The simple fact is that since most monitors have a 60Hz refresh rate anything beyond that is wasted – then again maybe not. Recently I was trying to scroll a 2D image from left to right in one of my windows C#/XNA application. Oh wait, the other way around. In any case the direction was not the problem. The problem was that the scrolling was not exactly smooth. The sprite seemed to slow down and accelerate at various points during the animation.

Previously on GD chaos, our hero demonstrated how he can kill his frame rates by drawing simple (yet expensive in terms of processing) 2D primitives. Today the hero cheats. Imagine a world way more complicated to draw, a world of 2D and 3D shapes of great complexity. Oh the terror of having to calculate everything from scratch for every single frame. No need to panic. Render surfaces are your friends. Render surfaces love you. You see dear reader, not every graphic artefact changes all the time. So if something has not really changed, why re-create it from scratch again and again. A much better idea is to “render” this artefact on a texture, a buffer in the graphic card’s memory, and display that texture instead.

In the previous of my not so amazing C# tutorials I described how to draw 2D triangles. This was a useful exercise since drawing triangles, filled or not, involved interpolating values (we need to go from there to there in that many steps). Interpolation is a useful technique that can be used in a number of situations from moving models/sprites to faking missing data in scientific charts – anything that requires finding a number of intermediate states really. However that was not the only reason for selecting triangles. The author of the previous tutorial (all tremble before my evil goatee) also claimed that triangles are useful for making more complex geometric shapes. Lets put this claim to the test by using our pretty triangles to make a nice round (well, almost) circle. Building circles out of triangles might sound a bit insane as generally speaking triangles are not exactly known for their roundness. This is I guess what makes it fan.

Once upon a time when I started XNA programming (not so long ago actually) I remember being annoyed about the lack of basic 2D primitives. There is a perfectly valid reason why – today’s graphic cards are much better at dealing with 3D operations. Doing 2D stuff with them can be rather less efficient which can be considered a major drawback when your main target is a console with less processing power than what can be found on a high-end personal computer.

Sometime ago I released “follow the line 3D” (aka roll game). Now quite a few people pointed to me that it would be good to add more features to this – more levels, a proper high score table and so on. Make it a more complete game, that sort of thing. Furthermore a few more (some programmers among them) were curious how you can use programming to make games like this one. I would have thought it is obvious, but apparently many of those who never tried game programming considering it something of a mysterious forbidden dark art. A bit like being a Ninja I guess. In reality there is nothing magical about it – if you can program in general, then you can program games. This would make an interesting topic for discussion but I am getting out of topic here.

Simple tutorial of how to install Mysql on Fedora13 and perform basic operations using java.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use very simple sql queries from java. HyperSQL is used to create the database and the table. The operating system is Fedora 13 and the IDE is NetBeans 6.9.1..

I decided to repost the linked list code with some amendments after upgrading to C# 2010 and discovering that some minor changes were indeed needed. Since I was going to do this (update the code) it made sense to improve it somehow, especially in the documentation front. The whole point here was not simply to make the code working but to somehow add some tutorial flavour to it. As such there are lots of commends explaining what happens and why, in what I hope is an easy to understand way. Apart from minor changes the code is the same as the one posted initially. The only notable difference is the addition of a couple of functions that make it possible to access the list elements using “foreach” statements. I hope someone somewhere might find this useful (I did since I am rather new to this language). If you are simply not interested in lists or C# please do suggest topics for future tutorials. Making such material seems like a good way of killing a few hours here and there whenever I got nothing better to do.

What was the last time you implemented one of them traditional data structures? I was in the local pub with a fellow fossil of the pre-windows programming era, drinking and complaining about how thing are not like they used to be. Those new programmers have nothing to do, argued my friend – cut and paste this, use some libraries, drag and drop a bit and it is done. What was the last time you implemented one of them traditional data structures then? Hic. My answer at the time was that it was probably at some point in the beginning of the decade. Even though I am nostalgic about them old days, I am still a programmer and as such lazy by definition. What is the point of implementing a list for instance, when the programming language of your choice offers such a structure fully debugged, optimised and ready to use. I must have had a bit more whisky than I do usually because later, as I was sobering up, I decided to do just that!