The random ramblings of a French programmer living in Norway...
2021
  ACF and XCF
Tue 5th October 2021   

Now that I've given some information about how the way levels were designed and scripted, time to talk about the Xtra 3D Motion!

  Timeco Trivia Time
Tue 3rd August 2021   

Modern games tend to follow a rigorous top-down design approach, where a lead designer comes up with the core elements of the game, and is in charge of validating how these are actually implemented.

At Adeline, the process was a lot more organic, and a lot of things happened just because somebody thought about it, which resulted in games having many easter eggs, weird references, insider jokes, etc...


  Level creation workflow
Thu 29th July 2021   

When the work started on Time Commando, the most common type of CD-ROM drives were 2x models, barely able to load 300 Kilobytes of data per second.

What that mean is that we better had to be smart if we really wanted to use full motion video!

2011
  Simple C++ threading
Sun 20th February 2011   
For some reason, people tend to think that creating multi-threaded applications in C++ is a very difficult thing to do.

It is in fact not that difficult, but there are basically two main issues to consider: How to make the code correct (it should not crash, deadlock, corrupt data, etc...) and how to make it efficiently use as many cores as possible.

2010
  I can see the wall out there
Sat 23rd January 2010   
... yes, there is a wall.

We've been told for a while that the wall was here, and that we should prepare for it. Get the equipment ready, get the bodies and mind in good shape, this kind of thing. But well, you know how it works, we tend to wait until the very last moment before we change our habits.

But sometimes changing the habits is not enough. Sometimes you need more than that, you need to find alternatives that works... assuming they actually exist.