Wicked Engine

Wandering in YouTube again, I found a video about game development from scratch announcing the new version of Wicked Engine. It has a simple user interface but a lot of things implemented. Check it out:

Wicked Engine gets more... Wicked!

When I open the official Engine website, I see the Nazaré meme on the top. It made me wonder if it was made by a Brazilian, but no. Anyway, it made me laugh. 

The 'About' section states that that Wicked is a Game Engine, but if you don't want to use it that way, there are some programming tips, hopefully useful for the reader. That's what I want for my Arena Engine too. Also, one of the Wicked's features is the possibility of using it through C++, or the scripting language, Lua. This is important to me because if you are a better C++ programmer than a Lua one, you are not obligated to learn it, or if you don't want to deal with C++, you can create something faster with a higher level language. 

So, this is another Engine code available on Github for my study alongside with Hazel, as a source material. Hope this is useful for you too.

Python and its Creator

Python has a fairly recent history too, as C++. And I'm impressed to say "fairly" because it was in 1992. Time is catching up. Anyway, this is a language created to minimize the effort of the programmer to write code and to read it¹. This was a problem faced in the beggining of the 90's, and the easyness of Python to be teached to kids, and maybe good timing to rise on the community, led it to success along the years. 

Until today, we can see the initial goal of the Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, still being reached: increase productivity¹. Even though the language is maintained by another group, without Guido. One of the best examples of this, in my point of view, are the current libraries for convolutional neural networks, a.k.a, deep learning nets. I was always afraid of start studying them, for I knew they were complex. But then, I saw how it was handled by Python, the high level, and the fear was gone. That's the power I think Python has.

There is an interview with Guido I found on YouTube (yes, I spend a lot of time on YouTube, so I'll cite it in this blog very often), where Guido says at 07:54 to 08:20:

"If I had been smart, I would have done somenthing like take the Perl interpreter and port that into Amoeba. And nobody would have heard of me again. But I was like... I felt if it was going to be a hobby project anyway, I might as well do something that I thought it was really fun."   

Creator of Python, Guido van Rossum | Oxford Union

That surprised me. It describes exactly what made me start pursuing my interest of working in the entertainment industry. And I'm starting it here.

Again, I think its great to see the contributors of computer science sharing the same time as us. Quoting another channel I like:

"What a time to be alive!"

Two Minute Papers

¹https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python

C++ and its Creator

I've been reading and watching videos about C++ to start my new page about it and I wanted to begin with a background history. I noticed that we study the creation but not the creator of it. Maybe because he or she lived a long time ago, there is not enough information of them, or we already have so much to learn that the author becomes irrelevant or only deserves a footnote. But in computer science, we can find some big contributors of this field alive. 

The first time I realized it, was at the SVR 2019 conference, which I participated to present my paper. There was an international guest for the main lecture (also the first of the event). It was very interesting, funny, and the audience made relevant questions in the end. Then I searched for his work to know more, and I found a wikipedia page telling that he was the author of the Perlin Noise, which I heard about in my class of Image Processing. Then I remembered that Ed Catmul, of the Catmul splines, is also alive. The same happens to the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, and until 2018, at least, he stills lecturing about his main creation (or the one that made him famous). 

Maybe you really don't mind about the people, but for me, this brings the creation closer to me and makes me more curious and inspired. Because people are the ones that make changes. 

If you're interested too, here is a video of Bjarne talking about the creation of C++:

The Design of C++, by Bjarne

Basic Materials

This is a list of materials I use for studying programming. The first ones are the book for modern C++ by Scott Meyers (Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14), and the book for Python by Mark Lutz (Learning Python). You can find them online but I find it better to have them on my hands. The C++ book is available in portuguese, but the Python one, only in english for the most updated edition (and over a 1500 pages... Ok, better have it as ebook).

When I'm tired of reading, there are these two YouTube channels I follow:

• The Cherno
• Bisqwit

The Cherno has a playlist for C++ and Game Engine creation. I'll basically follow his instructions and adapt it to my goal of building a visualization tool before the game engine. And Bisqwit has videos about programming many sort of things, yet related to my interests in maintaining this blog, which are rendering and C++. Some other subjects as compilers, games cracking, and emulators are curious to me. For now I'm not going to dive into these ones, or I'll loose focus.

Any other relevant channel, book, or paper I find will be credited as well.

See you soon!

Hello World!

Not the most creative title, but captures the feeling of this new blog. This is a blog for me to write down the steps of developing some code about visualization, game engine and possibly a full game for every one around the world to see. Before begining this journey, a few notes:

• I'm not native american, so my english is simple. Feel free to point out any misunderstanding or misspell and to comment in english or portuguese (I'm brazillian), or maybe in japanese, since I study it for quite a long time.
• Due to the interests I pointed out, most of the code will be written in C++. I use Python mostly for generating graphics or when a tool is manipulated by this language. C# is on my list of languages to learn.
  
• Every code I produce will be stored at GitHub (https://github.com/LilianeRA/), and the projects will be created with CMake.
• I value compatibility between operating systems, so I'll test my code on Linux and Windows (I don't have access to a Mac, sorry).
• Posts will be as regular as possible. My attention is focused on here, drawing lessons, ballet, my job as researcher scholarship, and my beloved elder dog, Sophie (she gets the most of it).

That's it for now. See you soon!