Comments for Chad Stewart: Game Programmer

Comment on Run Time Type Checking In Objective-C by mitch

mitch — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:42:10 +0000

Hey, C++ supports RTTI too!

Object *object_pointer = new Object;
Whatever *thing = dynamic_cast(object_pointer);

thing will be null if Object is not pointing to a complete type (derived type) of Whatever.

You can use this the same way you might use the 'as' keyword in C#.

There is also the typeid() operator that returns a const type_info reference that has type information.

I've never really played around w/ RTTI in C++ much before so I'm not sure what all you can do w/ the type_info but I'd bet there is a way to do that factory function you have in C++ as well.

Comment on C# Anti-Pattern: try catch flow control by Exceptions, again | RobG3D

Exceptions, again | RobG3D — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:59:29 +0000

[...] ran across a post by my colleague Chad Stewart, Lead Dev Support Engineer at BioWare Austin: Try/catch control flow First of all, you ought to know that exceptions are deliberately named. That is to say, they are [...]

Comment on C# Anti-Pattern: try catch flow control by IGoByChad

IGoByChad — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 01:34:03 +0000

You know, there are cases where the try / catch block is viable, but as normal program flow, I simply can't do it. It's dirty.

Now in some server-side application, perhaps you've no good reason to go down in flames simply because some library through an exception trying to convert 1/0 to an integer. You determine if it's severe, handle it gracefully (logging, email alert, message to the user), and move on. It just shouldn't be par for the course. Routinely ignoring all exceptions is a great way to rack up that technical debt.

Comment on C# Anti-Pattern: try catch flow control by Seth Gorden

Seth Gorden — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:48:33 +0000

I have heard stories about entire applications whose error-checking is a try/catch around the main loop. Scary stuff.
Explicit error results have been quite reliable for me these days in C++ projects, and most of the checking is kept away from high-performance areas (that is, verified earlier during initialization).
All the same, it's great to see some real examples that demonstrate what happens when such checking is misplaced.
Your posts read like some of the better instructive books I own. Always looking forward to the next one.

Comment on Run Time Type Checking In Objective-C by IGoByChad

IGoByChad — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Mitch, you should know I call it RTTI because of C++! The only thing is that I have been scared silly of RTTI in games by people (teachers, leads, etc;) for performance reasons and in Obj-C, it is a pointer comparison for some operations due to the way they nest the Class member in classes. I’m not saying that RTTI is not useful in C++ or that it does not exist, merely that my first thought usually does not fall to RTTI.