NCTL

Welcome back to another development update for the nCine, covering what has been accomplished in the first part of this year.

Yet another update coming after a very long time since the previous, apologies for that. Well, at least it comes packed with a lot of enhancements from the last months. 💪

Quite some time has passed since the previous development update but I’m here again to talk about the latest nCine progress. By the way, in case you missed the latest article, the project has recently reached its tenth anniversary. 😉

I have spent nearly two months on a big task this spring: custom memory allocators. They can be useful in different scenarios to alleviate the performance cost of allocating and deallocating memory.

It has been a month and a half of small but useful updates for the nCine. LibPNG The PNG image loader has been modified to support more color types, by copying some code from the libpng example. It means that any nCine game is now able to properly load PNG images with palette or with gray-alpha channels and to expand or strip bit depths that are different than the standard 8 bits.

Just a few weeks after the last update here I’m again to write the next one in which I’m going to show you the performance of my new hash table implementation.

A lot of work has been carried out during the last three and a half months. First of all I have added some macros to allow asserts in the code, think about checks like this: ASSERT_MSG_X(index < size_, "Index %u is out of bounds (size: %u)", index, size_); The macro also invokes a breakpoint if a debugger is connected, allowing to inspect the context around the failure. It was a long needed feature that I finally had the time to implement. 😄