Console video games run on memory restricted environments and even with half a gigabyte of space it runs out quickly. It’s easy to know when you’re out of memory, what we want to know is exactly what approach to take to fix the problem. With all the information available the challenge is presenting the information in a way that gives clear indication of problems while providing enough low-level detail to zero in on individual assets.

Noel Llopis and I did a lecture at the Game Developer Conference this year about test driven development. It’s a process we’re using at High Moon and I use at home for all my coding. Gamasutra wrote an article about it, but they’re the ones throwing the conference so it’s not unexpected. I didn’t realize how much work it takes to put together an hour lecture. In general is was pretty stressful, but worth doing.

Noel’s article Test-Driven Game Development mentions that unit test suites should run quickly. That usually means as little file I/O as possible. However, sometimes you’re dealing with middleware or legacy code that requires deserialization to construct objects. What do you do? The Problem Let’s say you have a class that can only be constructed with a stream, something like: class Mesh { public: Mesh(InStream& stream); }; You would like to construct a Mesh in a test so you can check some functionality.