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By now, it should (hopefully) be common knowledge that the term “zero cost abstraction” is a lie. To be fair, it’s more of a misnomer – had the term been “abstraction likely to result in zero runtime overhead after optimizations” then it would have been much more honest, but I can see why that didn’t fly…

Most C++ developers tend to accept the fact that “zero cost abstractions” provide zero runtime overhead only with optimizations enabled, and that they have a negative impact on compilation speed. The same developers tend to believe that the benefits of such abstractions are so valuable that having your program perform poorly in debug mode (i.e. without optimizations enabled) and compile more slowly is worth it.

I used to be one of them.

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It felt wrong to not participate in the Wordle craze, and what better way of doing so than by creating a purely compile-time version of the game in C++20? I proudly present to you… Wordlexpr!

(You can play Wordlexpr on Compiler Explorer.)

Carry on reading to understand the magic behind it!

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A few months ago, I finished implementing the replay and secure leaderboard system for my game Open Hexagon, and it has worked very well so far. I’ve used a few interesting techniques and tricks to (1) achieve deterministic gameplay, (2) prevent cheating by slowing down time, and (3) prevent cheating by modifying game files which I am going to talk about in this post.

If you want to know more information about the replay system and the server/client implementation, check out the two previous devlogs here and here.

At the end of the article, I’ll also share some major milestones I’ve reached this year.

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Keeping my promise and motivation up… here’s the second installment of the Open Hexagon leaderboards devlog. I have made quite a lot of progress in the past few days, and have implemented the following features:

• Headless mode with replay validation

• Bought a Arch Linux VPS on Linode for the server

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Hello everyone!

This is going to be a DevLog about the implementation of one particular feature for my game Open Hexagon: online leaderboards.

open hexagon

First of all, what is Open Hexagon?

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The past few days have been “interesting”. My Twitter has been raided by the part of the gamedev community that doesn’t see much value in Modern C++ and prefers writing code with a very low level of abstraction. However, this time I didn’t start it, unlike a while ago…

This article (1) tells the story of the heated discussions one of my tweets spawned, (2) analyzes some common requirements and misconceptions game developers have, and (3) provides a list of Modern C++ features which every game developer should use.

Enjoy.

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Imagine that you have been designing a programming language for over 30 years and that it gradually became widely used across the globe. Some of the decisions you made at the beginning were excellent and contributed to the success of your project. Some others, however, were not the best: over the years you and your users realized that the world would have been a better place if those choices you made eons ago were slightly different.

You keep evolving your language, adding useful features and keeping it up to speed with the competition. The bad choices and older (now obsolete) constructs still linger.

You try removing the most dangerous and least used aspects of the language, and while their dismissal is highly successful, some users will undoubtedly be hindered by it. For more popular constructs, you attempt deprecation: a large part of the community welcomes it and migrates their codebases, while another finds the work required to achieve conformance either unjustifiably large or impossible due to legacy dependencies or licensing issues.

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