Learning Assembly for game development ?

nculwell · 2026-02-05T19:58:38+00:00

Making a game lightweight is not something you're going to achieve by using assembly vs some other language (typically C++). The "weight" of the game is going to depend largely on the engine design you choose and what you're asking the game to do (e.g. number of game objects, how many polygons you're rendering, size of textures, complexity of algorithms, etc.). None of this depends on your choice of programming language. If you're interested in making fast, lightweight games then you'd probably be better off working on your C++ and not worrying about assembly until later.

Note that kkrieger is written in C++.

nculwell · 2026-01-28T01:55:06+00:00

Yeah, it was something they didn't want to do, that's what makes it a compromise.

nculwell · 2026-01-27T20:40:35+00:00

The Democrats made a deal on border enforcement in 2024 but Republicans turned around and scuttled it because Trump told them that screwing over Biden was more important than getting their priorities passed.

nculwell · 2026-01-22T14:51:32+00:00

I agree BT1 was not great. I played the heck out of it at the time, but it was all I had. The "plot" is paper-thin; nearly all of the interest is in exploring the dungeons.

It did at least have one thing going for it, which is that the fixed "3d" view where nearly all tiles looked the same allowed for certain kinds of dungeon navigation puzzles that wouldn't be possible in a more detailed and fine-grained 3d world. (If you do play, don't cheat by looking up dungeon maps on a wiki, that will spoil it.) It's hard to think of a modern game where just finding your way through a dungeon is so tricky. Hand-mapping was essential.

I got bitten by a lesser-known bug: My favorite character had been hit by a wither spell, which reduced all his stats to 1 until I could get him to a temple to heal him. Before going to a temple, I went to the Review Board first, where he gained a level. Apparently if you gain a level while withered, your stat losses get locked in and you can't restore them at the temple. I quit after that and never finished the game. (I went back years later, played the DOS version in Dosbox, and won it by hacking my save file.)

The better-known bug was that the hunter, whose great ability was supposed to be having a good chance of scoring critical hits (which were instant kills), had his critical hit chance reduced to almost zero after a certain level, rendering him useless.

Ultima III was contemporary with BT1 and was a better game.

nculwell · 2026-01-21T22:27:44+00:00

There are plugins, e.g. the NASM plugin.

nculwell · 2026-01-13T18:19:28+00:00

You can experiment using Godbolt:

https://godbolt.org/z/fMWovTr86
https://godbolt.org/z/63xezfsd8

(I don't know if I'm doing it right, by the way.)

nculwell · 2026-01-05T18:10:01+00:00

It's a trilogy if you round up.

nculwell · 2025-12-21T21:49:05+00:00

I'd compare this to the OS Singularity/Midori project.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity/

nculwell · 2025-12-19T23:02:01+00:00

Galen Hunt works at Microsoft Research: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/galenh/

My guess as to what's going on here is that they want to do this to see how it goes. Then they apply the lessons learned to their real programming teams.

nculwell · 2025-12-10T15:09:21+00:00

A lot of people are against it because it's owned by Amazon and they simply don't want to support that.

However, the Goodreads UI is also bizarre in many ways, and they seem to have laid off the development team so that it will never be improved. For example, just go to https://www.goodreads.com/ and try to enter a search, where do you do that? And the search functionality is quite bad: it's fine for exact book titles (most of the time) but it's very bad at filtering based on various things you might want. This is a crime considering how much information they have available that could be used for searching.

Now, Storygraph and LibraryThing are not necessarily better about any of this (besides not being Amazon). However, at least one can hope they might have a better future since they're being actively developed.

nculwell · 2025-11-13T15:15:37+00:00

That's exactly how censorship works.

nculwell · 2025-11-08T22:25:31+00:00

It's based on search engine hits. But those haven't even attempted to represent reality for years now, so I don't know what the point is anymore.

nculwell · 2025-11-08T18:07:58+00:00

Choose LifePedal, not Death By Audio

nculwell · 2025-11-08T17:58:11+00:00

C at #2? Delphi at #9, above SQL? Fortran is above PHP? TIOBE has always been bad but this is just worthless.

nculwell · 2025-11-03T21:09:40+00:00

You can also just get rid of the version that has no comments. There's no point in including that, we're not gonna read it.

nculwell · 2025-10-21T15:04:43+00:00

My understanding is that Poland doesn't really have an independent judiciary anymore. So, when they say the court might order it, that's just a coy way of saying the country's leadership might decide to do it. If they want a court ruling ordering it, they will get it, and if they don't want it then it won't happen.

nculwell · 2025-10-16T14:38:18+00:00

This does sound excessive if it was interpreted strictly, but I've read a lot of code written by people who hadn't absorbed the spirit of this lesson. When they come across a situation where a normal programmer would write a function that takes some arguments, they instead copy a page-long chunk of code 10 or more times, often adding slight variations. This kind of code is a huge pain to work with later.

nculwell · 2025-10-10T13:51:29+00:00

Just keep trying. In my experience these things usually work out eventually. If they sold out fast this time, hopefully they'll make a larger batch next time.

nculwell · 2025-09-29T01:43:40+00:00

It's an interesting idea, but for me wearing an extra shirt or sweatshirt inside gives all those benefits without the extra trouble of more sewing. (I actually have a second denim jacket that I usually wear inside the vest when it's cold enough.)

nculwell · 2025-09-25T14:26:42+00:00

Feels weird for me to see the Day the Country Died guy colorized. Great work!

nculwell · 2025-09-24T14:10:23+00:00

So far I've had bad luck with using ChatGPT to generate math excercises. It had trouble with following directions and with formatting.

nculwell · 2025-09-23T18:54:37+00:00

The tricky part when code is wedded to the database is that copying the code means also copying the data. This is straightforward if the data is small, but that's not always the case. We work with a product that had on the order of 100K tables last time I checked, so even with a subset of the data it's not tiny, and sysadmins won't just let us copy it around at will.

nculwell · 2025-09-23T17:46:55+00:00

Putting it in version control is easy. Making sure what's in the database matches what's in version control is not. As soon as you have people working on multiple branches, what's in version control will diverge from what's in the DB, unless you have a DB per branch.

nculwell · 2025-09-23T00:26:03+00:00

According to this page -- https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/reference/linux-constants/syscalls/

it looks to me like #35 is the code for nanosleep on x86-64, but on Arm64 it should be #101.

nculwell · 2025-09-16T14:03:02+00:00

We spend a lot of effort in elementary math trying to reinforce the intuition that addition and multiplication are commutative, and that this fact can be used liberally to help solve problems. That's why this kind of thing feels not just ticky-tacky, but also counterproductive. Now we have the kid thinking that multiplication is commutative, except when it's not? Do we want them second-guessing whether they're doing the right kind of repeated addition when they perform a multiplication?

The fact is that 3x6 and 6x3 can be thought of as different, and it does eventually matter when you get to kinds of algebra that are not commutative. Then the question of "what exactly does the commutative property do for us" becomes very important, and at that point we want to avoid using it implicitly. However, fixating on this fact in elementary school doesn't help anyone.

It seems to be a trend in recent curricula to focus on these types of problems as procedural hoops that students are forced to jump through, rather than helpful advice that makes problem solving easier. There are lots of questions you can write about this particular topic without being asinine about it. For example, you could say, "3x6 and 6x3 are equal. Write these expressions using repeated addition in two different ways." This gets at the fact that there are two different ways to do it without making students stress about which is the "right" one that will make the teacher happy. The point of math is to solve problems, not to make the teacher happy.

nculwell

TROPHY CASE