“Introduction to ds” is a slide presentation/manual about ds which I started last year. I never had enough time to finish it quickly so I wrote it now and then and just recently finished it. The presentation explains the concepts and design decisions behind ds, provides short code examples to demonstrate basic usage and covers …
polygonal labs
Tips, tools and techniques for making games with haXe
Linked list performance
It’s a fact that haXe creates swf files running faster compared to mxmlc. Amazingly, haXe is also faster at compile time. But to which extent are haXe generated swf files faster? Optimizing code especially pays off for “low-level stuff” like data structures, the building blocks of many algorithms. With this in mind, I picked the doubly linked …
A* pathfinding with ds
I recently did a complete rewrite of my graph-based A* pathfinder example because I received a lot of questions on how to implement path-finding using the new ds library. So here is an updated demo that works with ds 1.32: Interactive demo: A* pathfinding with ds I’m transforming the point cloud with delaunay triangulation into …
Heaps and Priority Queues in ds 1.31
I recently revised and improved the Heap and PriorityQueue classes, mainly because the difference between both has always been somewhat blurry. The new implementations are included in ds 1.31, so let’s talk a bit about the changes. The Heap class By definition, a heap is a dense binary tree for which every parent node has …
Yo, Ho! Welcome on deck, deque!
The newly released ds library (version 1.3) now includes an efficient deque implementation. What is a deque? A deque is a double-ended queue and pronounced “deck”. In contrast to a queue, which allows insertions at one end and removals at the opposite end, a deque allows insertions and removals at both ends. The new Deque …
Simple 2D Molehill Example
Here is a minimalistic FlashDevelop AS3 project that demonstrates how to use the Molehill API to draw a single 2D sprite on the screen. You can get the project here: fdproject-mole2d.zip. Assuming you have followed the instructions below the result should look like this: Flash: Simple 2D Molehill Example To compile the example you need …
Fast hash tables
The Dictionary class – a dead end for other targets Recently I started to adjust my code with the C++ and JavaScript haXe target in mind. I have to say it’s really amazing to see your code running on different platforms. This offers an incredible amount of flexibility! While almost everything worked out of the …
MemoryManager revised
Starting with DS version 1.1, there is now a new MemoryManager available, which was almost written from scratch. My past experience showed that the former implementation was somewhat limited, as you were forced to preallocate a fixed amount of memory prior to your application’s entry point. The new version now supports dynamic memory allocation, so …
Traversing the display list
A great HaXe feature is that you can define your own Iterator and execute it with the for-syntax. It can be used in many different ways and drastically improves readability of your code. AS3 developers often need to look at the display list, so I wrote a basic DisplayListIterator to handle this task. Here is …
Font rendering with the FP10 drawing API
After all the vector/font rendering library is done – the HaXe sources and SWC files for ActionScript 3.0 are available on the polygonal google code project page. As a reminder – the project started as an experiment if it’s possible to render fonts using the FP10 drawing API without loading or embedding any additional assets. …
