help avoid mistakes. Without this technique the US commercial aviation industry may have taken a lot longer to be established and it has been proven to save lives in hospital. It's also a technique I use some days.

The first prototype of the B17 Flying Fortress bomber crashed killing two of the five crew because the takeoff sequence of flight controls was too long to remember everything and a vital step was overlooked. After that they introduced the humble checklist. It's had other successes as well; I highly recommend this New Yorker magazine article by Atul Gawande.

Some software changes are complex enough to require a checklist and it helps brings new developers up to speed by insisting they follow the list. For example say for checking code in to a version control system or deploying databases. Humans can on average remember seven things at once, without the help of a mnemonic type memory system. So if there are more than seven steps then create a checklist.

An Astonishingly Simple Concept originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 17:03:44.

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Programming Challenge 29 Heating Up

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:25:53 +0000

We've now got five entries with average times running from 0.11 to 3.3 seconds. Anyone can send in (hopefully) faster entries from now until the end of November. I'm not publishing any source code until then.

Link to Programming Challenge Twenty Nine Manage the Hunters

Programming Challenge 29 Heating Up originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 17:25:53.

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Algorithms For Falling Sands

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:57:32 +0000

In case you haven't seen it, Falling Sands is a Java app that runs in a browser. It's a toy rather than a game. Just streams of sand, oil, water and salt that fall from the top of the screen and you can divert them with walls, ignite them etc. It's very relaxing and there's no aim but to exercise your creativity. It's similar in that way to the Life cellular automation that has only a few rules but generates complex patterns.

It's implemented in Java but no source code is available. I've been thinking about the algorithms used. There seem to be a few thousand grains of sand, oil, etc that are either falling, moving over other particles (eg forming heaps) or being transformed- water turned green by plants, oil and plants being consumed by fire so probably only a few hundred pixels in motion at one time. It uses about 20-25% CPU of my three year old PC's processing power so is fairly intensive. I imagine there might be lists of static points and moving or transforming points but tracking and processing all these points is a clever bit of programming.

Looking around the web I discovered an open source C++ version by developer Owen Piette and that uses the wx Widgets. I'll see how he does it.

Link to C++ Games Code library

Algorithms For Falling Sands originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 11:57:32.

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A C++ Exception to the Rules

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:56:34 +0000

You can't modify a const can you? Well technically no, but there is one place (before a constructor) where you can. If the parameter used to construct an instance of the Example class is 0 then it allocates an 80 char string and frees it in the destructor.

#include <iostream> class Example { private: const char * ptr; const bool freeable; public: Example(const char * optional): ptr( optional ? optional : new char [80]), freeable( optional ? false : true ) {} ~Example( ) { if (freeable) delete[] ptr; } void ViewState(char ID) { if (freeable) std::cout << ID << " is Freeable" << std::endl; else std::cout << ID << " is not Freeable" << std::endl; } }; int main(int argc, char * argv[]) { Example S(0) ; Example T("Hello World") ; S.ViewState('S') ; T.ViewState('T') ; return 0; }

So S is freeable, T is not.

A C++ Exception to the Rules originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 17:56:34.

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Facebook Development on .NET Revived

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:25:38 +0000

By coincidence, last night I was at a Facebook Developer Garage event (in London).

The coincidence is that the .NET Facebook software, which had been getting left behind has just been relaunched at version 3.0. Here is a link to Download it. Facebook has just made a lot of changes to their platform and that all goes live in the next month. The toolkit now includes dlls for Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC (as well as the ASP.NET one) and WPF. If you are developing Facebook applications for .NET then you'll need these. Once I've done a bit more with my code, I'll publish articles and tutorials for it.

Link to ASP.NET C# Code Library

Facebook Development on .NET Revived originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 17:25:38.

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Go, An Experimental Language from Google

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:59:27 +0000

Anything Google does in code is worthy of attention and a new programming language more so. Both Microsoft and Google have a lot of very bright people but with Google it's more likely to be producing open source as this is. Started in September 2007, Go is an experimental OO Lite (no inheritance) language that tries to break away from Java and C++ . It's best summed up as a concurrent, garbage-collected language with fast compilation.

By experimental I suspect they mean it's here to stay but isn't quite finished yet. With built in features like Garbage Collection and parallel computation without having to write threaded code so it supports multi-core out of the box.

The language is interesting. For example, variable declarations are more like the Pascal model with the type after the variable name. This declares two pointers to an int.


var a, b *int;

This is for Linux/Mac mainly, so possibly it would run under Windows using Cygwin/MingW. Gccgo has a C++ front-end with a recursive descent parser coupled to the standard GCC back end. Gc is written in C using yacc/bison for the parser. No header files but instead, just put a load of files in a directory and they can compile together and make cross file calls without needing declarations.

There's a fair deal of documentation and instructions on how to install and run it. It's early days so it lacks tools like an IDE and debugger but no doubt those are in the works. For some "strange" reason they think ogle would be a good name for the debugger as in "go ogle". It must be an anagram...!

Link to C Code Library

Go, An Experimental Language from Google originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 17:59:27.

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An Augmented Reality Toolkit

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:35:15 +0000

Augmented Reality (AR) is a new buzzword at the moment with several iPhone apps available. It's a simple idea, determine what a camera is looking at and add additional information onto the display. So you point your iPhone 3GS (The latest one with a compass) and it uses GPS and direction information to suss where you are at what you are looking at. It then adds information (e.g. StarBucks) over the live camera image on the screen. It's great for guide books!

But there are other uses of AR and for computer users with a camera there's the GPLed multiplatform library (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, SGI) ARToolkit with a C API. This was originally developed by Dr. Hirokazu Kato, and is now supported by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and ARToolworks, Inc, Seattle.

It picks up images from a camera and tracks markers (square areas) where it superimposes images. The projects page lets you see what people have done with the toolkit.

Link to Useful C Code Libraries

An Augmented Reality Toolkit originally appeared on About.com C / C++ / C# on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 18:35:15.

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