Windows 8 is having to endure with a lot of headwind at the moment. The weather forecast doesn’t appear to improve in the near future either with prominent game developers and publishers taking to the barricades accusing Microsoft of building a closed ecosystem. I am forced to side with this opinion as I too see services the likes of Steam as playing ......

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Just recently I read a great blog post by David Darling, the founder of Codemasters: http://www.develop-online.n... In the blog post he talks about how traditional retail games are experiencing a downfall thanks to the increasing popularity of digital distribution. I personally think of retail games as ......

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I’m extremely happy to announce that Raccoon Interactive has finally released it’s first game on the Android platform. The game can be found on Google Play. If you are on your Android device, you can get the game by clicking this link. There’s also a free Lite version of the game if you’d like to give it a try before buying! If you’re on your Android ......

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With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview version out in the open and the Visual Studio 11 Beta also available, I’ve been putting some more effort into trying them both out. The first impression of the new Visual Studio 11 build was: Why doesn’t it work at all on Windows 8?! The issues I encountered were odd to say the least. Visual Studio did install correctly, ......

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Command passing is a handy way to execute pieces of code on specific threads. The idea is simple enough: Write a command into a buffer and that command then gets executed on some specific thread that monitors that command buffer. This paradigm is used in graphics APIs like DirectX and OpenGL, for instance. This allows you to split your data into working ......

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The typical way to check for whether anything has changed in the view when you’re navigating away from a page is to bind a method to the change event of each input and to set a flag if this has happened. This flag is then checked when leaving the page and a notification is shown to the user if the flag is raised. This is all good but it does not take ......

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When working with a large code base, finding reasons for bizarre bugs can often be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Finding out why an object gets corrupted without no apparent reason can be quite daunting, especially when it seems to happen randomly and totally out of context. Scenario Take the following scenario as an example. You have defined ......

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Just recently I bumped into a very nasty bug that I had been unfortunate enough to conjure. Alignment of memory has never been my primary concern when working on the PC. As a typical C++ programmer you often don’t have to think about such things. On the PC this is usually “almost never” (when not optimizing, that is) and in a managed environment this ......

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The recently ratified C++11 language specification provides a range of cool new features. Many of which have been part of other programming languages for some time now. One such new feature that I value a lot is the concept of lambdas. Lambdas are great in many ways. They enable you to create callbacks that are called for specific items, for instance, ......

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C++ is a very powerful language. Well written native C++ code can perform much better than managed languages like C# and Java due to optimizations that the managed systems are not able to perform during run-time compilation (if this is done at all, that is). This is great for developers who work on gaming technology for instance. For people concerned ......

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