A number of readers asked questions about programming careers, both about getting into game-development as well as staying employed in software engineering. I started writing a comment to JM about age-discrimination but it turned into this blog post about getting a great software engineering job. JM asked: How did you manage to stay in this […]
Archives for July 2012
The making of Warcraft part 1
July 25, 2012 by 103 Comments
Back before the dawn of time, which is to say when PC games were written for the DOS operating system, I got to work on a game called Warcraft. I get to lead a project! While I had developed several PC games, a couple of Mac games, and seven console titles for the Super Nintendo […]
Scaling Guild Wars for massive concurrency
July 24, 2012 by 17 Comments
TL;DR: Server-side game recording is awesome for performing scalability testing, as well as reproducing game bugs and enabling players to replay their game experiences. How to load-test game servers In anticipation of the launch of Guild Wars 2 in August I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of the techniques we used […]
Detect client disconnects using named pipes in C#
July 23, 2012 by 19 Comments
TL;DR: Solved – after several failed attempts I discovered how to detect client disconnects when using named pipes in C# — the article below includes relevant code snippets from my CSNamedPipes GitHub project. In my spare time — of which there’s not much since I have four kids — I’ve been helping someone solve a […]
Error handling using forever-loop
July 23, 2012 by 17 Comments
One of the biggest hassles in programming is handling error conditions. It’s also one of the most important parts to get right because improperly handled errors lead to security defects and general unhappiness of your users. Error-handling code sucks because it complicates the flow of the code that does real work. Consequently, most programming articles […]
