A few minutes before 2PM ET on Monday, the crew of Artemis II broke a record set 56 years ago by the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission - at over 248,655 miles, they have now traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them. They marked the occasion with a crater naming ceremony that left the […]

RollerCoaster Tycoon, a classic game from 1999 is still worth dissecting for its performance to this day. First a quick primer on bit shifting (new to me—I’m used to high level languages!):

What the << operator does here [NewValue = OldValue << 2] is called bit shifting, meaning all the bits that store the value of the variable are shifted to the left, in this case by two positions, with the new digits being filled in with zeros. Since the number is stored in a binary system, every shift to the left means the number is doubled.

Since this is a lot faster than multiplication, Chris Sawyer decided to exploit this as much as possible:

The even more interesting point about those calculations, however, is how often the code is able to do this. Obviously, bit shifting can only be done for multiplications and divisions involving a power of two, like 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. The fact that it is done that often indicates that the in-game formulas were specifically designed to stick to those numbers wherever possible, which in most modern development workflows is basically an impossibility.

I do want to disagree with that last bit. Impossibility sounds too harsh. We can’t decide the requirements for stakeholders, but plenty of things aren’t as set in stone as they seem. It’s our job to nudge things in the right direction, so the result works with the grain of our programs.

Sarah Nassauer / Wall Street Journal:
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Secrets of Strixhaven's new Commander precons are still going for MSRP, but I don't know if that'll hold.

digidude23: Is Apple creating updates for 3rd party apps now? This update from Apple will improve the functionality of this app. No new features are included. iSan4eZ: Apple inserted this text into my app and issued an update with the same version. I’m sure about it as I update the app on my phone as […]