Simple Kernel in C

During the second year of university, I created a kernel for the ARMv7 instruction set. I went above and beyond what was required on this project, achieving a clean design and features such as a blocked process queue, piping, kill, and a simple filesystem. This was my favourite coursework so far. I found it very interesting to learn about and implement the things that we take for granted as programmers.

Multiplayer Topdown Sandbox Game in C++

For the last two years, I have been working on a very ambitious game. The game is a top down sandbox with multiplayer support. I’m aiming towards a city-based game, where players can wander around a procedurally generated city. One of the main reasons I started creating this game is to learn about multiplayer networking at a low level - client-side prediction, server-side reconcilliation, cheat preventation, and reducing the visual effect of latency.

Stop JavaScript Promises Swallowing Exceptions

It’s very hard to debug a crash when no stack traces are printed. It becomes a case of manually trying to find the error.

GET /foo/bar/
Doing something useful
Error: Expected } near ;

ES6 promises doesn’t seem to offer the functionality to change this, and bluebird has on[Possibly]UnhandledRejection, which can only be used if you don’t add a .catch() case to the promise. There is no global callback for a rejection unless it’s unhandled. To workaround this, we’re going to need to override the method which runs the callbacks. This is a little hacky, and relies on the library not changing - but it’s better than swallowing errors.

First, if you haven’t already, install Bluebird.

npm install --save bluebird

Next, make a file somewhere (perhaps called bluebird.js) with this as its contents:

const Promise = require('bluebird')

// Throw errors in promises rather than calling reject()
// Makes debugging A LOT easier
Promise.prototype._rejectCallback_old = Promise.prototype._rejectCallback
Promise.prototype._rejectCallback =
    function(reason, synchronous, ignoreNonErrorWarnings) {
        if (reason.stack) {
            throw reasong
        } else {
            this._rejectCallback_old(reason, synchronous, ignoreNonErrorWarnings)
        }
    }

module.exports = Promise

Alternatively you could just print reason.stack if it exists, however I prefer a full crash whilst debugging. You could also make it possible for promises to declare whether they should throw errors - similar to the throw keyword in Java - and print out the stack rather than crashing in that case.

OpenCV: compile images (Mats) into a strip

I created a very short C++ snippet to accumulate a series of Mats into a single Mat strip. It works like acc = acc + m - a new mat is added to the accumulator each time, then stored in the accumulator again.

Example output
Example output 
#pragma once
#include <opencv2/opencv.hpp>
#include <opencv2/core/core.hpp>
#include <opencv2/imgcodecs.hpp>
#include <assert.h>

using namespace cv;

class MatStrip
{
public:
    Mat current;
    float scale;

    MatStrip(Mat start, float scale=0.3f):
        scale(scale)
    {
        resize(start, current, Size(start.cols * scale, start.rows * scale), 1.0, 1.0, INTER_CUBIC);
    }

    void add(const Mat &in_o)
    {
        Mat in;
        resize(in_o, in, Size(in_o.cols * scale, in_o.rows * scale), 1.0, 1.0, INTER_CUBIC);

        assert(in.type() == current.type());
        Size sz1 = current.size();
        Size sz2 = in.size();
        Mat im3(sz1.height, sz1.width+sz2.width, current.type());
        Mat left(im3, Rect(0, 0, sz1.width, sz1.height));
        current.copyTo(left);
        Mat right(im3, Rect(sz1.width, 0, sz2.width, sz2.height));
        in.copyTo(right);
        current = im3;
    }
};
How to emit a single particle using SFML's Thor Particle System

Usecase: shells dropping in sync with firing, fake bullets, etc

You must use a particle emitter to create particles, however this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to create single particles on command. You can create a particle emitter which simply adds particles from a queue to the system

#pragma once
#include <SFML/Graphics.hpp>
#include <Thor/Math.hpp>
#include <Thor/Graphics.hpp>
#include <Thor/Particles.hpp>

namespace sfext {

class SingleParticleEmitter
{
    std::vector<thor::Particle> *particles;
public:
    SingleParticleEmitter();
    SingleParticleEmitter(const SingleParticleEmitter& that);
    void operator() (thor::EmissionInterface& system, sf::Time dt);

    void push(thor::Particle particle);
    void push(sf::Vector2f position, sf::Vector2f velocity, float lifetime, float rot=0, float rotsp=0);
};

}; // end namesapce sfext

The above allows you to use the push functions to emit particles. Here is an example of it in use:

SingleParticleEmitter single_emitter;
thor::ParticleSystem particle_system;
particle_system.addEmitter(single_emitter);

// When you need to emit a shell:

single_emitter.push(origin, velocity, 1.0f);
// lifetime of the particle in seconds --^

Here is the cpp file:

#include "singleparticleemitter.hpp"

using namespace sfext;

SingleParticleEmitter::SingleParticleEmitter()
{
    particles = new std::vector<thor::Particle>();
}

SingleParticleEmitter::SingleParticleEmitter(const SingleParticleEmitter& that)
{
    particles = that.particles;
}

void SingleParticleEmitter::operator() (thor::EmissionInterface& system, sf::Time dt)
{
    for (auto particle : *particles) {
        system.emitParticle(particle);
    }
    particles->clear();
}

void SingleParticleEmitter::push(thor::Particle particle)
{
    particles->push_back(particle);
}

void SingleParticleEmitter::push(sf::Vector2f position, sf::Vector2f velocity, float lifetime, float rot, float rotsp)
{
    thor::Particle particle(sf::seconds(lifetime));
    particle.position = position;
    particle.velocity = velocity;
    particle.rotation = rot;
    particle.rotationSpeed = rotsp;
    particle.scale = sf::Vector2f(1.f, 1.f);
    particle.color = sf::Color::White;
    particle.textureIndex = 0u;
    push(particle);
}