This is just a quick note to say that I’ve updated MockItNow on Google Code to allow you to define storage types on a per-class basis using the DECLARE_STORAGE_TYPE macro. I did this so that the Mocker can deal with abstract class parameters. Please note that the macro must be declared at global scope because it uses partial template specialization.

I updated the download, and the source. You can see the new test at the end of the file here, and the only other affected file is Storage.h.

Thanks to Lance for pointing this problem out.

Back in 2002, I started my first job in the games industry at Climax Studios in England. I have to admit, I didn’t know very much about game development at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’d been writing little 2D games, and messing around with rubbish particle systems at home, but it was nothing like what I was about to get involved with. Despite my inexperience, somehow I did enough to pass the interview, and I was offered a job as a junior programmer.

As seemed to be typical for the time, my introduction to the industry was pretty much a trial by fire. I quickly found out that I couldn’t hope to truly understand every single new thing I encountered, so I learned to just accept some things as the truth. For example, I was told that the dot product of two normalized vectors yields the cosine of the angle between them. I just accepted this, and only took the time to find out why later on.

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For a little under a year now, I’ve been using Modo to learn how to create 3D models. I’m doing this partly for fun, and partly to help me think about game engine features from the perspective of an artist. Along with the traditional poly-modeling tools, Modo (like many other 3D tools) also has support for subdivision surfaces. A subdivision surface basically allows you to create a low-poly control mesh for your model, and to add detail, you let the application divide each face in your mesh according to a set of rules.

Here’s an example:

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While I was reading through some C# 2.0 code that a friend of mine wrote, I noticed that he was finding some objects in a List using a foreach loop. As soon as I saw that, I thought to myself that I would probably have done that using FindAll with an anonymous delegate.

That got me thinking about all the different ways you can find things in a List in C#. I’ve recently upgraded to using Visual Studio 2008, so with the advent of C# 3.5 there are even more ways to do something like this. Which method is best is not very clear, so I thought it was time for some performance tests.

The Test

I decided that a nice and simple performance test would be to find all the numbers less than 10,000 in an array of 1,000,000 random integers. To even things out, I perform the same test 100 times for each method, and take the average time. I generated the set of random numbers once, and then used that same set in all tests.
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Well, there’s not much to report really. I’ve been spreading myself very thin recently, investigating a few different things, so I thought might be nice to post a status update.

Variance Shadow Maps

Yes, I’m jumping on the variance shadow maps boat. They look nice, they’re easy to implement, and have relatively small overhead over traditional shadow maps. I read the article in GPU Gems 3, which is also available here, and it was pretty easy to implement from there. It probably took me about 2 hours to go from no shadows at all to variance shadow maps. After a bit of tomfoolery to get rid of the light-leaking I ended up with the image below. I haven’t implemented any bias yet, so there are some errors there, but the VSMs appear to be working very nicely.

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A while back, I wanted to improve the material system I was using in my engine at home, since at the time, I had just just one fixed material type. I had to specify three textures for each object I wanted to render: Diffuse, Specular and Normal. If I didn’t want specular, I had to use a black specular texture. This was barely OK for very simple things, but soon I wanted more…

I’m not really going to mention anything about the lighting in this article, since that’s still a work in progress (as can be seen by the lack of shadows below), but I hope this will be interesting nonetheless.

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I’ve just uploaded a sample project for MockItNow to Google Code. Get it here.

This file includes the Examples project, the latest version of MockItNow, and UnitTest++. The projects are provided in Visual Studio 2005 format, and should compile out of the box.

Please note that this is a slightly modified version of UnitTest++, since the current release doesn’t catch std::exception in all cases. I’m going to work with Charles at some point to integrate these changes back into the main branch of UnitTest++.

I’ve provided three configurations for the Examples project: Debug, Release and Final. Debug and Release configurations both run the unit tests, but Final has optimizations turned on, and so does not run the tests.

If you’re just interested in seeing what the the test code looks like when using MockItNow, you can browse the example file.

Enjoy!

This is the first in a short series of articles I’m going to write about the way MockItNow works. I’m going to start off with something pretty meaty: How does MockItNow intercept the function calls and redirect them?

I tried a few ways of intercepting function calls and recording their parameters, and maybe one day I’ll explain ways not to do it, but for now, read on if you’re interested in how it works at the moment.

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I finally took the plunge to set up my own website! I’ve been wanting to do this for a while to be able to share some of the things that have interested me as I spend my spare time writing a small game engine. I hope that someone somewhere finds these things interesting!

One other reason that I set up the site is to have central place to store information about a couple of small pieces of software I wrote: DoItNow and MockItNow.

DoItNow is a little addin for Visual Studio 2005 that I use both at work and at home to speed certain parts of the development process up. It’s like Visual Assist, but not as good, and freer.

MockItNow is a C++ mocking framework. If you write unit tests in C#, then you have probably tried out using something like RhinoMocks, or maybe TypeMock. There isn’t much choice in C++, so I wanted to see if I could write something.

MockItNow was a great venture into the unknown for me. I wasn’t at all sure that I would be able to pull it off at the start. In fact, I had two failed attempts (based on ludicrous ideas) before I landed on what I use now. Along the way I learned a lot about areas I’d never looked at in great detail before, like stack frames, x86 assembly, calling conventions, type traits… The list goes on and on. I also learned some nasty little tricks that you can do in order to get at certain pieces of information I needed along the way too. I wouldn’t recommend using some of these techniques, but I had to do what I had to do.

I’ll be providing some more of the gritty details about how MockItNow works over the coming weeks, but If you can’t wait, then feel free to download it and take a look.

The site’s still a bit of a work in progress at the moment, but I set myself the goal of getting something up this weekend, so here I am. Unfortunately the great weather stole a lot of my time, but be sure that I’ll be improving things as I learn more!