In Windows Vista and earlier, the operating system managed a list of audio (playback) devices, and one of them was always specified as the ‘default’. This is how audio devices may have looked on such a system: Speakers (Default) USB Headset Realtek rear audio jack Applications using Windows’ built-in sound functions such as PlaySound() always
This topic seems to come up quite a lot, and yet the majority of the time, there’s no clear answer. Take the scenario: you have a game or an application, and there’s some downtime. You’ve noticed in task manager that your apps remains at a high CPU Usage% even while it’s not doing anything, and
A short and simple post for today. Playing a video file in Freepascal, without using Lazarus. I honestly couldn’t find any examples on the internet of how to do this, so I made one. The DirectX9SDK has examples of how to use DirectShow/ActiveMovie to play back video files in C++, however, the common version of
When your project is nearing completion, it’s time to look at optimization. For Direct3D, this typically means grouping and reordering of things to make the hardware work as efficiently as possible. For Direct3D 9, Microsoft have published a handy guide of things to look at optimizing here. But it’s interesting to look at the difference these
Consider this pseudocode: Is there a memory leak in the above code? This is just pseudocode, so I’m not trying to be tricky with syntax and I haven’t omitted any key steps in init or shutdown. The answer I should get is “no”. And yet, in reality, the answer is “maybe”. All the code does
After a delay of way longer than expected, I am happy to announce that the redesigned Five Hundred game V1.00 is now available! I had hoped to have this done several months ago, but I kept getting sidetracked into adding extra features. Some of the new things you can see in this game: User customisable
Update: Version 1.00 now available – get it from this link! Wow, far, far too long between posts! Icefall development is currently on hold for a little while as… the problem is… I’m not finding it as fun to play as it should be. So I think I need to take a break and focus on
Let’s take a look at pathfinding. Pathfinding is the process where the game can determine a suitable or optimal path from one point to another by traversing the game’s terrain. It’s a critical part of almost all games (RPGs, RTSs, turn-based strategy.. basically anything that has a variable terrain or map is going to need
Lately, I have been rewriting some of the subsystems in Icefall. Now that the core of the gameplay is in place, it is time to go back and implement flexible/efficient versions of systems I originally coded in very fast to get the basic game up and running. Mainly this involves recoding subsystems to do things
A small break from Icefall. My network has been a bit flakey recently, and it was irritating because it wasn’t always immediately obvious when it died. So I wrote a little application that can sit in the notification area and send a regular ping to a designated address/site, and make a sound if it suddenly