Links van 21 april 2014 tot 23 april 2014

Game Programming Patterns
Do you struggle to make your code hang together into a cohesive whole? Find it harder to make changes as your codebase grows? Feel like your game is a giant hairball where everything is intertwined with everything else? Wonder if and how design patterns apply to games? Hear things like “cache coherency” and “object pools”, but don’t know how to use them to make your game faster? I’m here to help! I wrote this book to answer those questions. It’s a collection of patterns I found in games to make code cleaner, easier to understand, and faster.

Hacking Sonos — Medium
In my spare time I’ve been writing an app that replaces the Sonos app used to control multiple speakers in one’s home. It’s been a little challenging so I thought I’d share how I got where I am. You can check out most of the code on Github. I’ll be pushing more stuff when it’s ready.

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me — and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

Game Mechanic Explorer
A collection of concrete examples for various game mechanics, algorithms, and effects. The examples are all implemented in JavaScript using the Phaser game framework, but the concepts and methods are general and can be adapted to any engine. Think of it as pseudocode. Each section contains several different examples that progress in sequence from a very basic implementation to a more advanced implementation. Every example is interactive and responds to keyboard or mouse input (or touch).

jdm314: The Dæneryd
Here is my first ever hexametric composition in High Valyrian. It's only two lines, but written to sound like the beginning of a lengthy epic: Ābre se zaldrīzī bone ivāedan hen Essot jitte ēlī Pento se Dothrakoti Embraro rȳ ondoso vējo…