Kimmi's Weblog

The advantage of solving real issues with a learning project

kim.kulling — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:32:13 +0000

In my developer life I developed many little applications and libraries to see, how to deal with API’s, special programming techniques or new languages. My reason to stop my experimental work before getting something useful was everytime the same thing: my movitation was gone or another experimental code was more interesting than the current experiment or feature. The same thing happened happened to me in the ZFXCE. I tried out a new technique, but before finishing this ( because I get no benefit of it ) I started something new. So in the redesign phase I deleted a lot of deprecated and not working code.
But some experiments were finished successfully: the experiments, which implementations have solveld a real issue. So how can I use this to have more success in my bigger projects like the ZFXCE. In the ZFX-Community-Engine we have one major issue: we don’t have any customers and no projects, which needs new fatures.
So what can I do to improce this? It’s quite simple: develop a testgame / testproject parallel to the engine-development. Hopefully this will increase the functionality of future developments.

How to deal with memory issues using WinXP

kim.kulling — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:19:51 +0000

In the last days a lot people asked me questions regarding memory issues using Windows XP. SO I decided to write down my experiences with the common tools. Maybe I am not the first one who wrote down a proposal about this. But so my blog looks a bit more active .

If you want to detect memory leaks in your application and you are using Windows Xp you can walk more than one way. The common way is to use the debug runtime support of Micorsoft. This debug runtine support can help you finding memory leaks and memory assertions. At first you must include the common headers and enable the debug support by defining _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC like:

#define _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC


#include 
#include

Now you must enable the memory tracking and reporting support:

_CrtSetDbgFlag ( _CRTDBG_ALLOC_MEM_DF | _CRTDBG_LEAK_CHECK_DF);

_CrtSetReportMode ( _CRT_ERROR, _CRTDBG_MODE_DEBUG);

And make sure, that the following preprocessor-definitions are at the beginning of your file

#ifdef _DEBUG #define new DEBUG_NEW #undef THIS_FILE static char THIS_FILE[] = __FILE__; #endif

After this the debug runtime of Visual C++ tracks all new calls. If you just have forget to delete a allocated memory buffer you will get a notification after terminating your application in the output window.

Another way to deal with memoryleaks is umdh ( see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/268343 for more infos ). Here you can get a list will all allocations, which are currently not released. So by analysing that you can hopefully find your own leak.

The advantages of decentral version control

kim.kulling — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:29:28 +0000

In the ZFXCE we moved from subversion to git. So a lot of you may be ask why we did this. The reasons are simple: using a decentral versioncontrol like GIT you don’t have a single point of failue. And using GIT the merge of branches back to the mainbranch is much more easier than using subversion. If you already made some experimences with that you know what I mean.

And git is much faster than subversion. Currently I am using GIT under windows with the GIT package and with tortoise-git to make thinks easier and it works fine for me.

Of course we had to learn new things. But in my opinion learning somethink new isn’t so bad at all.

Some useful doxygen stuff

kim.kulling — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:38:11 +0000

If you have to deal with .NET stuff and you want to generate a doxygen docu because the code is only a separate component of a bigger project, you have to convert the xml tags into doxygen-compliant tags. And if you are looking for you can find a lot of similar issues like integrating python docu into a doxygen format. Fortunately some clever guys already solute this issues. Take a look to the following URL:
Doxygen extentions
It is possible to extend the doxygen parser. Or you can use a preprocessor to convert your tags into doxygen.

The first beta release of the ASSET IMPORTER LIB is out

kim.kulling — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:37:45 +0000

After a half year of discussing, many many debug sessions and redesigns of the basic ZFXCE obj loader from my side we have finished our development activities on the first version of ASSIMP. And so we were able to release the first beta version. At this Moment we are able to load a lot of different file formats like MD2, MD3, X, 3DS, Obj and many many more. The loaded data could be postprocessed with a configurable setting of postprocessing steps for retriangulate the meshes or recomputate the normal vectors for instance. We are also supporting a basic datastructure validator to make shure, that the loaders are working correctly.

If you want to see what we have done just open the project page on sourceforge: ASSIMP project Page.You can build it using windows and GNU-linux. We are using the BSD-licence. So feel free to take a look onto our work and adapt it to your frameworks.
A very nice gimmick is the ASSIMP-viewer, which Aramis has developed on its own to make it much more easier to see, thats something went wrong in the loaded data structure. Currently it just works using windows because it is using D3D9.

Some useful debugging tools and tips for windows

kim.kulling — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:26:17 +0000

I detected some useful debugging stuff by debugging windows applications. I debugged some memory issues and searched for some useful tools which may be helpful. I detected the site http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/index.php/crash-dump-analysis-patterns/.

The author of this site is using a tool called WinDbg.exe, which is a very useful and powerful application to dig deeper into the fundamental mechanism of your applications and the windows kernel in common. After the setup of WinDbg with the right symbol pathes you can learn a lot over the bugs in your code. And the crash-dump-analysis-pattern are a very useful help to find the critical mistace I made.

Ocrtree Implementation out there

kim.kulling — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:46:37 +0000

I have started to debug the octree-implementation of the ZFXCE. Currently I am working on the testcase. If you want to take a look onto the implementations, follow the link:

http://zfxce.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/zfxce/trunk/ZFXC-Engine/include/Geometry/ceTOcTree.h?view=markup

Best regards

Kimmi

Light-Scenenode works

kim.kulling — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 09:08:20 +0000

After a long period of time I was able to add a new entry in my developer blog. In the last months I worked on a prototype for an octree. Expected in the next weeks I will keep him work. And the ZFX-community-engine has a new scenenode: a lightscenenode. You can use this node to place dynamic light sources into your scene. At this moment we supporting only point and ambient light. But in the future I will upgrade the light implementation by a directional light source.
And I have fixed a lot of bugs and compiler warnings. I am trying to decouble the several modules of the different system-components in the ZFXCE. The future will show me, if its works.
To enshure a correct functionality I have added a lot of new testsuites, too.

Serialize module add, bugfix in texture loading under Linux

kim.kulling — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 09:09:17 +0000

Salacryl has added his Serialize module to load differnt file formats like images, meshes, models, level etc. .At this moment the module supports no features, its only a reprasentation for the underlying design. At this moment we have started with the implementations.

I have fixed a problem of the linux model loader. If the material description use different path separators than the os specific one, the loading process to get a valid texture iinstance failed. This hsould be fixed.

I have started to solve some performance problems in the obj-loader.

Scons build supports debug and testsuite

kim.kulling — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 12:49:26 +0000

I have add the test suite to our scons build. Now it will create an application names testingd, which starts all hard coded tests. It is also possible to start the ZFXCE in a debugger (only tested under linux Debian etch).

Best regards

Kimmi