Choosing a maths library for cross-platform C++ game development

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Martin

I have recently been looking for a C++ maths library for use in game development projects. There are plenty of posts on websites like gamedev.stackexchange.com with suggestions for libraries but few quantitative comparisons between them. I decided to take three of the most popular libraries and run some tests of my own. Below I describe the three libraries I’ve compared with their advantages and disadvantages and then show the results of some performance tests. It’s important for me to have cross-platform compatibility, so each library selected is header only and has been tested on Mac, Linux, and Android using the NDK. The code and results are also available on GitHub for testing.

The libraries tested are:

These choices are largely influenced by reading their websites and posts at the Game Development StackExchange site:

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MDN Holiday Calendar Link Roundup

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Martin

Through the run-up to Christmas 2011, the Mozilla Developer Network has been posting a link a day in their MDN Holiday Calendar. This post serves as a collection of those posts as a time-saver, but the site is worth checking out. Note that none of this is my work, the calendar was written by Chris Heilmann with additional links provided by Luke Crouch, Robert Nyman and Rob Hawkes. Source code is available on GitHub and there is a making of tutorial: Part 1 – Part 2.

Also note: this isn’t an error, at the time of writing numbers 2 and 10 point to the same URL. Number 10 also seems to have a broken quote with half missing! Despite this, some of these articles are really interesting!

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Cross-compiling FreeType for Android with CMake

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Martin

Freetype provides a Makefile with a configure utility that makes it fairly easy to cross-compile for other platforms, however there are a lot of examples on the web (as well as some solutions) of people having difficulty in it.

My intention is to cross-compile FreeType using the Android NDK into a static library that can ultimately be used by libRocket for font rendering in HTML+CSS based UIs in OpenGL applications. I’m using the CMake build system for cross-platform builds and the android-cmake project to create a CMake toolchain for the NDK. This requires creating a CMakeLists.txt for FreeType as it doesn’t currently provide one.

The CMakeLists.txt file included below is based on the FreeType-2.4.8 release and is a result of converting the Jamfile and Makefile to CMake. Its intention is simply to allow compilation with CMake. For standard build and installs I would recommend following the instructions in the docs/INSTALL file from the FreeType directory. Note: This file will try and build *all* of FreeType2′s modules as defined in include/freetype/config/ftmodule.h. If you don’t want to build some of these modules please edit that file and remove the macro calls. Continue reading →