C++

C++ gets a lot of stick, and there’s good reasons for it. But despite its flaws it was popular enough to have decent debugging tools for a lot of its life, making it as useful as it is dangerous.

I got into C++ by writing games for Nikolaus Gebhardt’s Irrlicht Engine, an open source 3D graphics library for the fixed-function pipeline that abstracts the rendering back-end and operating system away, making it perfect for cross platform, device agnostic games programming.

So most of my C++ work is stuff done for Irrlicht, which I was on the dev team for several years - until I gave up on the idea of writing games and moved on to more boring, real things.

Games

Some games, none of any note.

• irrvaders - A space invaders game with a cylindrical coordinate system.
• jetpac - A remake of JetPac.
• jump or burn - Ridiculously crap game made for a gaming contest.
• mines - Minesweeper game.
• UFO game - A game that Graeme and I never finished.

Irrlicht Scene Nodes

Things that make your world pretty

• axial-billboards - Axis aligned billboards, like Mariokart on the SNES.
• batching-mesh - A mesh that batches its children, so you can use fewer render calls.
• beam-scene-node -
• A screen-aligned beam effect. Basically a rod with a billboard on each end.
• clouds - Clouds with recursive levels of detail.
• grass - A grass patch scene node, used in a few popular games.
• impostors - Distant items become billboards, making enormous scenes possible.
• plantlod - A quad tree to render loads of stuff, loaded from disk and culled depending on distance.
• spheremap renderer - Render the scene into a spheremap, for use in lighting effects.
• skybox renderer - Render your scene into a sky box. Same as above, but for performance reasons.

Tools

• 3d mesh thumbnailer - A Gnome thumbnailer for 3D mesh file formats.
• font generator - The cross platform Irrlicht font generator.
• GUI Editor - The GUI editor for Irrlicht.

Irrlicht Loaders and Internals

• figlet driver - Loading figlet fonts on the console device, or wherever.
• console device - Created as a null device, became an ASCII device for software drivers
• ico-loader - Load Windows icon and cursor files in your Irrlicht app.
• loader profiler - Profile the various loaders for the Irrlicht Engine.
• ply loader - A loader for Stanford Polygon with blistering performance due to ugly hacks.
• rsrc-loader - Load resources from Windows DLL and EXE files.