Kynosarges

Tektosyne 4.4.0 Released

Chris Nahr — 2010-03-04

Uploaded Tektosyne 4.4.0 with a “braided” search tree, again taken from Computational Geometry and Computer Graphics in C++ by Michael J. Laszlo. This is a binary search tree with randomized balancing whose nodes are connected by a doubly-linked list for very fast enumeration in key sorting order. I was pleasantly surprised that other operations are also much faster than the BCL’s red-black BST. The average speedup for adding, enumeration, searching, and removing elements is 160% for presorted keys and 60% for random keys.

I had not really planned to implement a fast search tree at this time, but Laszlo’s multiline intersection algorithm works best with his own BST. Going forward I’ll tackle this algorithm and then polygon intersection, but I also want to figure out some way to generally represent geometric primitives (line segments, polygons) with extra connectivity information so they can be used for any geometric algorithm.

Book Reviews: Windows via C/C++ & Using MSBuild

Chris Nahr — 2010-02-24

Added two belated reviews for books that were published in 2008 and 2009, respectively. First, Programming Applications for Windows is now Windows via C/C++ by Jeffrey Richter & Christophe Nasarre, and unsurprisingly it’s still the standard guide to Windows systems programming.

Second, Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and William Bartholomew is the comprehensive guide to MSBuild that .NET developers have been waiting for since 2005. Definitely get this book if you ever intend to manually edit MSBuild scripts.

Tektosyne 4.3.3 Released

Chris Nahr — 2010-02-23

Uploaded Tektosyne 4.3.3 with a generalized method to locate an arbitrary point relative to a line segment, courtesy of Computational Geometry and Computer Graphics in C++ by Michael J. Laszlo.

As you can see I’m stitching together algorithms from several sources since there is no comprehensive textbook of immediately usable code yet. There’s the classic Computational Geometry by de Berg et al. which gives great descriptions but only high-level pseudocode – and getting implementation details right is rather tricky in this area. My first choice would be Robert Sedgewick’s Algorithms in Java series, but the volume on computational geometry won’t be published until 28th June 2010 – and then only for plain C, with the more immediately useful C++ and Java editions scheduled for September 2010 and 2011, respectively.

Website Update

Chris Nahr — 2010-02-17

Added some interesting links: Piriform has a couple of nice free Windows utilities, CodeCast is a good interview podcast for .NET developers, and Microsoft has put the F# PowerPack on CodePlex.

Tektosyne 4.3.2 Released

Chris Nahr — 2010-02-17

Uploaded Tektosyne 4.3.2 with an enhanced line intersection algorithm that returns more detailed information about the intersection.

Tektosyne 4.3.1 Released

Chris Nahr — 2010-02-12

Uploaded Tektosyne 4.3.1 with yet more geometric algorithms adapted from Joseph O’Rourke’s Computational Geometry in C . This release includes line intersection, a stepping stone for polygon intersection and planar point location.

Visual Studio 2010 Tips & Tricks

Chris Nahr — 2010-02-04

Those who fondly remember Sara Ford’s series of VS2008 tips should head over to Zain Naboulsi who is now providing the same service for the upcoming VS2010.

Tektosyne 4.3.0 Released

Chris Nahr — 2010-02-04

Uploaded Tektosyne 4.3.0 with a generous helping of computational geometry, including Fortune’s sweepline algorithm for Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, Graham’s scan for convex hulls, and a faster point-in-polygon test. The most important standard algorithm that’s still missing is point location in an arbitrary planar subdivision, which I hope to add in the next release.

Hexkit on Hold, Down with Hexagons

Chris Nahr — 2009-12-13

Hexkit development has stopped as I’m refocusing on a more realistic simulation of pre-modern warfare, which will require the kind of geometric algorithms added to the last Tektosyne release. I’ve written a Project Status update to explain this change of direction.

Book Review: Masterminds of Programming

Chris Nahr — 2009-12-12

Added a review for Masterminds of Programming by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden. Sadly, this collection of interviews with famous language designers turned out rather less interesting than one might hope. Wait for a price drop.

Tektosyne 4.2.0 & Hexkit 4.2.1 Released

Chris Nahr — 2009-12-12

Uploaded Tektosyne 4.2.0 with a few changes to mathematical & geometric types, as detailed in the WhatsNew file. Hexkit 4.2.1 and a revised Hexkit User’s Guide reflect the new Tektosyne version but are otherwise unchanged. I’ll write more about this update in a future post.

Website Update

Chris Nahr — 2009-11-06

Windows PowerShell 2.0 has been released and is now part of the Windows Management Framework (Core) package, unless you’re running on Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 where it’s preinstalled. Moreover, the new PowerShellPack provides an extra set of libraries.

Microsoft has also put together handy lists of all keyboard shortcuts in Windows Vista , Windows 7 , and Internet Explorer 8 . I updated the Microsoft Links page accordingly, and also removed a number of broken or outdated links.

And in other news, Chris Morris of CNN Money fame now writes The Cut Scene at Variety.

Website Update

Chris Nahr — 2009-10-10

Added The Science Show , Slide to Play , and Touch Arcade to the Subscriptions page.

Also, Microsoft has released the final version of its free Security Essentials , a convenient all-in-one package that protects against viruses, spyware, and all kinds of malware. Preliminary reviews are excellent, so unless MSE does very poorly at detecting viruses you can expect it to quickly obsolete all those free-for-private-use versions of commercial anti-virus scanners.

Hexkit 4.2.0 Released

Chris Nahr — 2009-09-27

Uploaded Hexkit 4.2.0 with new demo scenarios and many small fixes . As promised there’s a new scenario based on the battle of Poitiers, and one hypothetical variant scenario each for Crécy and Poitiers. The Crécy variant gives the crossbowmen their pavises back, and the Poitiers variant prevents the second French division from routing prematurely.

All four scenarios are documented in the enhanced scenario guide . Finally, the User’s Guide and the screenshot page have been updated as well. There is a new screenshot for Poitiers, but I also recreated all other screenshots using Windows XP at 96 dpi in a virtual machine. The resulting image files are much smaller than the ones I took at 120 dpi on my Vista system.

Civ4 BtS Modifications Re-zipped

Chris Nahr — 2009-09-12

Seems there’s some bizarre incompatibility between Speed Commander’s built-in ZIP compression and the ZIP extraction used by 7-zip. The latter would complain about “incompatible” compression when attempting to unpack the Civilization mods I updated yesterday, even though the extraction itself was successful. I repacked the three mods with 7-zip to prevent this error message.

Civ4: BtS Patched, Re-patched & Modded

Chris Nahr — 2009-09-11

Patch version 3.19 for Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword has been released a good while ago. During the last month, the community-created Unofficial Patch and The BUG Mod have been updated for this final patch, which means I finally got to install it.

There were a couple of small changes to the Civ4UnitInfos.xml file in both the official and the unofficial patch, so I updated all the affected downloads on my Civilization page . These were the three mods adjusting espionage and unit costs. Their documented effects are still the same as in previous versions.

Tektosyne 4.1.9 Released

Chris Nahr — 2009-08-30

Uploaded Tektosyne 4.1.9 with a better MessageDialog that automatically resizes to the primary message, MessageBox-like, but not to the secondary message.

Meanwhile, the new Poitiers scenario for Hexkit is coming along nicely and should be released within the next month.

And lastly, three prominent victims of ExtremeTech’s implosion now maintain their own weblogs: Loyd Case on Improbable Insights , Jason Cross , and Joel Durham Jr. .

NDoc 2.0 Alpha with Firefox Bugfix

Chris Nahr — 2009-08-01

Franz Alex Gaisie-Essilfie has modified NDoc 2.0 Alpha to incorporate the Firefox bugfix originally discovered by Bruno Braga. See the NDoc download page for details. Thanks, Franz Alex!

Hexkit 4.1.6 & Tektosyne 4.1.8 Released

Chris Nahr — 2009-07-16

Uploaded Hexkit 4.1.6 which adds unit resource gauges to the map view. Those act as standard health bars by default but can be configured to show any unit resource, e.g. morale or ammunition. Also tweaked the implementation of standard variables – see the WhatsNew file and the revised Hexkit User’s Guide for details.

Moreover, Tektosyne 4.1.8 comes with a better XmlUtility.ReadAttributeAsEnum method and the latest NUnit version 2.5.1.

Subscriptions Update

Chris Nahr — 2009-07-08

Added Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry weblog to the Subscriptions page. I recently discovered that most of the articles in this weblog do not appear on the Eurogamer frontpage or the main RSS feed, so you’ll want to subscribe to the well-hidden separate RSS feed .

Tektosyne 4.1.7 & Hexkit 4.1.5 Released

Chris Nahr — 2009-06-27

One update is chasing another these days… Tektosyne 4.1.7 fixes several overflow crashes on 64-bit systems. Hexkit 4.1.5 incorporates this fix and resolves a crash bug when changing zoom levels during command replays.

I also replaced the rather strange desert slopes in the Crécy demo scenario with color-coded elevation steps, using the new color shift option. See Hexkit Images for a sample of the new look.

Hexkit 4.1.4 Released

Chris Nahr — 2009-06-25

Uploaded Hexkit 4.1.4 with a few fixes and a minor enhancement: you can now select any available WPF display theme for the Hexkit GUI. Finally, everyone can enjoy the green buttons of Luna Homestead! Or not.

More seriously, I’m reading up on the Battle of Poitiers which is a natural companion piece for the Crécy demo scenario. The two scenarios could share all data sections save for the map itself. There’s also an interesting AI challenge since Poitiers requires a flanking movement on the English side for historical behavior, and the Seeker algorithm currently cannot do that…

Tektosyne 4.1.6 & Hexkit 4.1.3 Released

Chris Nahr — 2009-06-21

Uploaded Tektosyne 4.1.6 with several new utility methods, including one to shift the color channels of PBGRA32 pixels & bitmaps. Hexkit 4.1.3 builds on this feature to provide a color shift option for image stack entries.

There is also a breaking change to the way image stack entries are serialized – see the WhatsNew file for details. The Hexkit User’s Guide was revised as well.

Hexkit 4.1.2 Released

Chris Nahr — 2009-06-10

Uploaded Hexkit 4.1.2 which adds a long-requested feature: static overlay images for map views. You can use them for background terrain graphics or simply as editing aids – see the WhatsNew file for details. The Hexkit User’s Guide was also revised to reflect this change.