Category Archives: Game Development

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

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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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Notes on Android Graphics and Animations

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This post contains my notes on the Youtube Video “Learn about Android Graphics & Animations from Google’s Android UI Toolkit Team” which shows a talk given by Romain Guy and Chet Haase from Google at the San Francisco Android User Group, Nov 20th 2010. Note that at the time of writing the video is already quite old, but much of it is still relevant and it’s well worth a watch for anybody interested in working with graphics in Android. This post is partly for me to remember and refer back to, but hopefully others will find it useful. The video is embedded below and notes can be found after the break:

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Using compressed assets in LibRocket via PhysicsFS

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LibRocket is a system that allows you to define user interface elements for OpenGL/DirectX applications in HTML and CSS. As well as being easy to get started with and powerful, this is really useful as it means you can load UI elements from files that can be edited without needing to recompile the application. It provides several interface classes that you can customise based on your current platform to allow it to play nice with any other libraries you may be using.

I’ve been storing compressed project assets using PhysicsFS, which allows for direct read/write access to compressed files such as zip files. After a little fiddling, I produced the class below that allows LibRocket to read it’s assets via PhysicsFS.

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