Friday the first of several books I ordered arrived: 3D Game Engine Architecture. I didn’t have time yet to read it completely (it’s over 700 pages), but I had a quick glance at the engine that comes with it (it’s called Wild Magic) and of course the book itself, and I’m confident that it was worth the money. Really loads of interesting stuff in there, and it’s written in a clear manner. Just be aware this is not a book for people who don’t know C++ or maths well – a solid background in both areas is needed.
I’ve been playing around with Python again during the last days, writing a small script. Python is really amazing, especially when it comes to tasks where you’re working on a not-clearly defined dataset. In this particular example, the input data was corrupted, and even worse, the tool which exported it expected the same corrupted data back (in case you wonder: It was a malformed CSV file). Writing a cleanup function took me only minutes (thanks to the excellent built-in string library), same goes for the easy-to-use yet very flexible CSV parser. It took me no more than 2 hours to complete the script, including bug fixing, and in C++ it would have surely taken me twice the time.
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