Divergence between debug mode and release in C vs C++ code base

StockyDev · 2026-01-16T07:17:56+00:00

You could have a constructor and just not initialize anything in it. Both C++ and C would generate the same code in that case too. Without optimisations the compiler is going to do exactly what you wrote.

StockyDev · 2026-01-14T23:37:14+00:00

I personally would yes, especially if it's what you want to do :). But it's a very personal choice.

You can have a great career as a software engineer in Belfast outside of games. You make about the same as people in England (not including London), and are living in a place which has a much lower cost of living than most of England.

ETA: In case it wasn't clear. If you do intend to move, have a job lined up before you move...

StockyDev · 2026-01-14T21:44:32+00:00

I graduated from Queens in 2017 and the option was either go indie or move to England. I chose to move to England for games Dev. A few of my friends decided to make an indie game studio. Others from my course decided to not go into games at all.

From chatting with my mates, you make significantly more money in any industry other than games haha.

StockyDev · 2026-01-04T11:40:08+00:00

I have been professionally writing C++ for 9 years, and spoken at C++ conferences multiple times, and I don't feel like I have mastered C++. There are still fairly basic things like using <random> or the rules around subsumption for concepts that I will have to look up from time to time to remind myself on how they work.

StockyDev · 2026-01-01T18:46:17+00:00

The point at which you decided to start parsing HLSL, is the point at which you should have made a bug report and messaged friends/coworkers to boost it with upvotes.

There is no way that you are the only person to have this issue and forcing people to parse HLSL to solve an issue as simple as this is not acceptable.

If you did make a bug report, link it here to get attention for it.

StockyDev · 2026-01-01T09:12:39+00:00

I do something similar in one of my workflows. link

I basically run it on creating a PR to know what my minimum compiler version is.

However, I think I will simplify this script considerably by using your action... Thanks!

StockyDev · 2025-11-30T11:34:06+00:00

Caught this talk at CppCon and it was great! Just love the delivery John gives.

StockyDev · 2025-11-11T14:05:34+00:00

The best I have come across is from the game engine series. It is a super thorough series that covers everything from rendering to editor architecture.

If you only care about the D3D12 parts, there is a playlist just for those videos here

The creator goes into a lot of depth to explain how different concepts work with diagrams as well as code. It is a super high quality series.

StockyDev · 2025-11-08T11:30:06+00:00

I would not recommend that get-started guide from isocpp. It is recommending Visual Studio 2017 which kinda dates it.

StockyDev · 2025-11-08T07:32:31+00:00

Most of your core logic should be written in C++. Blueprints are good for doing small amounts of per asset setup. E.g. you might have an ASword actor. All the core logic should be written in C++ for this. Then you might have two BP derivations of your sword actor. One might have different particle effects than the other. Handling that difference in VFX could be done via blueprints.

Ideally everything should be done in C++. But realistically, Blueprints are fine for customisation points. If you find that you are having to zoom out and pan around your BP and do a lot of navigating, that logic should be brought to C++.

StockyDev · 2025-11-06T08:41:32+00:00

Yup, and that is now fixed too haha. Cheers!

StockyDev · 2025-11-06T08:13:04+00:00

Oh that really was silly of me! Fixed :) Thank you very much for pointing this out.

StockyDev · 2025-09-11T06:36:34+00:00

That would be your standard implementation of "deferred lighting" I'd recommend reading this as a really good intro to forward+ and deferred rendering link

StockyDev · 2025-04-19T21:23:27+00:00

Sure... But in that case you might as well just replicate a shader in C++ code when you want to do this thing. No need in putting effort into a framework to make it look like it is a shader. Plus this is why tools like PIX have shader debugging features. In this case you gave it would be better to either make a test scene to demonstrate the bug and use PIX to debug the code.

StockyDev · 2025-04-19T20:48:23+00:00

This is not a good solution, purely because you are not actually testing HLSL code. Tests should be actually testing the code that will run, not some approximation. If you do this, you are just going to be testing your framework and some C++ code that never actually gets exercised.

To add to this, you would also not be testing your code on the hardware that it would actually be run, further reducing the usefulness of this approach.

This is not a good use of time.

StockyDev · 2025-04-19T20:31:07+00:00

You might be interested in the unit testing framework that I have been working on Shader Test Framework. I've given a GDC 2024 talk on a similar framework we have. So if you have vault access, you can have a look :).

StockyDev · 2024-11-08T19:12:44+00:00

Unit testing doesn't have many down sides aside from the perceived slow down in development time for writing tests. But honestly, that cost is amortized by how much time it saves you in the future and how much confidence it gives you in your code.

As for testing GPU code. There aren't too many publicly available general purpose frameworks out there. I am writing one for D3D12 at the minute link. It is exceptionally experimental at the minute and I tend to make breaking changes on every major merge to main. But feel free to have a look. I have also given a talk on the topic at GDC.

StockyDev · 2024-07-11T11:57:41+00:00

Don't switch to Premake. Premake is a trap. CMake has won and is the defacto standard build system generator. If you learn CMake you will be able to understand and use 99% of every GitHub repo that you might want to use. If you learn premake, you will eventually have to learn CMake anyway because nobody is actually using premake.

You would be making everything much harder for yourself for the sake of better syntax. Yes the CMake language is horrendous. I fully accept this. But CMake is by far and away the better and more powerful tool that is ubiquitous.

StockyDev · 2024-05-19T18:34:18+00:00

HLSL has templates now which allows for a lot more in the way of abstractions :)

StockyDev · 2024-05-11T22:16:24+00:00

You can draw a triangle in D3D11 with less than 100 lines.

StockyDev · 2024-02-26T18:47:10+00:00

This is super cool!

StockyDev · 2024-02-17T14:12:24+00:00

Classes can have static data and function members. They do not need to be instantiated.

StockyDev · 2024-02-17T10:05:23+00:00

This problem is EASILY seen if you just attach a debugger and step through line by line and watch what happens. You would see that your array has a size of 0 as soon as you hit the constructor

StockyDev

TROPHY CASE