When you write: char strA[] = "Hexlo World!"; strA[2] = 'l'; Everything works as expected. But what about: char *strP = "Hexlo World!"; strP[2] = 'l'; Do you think it will work correctly? If you are not sure, then I guess, you might be interested in the rest of article.

As I wrote in the Introduction to the particle series, I’ve got only a simple particle renderer. It uses position and color data with one attached texture. In this article you will find the renderer description and what problems we have with our current implementation. The Series Initial Particle Demo Introduction Particle Container 1 - problems Particle Container 2 - implementation Generators & Emitters Updaters Renderer (this post) Introduction to Optimization Tools Optimizations Code Optimizations Renderer Optimizations Summary Introduction The gist is located here: fenbf / ParticleRenderer

Recently, I’ve written an article about using a .NET third party library to generate reports from apps. You can find it on this in my previous post. In my opinion, the whole idea might be useful, for instance, for performance tests. I often try to make such in my blog.

Recently ended DConf 2014 conference was, as usually, a great event filled with interesting topics about the D language. I still need to update my little knowledge about the language and see more presentations, but one keynote especially drew my attention. This was a talk from Scott Meyers called The Last Thing D Needs.

In one of my previous post I wrote about performance differences between using vector<Obj> and vector<shared_ptr<Obj>>. Somehow I knew that the post is a bit unfinished and need some more investigation. This time I will try to explain memory access patterns used in my code and why performance is lost in some parts.

In our particle system we have already a basic foundation: the container and the framework. Now we need some modules that can actually wake particles. In this post I will describe the emitter module and generators. The Series Initial Particle Demo Introduction Particle Container 1 - problems Particle Container 2 - implementation Generators & Emitters (this post) Updaters Renderer Introduction to Optimization Tools Optimizations Code Optimizations Renderer Optimizations Summary Introduction Basic design:

After watching some of the talks from Build 2014 - especially “Modern C++: What You Need to Know” and some talks from Eric Brumer I started thinking about writing my own test case. Basically I’ve created simple code that compares vector<Obj> vs vector<shared_ptr<Obj>> The first results are quite interesting so I thought it is worth to describe this on the blog.

One of the most crucial part of a particle system is the container for all particles. It has to hold all the data that describe particles, it should be easy to extend and fast enough. In this post I will write about choices, problems and possible solutions for such container.

Just a quick summary of a great presentation from Build 2014 called Native Code Performance on Modern CPUs: A Changing Landscape. The presenter Eric Brumer (from Visual C++ Compiler Team) talked, in quite unique way, about deep down details of code optimizations. Why it is better to use compiler to do the hard work.

Particle systems are awesome! Not only can you create amazing effects, but you can also optimize code and push even more and more pixels to the screen. This post series will cover how to design a flexible particle system and apply a bunch of optimizations to run it faster. Flexible means that it can be used in real applications and for a variety of graphics effects.

For some time I have been playing around with my particle system. It seems to be a very interesting experiment to do! Today I just want to present some of current results and thoughts on future development. So far I managed to create three different effects: star tunnel: just round position generator + position update attractors: four attractors that affect acceleration of each particle fountain: simple collision detection with a floor Let us see some of the results…

Finally I have managed to publish my awesome water simulation! I know that I wrote about my intentions to publish the project some time ago but as usually there was no enough time :) The code is quite old and was ready something like 2 years ago. As usually I wanted to polish it and thanks to that it was blocked for too long period of time.