Mister C was a cool guy. C could make amazing things with just ordinary text files. He used to grab bunch of them and produce magic binary forms. He could make a spinning cube, web server, or even an operating system. One time he was running through a plain header file.

This year (2012) and the previous one were good time for C++ language. We have the new standard: C++0x became C++11. What is more important is that the language will definitely not be forgotten and new ideas and plans are coming! Another key thing is that Cpp is used in a lot of new spaces - for instance in WinRT, C++ AMP, QT5 with C++11 support and more.

In this post I would like to share with you my thoughts and ideas behind mouse selection. This is important technique for any interactive apps. There are several ways of doing the picking in OpenGL: Using selection/feedback mode in OpenGL. Since OGL3.0 this feature is deprecated. I suggest not using it.

What is faster: double or float? For a long time, I’ve been simply using floats - I thought they’re faster and smaller than doubles… it is also an obvious choice in graphics programming. But what about doubles? Are they that bad? It seems that the answers is not that obvious!

Just few minutes ago I’ve found an interesting option for Visual Studio. It can dramatically speed up compilation time. For instance, one of my project was rebuilding 19 sec, now it is 12 sec. It’s called “/MP” - Multi Process Compilation - and you can add it to the command line for compiler in VS (I’ve tested it on VS2008 and VS2010).

For some time I’ve tried to investigate why my OpenGL applications use almost 100% of CPU. The apps usually were quite simple, but still, CPU was heavily loaded. As it appears, the reason was quite simple: I had a window message loop (in WinApi) which was not perfectly implemented. So, how to lower the CPU consumption rate?

Recently, I’ve found something interesting in Visual Studio that improved my Logger! I had a function called AddMsg /** appends message to the log file */ void AddMsg(LOG_MODE m, int level, char* strModule, char *strMsg, ...); But, when you wanted to add a comment you needed to use quite complicated and long syntnax, like:

Let’s start blogging! Previously I had a wordpress blog, but I got hacked and I needed to move to some other platform. I had had some experience with the Blogger before, so I thought I give it a chance. In this place I will write about my experience with programming in general.