Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Housekeeping

I recently inherited the house of my grandfather, and now have a lot more housekeeping to do than earlier. Somehow, this might have helped me in my decision to do some housekeeping with Cake. Those of you who have programmed probably know the feeling: even if you started out with a more or less clean concept (I certainly didn't with Cake), things eventually get out of hand. You add an idea here, put in a quick fix there, and before you know it, your code is unreadable and unmaintainable. That's about the state that Cake was in before my summer holidays in the Austrian mountains. There, besides reading the Harry Potter finale and climbing some mountains, I cleaned up Cake's source code during two whole weeks. That much time is necessary, since you really have to stand back, and get an overview over your whole program to decide exactly how you want to do your cleaning up. You can't just do it on a single day, or fix it by programming one evening per month - until you get back to programming, you will have forgotten everything again (at least that's what would happen to me, but then I turned 36 recently!).
The result of two weeks of hard programming is that there are no global variables left in Cake, that Cake can be switched to thread-safe mode (at a small speed penalty), and that much of Cake's code is now much clearer and cleaner than before. It doesn't play any better at all though - but now that I have (nearly) finished the housekeeping part, I might be more inclined to work on it again!

Sunday, February 18, 2007

64-bit versions of CheckerBoard and Cake

Linux users could already benefit from the new powerful 64-bit processors for quite some time, while M$'s win64 never really got out of its beta phase. With the release of Windows Vista, this has changed, and 64-bit computing is now also available to the masses. I run neither Linux nor Vista, but I do have a compiler capable of producing 64-bit executables. I wonder whether they will run under 64-bit Vista? If you happen to own a 64-bit Vista, you can try it by downloading CB_64.zip (264KB), and installing it in your CheckerBoard directory. To do this, you need to extract checkerboard64.exe to the CheckerBoard directory, and CakeM64.dll to your engines directory. Run checkerboard64.exe and choose CakeM64.dll as your engine. Let me know what happens!

Friday, February 09, 2007

Wow! CheckerBoard runs under Vista

I haven't been doing any checkers-related stuff lately. I'm all the more pleased to hear that CheckerBoard and Cake run under M$ newest OS - that means I don't have to do any checkers-related stuff in the near future :-)
And no, of course I didn't try this myself: I'm going to avoid Vista for as long as possible!