John Carmack take on C code arrangements
John Carmack is a major games developer involved with DOOM, Quake and many other titles. Recently some past things he wrote were published and its interesting particular about inlined code.
You can read the piece here, but I’ll just copy a little bit out. Which of these three coding styles do you prefer?
------- style A:
void MinorFunction1( void ) {
}
void MinorFunction2( void ) {
}
void MinorFunction3( void ) {
}
void MajorFunction( void ) {
MinorFunction1();
MinorFunction2();
MinorFunction3();
}
--------- style B:
void MajorFunction( void ) {
MinorFunction1();
MinorFunction2();
MinorFunction3();
}
void MinorFunction1( void ) {
}
void MinorFunction2( void ) {
}
void MinorFunction3( void ) {
}
---------- style C:
void MajorFunction( void ) {
// MinorFunction1
// MinorFunction2
// MinorFunction3
}If you look at the source of Asteroids, you’d probably notice I’m more of an A or B person. I do like readability. Though if you looked back at the assembler code I wrote 30 odd years ago, it was not very modular. I used functions very rarely back then. In those days, you had to do a lot of tricks like unrolling loops to get that extra bit of performance. Now, it’s not quite as important and I’m happy to make it readable.
So I got round to writing that SDL vs TTF timing comparison. However I had to make a few assumptions. The program was written for Windows but easily converts to Linux (apart from the timing code but I did that 
Back in the day (2011) I did a bit of Flash game development. It was a curious technology compared to what I was used to. It was originally a way of scripting graphics and other media but really took off when ActionScript, a programming language very much based on JavaScript was introduced.
There’s a saying “Don’t assume- it makes an ass of U and me“, and I er fell foul of this a month ago. A couple of months ago I setup a cheap VPS. It was one of those that you pay every month. What I didn’t realise was you are explicitly meant to renew the hosting every month and they send you an email with a link. Of course what did I do?, I er forgot to renew it. Annoyingly, I’d installed Virtualmin, redirected a domain and bought a cheap SSL certificate. All lost.
The final game will use graphics but those graphics will be based on characters, so I’ve started off by drawing a room or two using the provided extended ASCII characters.
This follows on from yesterday’s post about creating QR Codes. How about creating a web game similar to the Choose Your own Adventure type games but with a difference? I did think about implementing this as a proof of concept and may yet still but ideas are worthless until executed so I’m happy to put this out there. Here are a few notes on a proposed web QR game.
Sometimes you come across a design that is sheer simplicity, could not be easier to use and it just works. That QR code you will not be surprised takes you to this very website!
Don’t expect this to be Call of Duty standard but then those games typically have a 50GB or higher footprint on disk. 
It has been a few months since I last used it and as you’d expect, it took a little bit of time and effort to get things back to what they were.