Typically, a file system in a game engine comes with all the bells and whistles like multiple file devices, support for zipped files, encryption, device aliases, asynchronous I/O, and more. But buried underneath every file system lives a low-level implementation (directly using OS/SDK functions), which in turn is used in the high-level file system.
This low-level implementation should be the only platform-specific file implementation in the whole file system, and is the topic of today’s post.
In game development, C++ enums are often used to denote that certain values can be combined using bitwise-operations, resulting in so-called flags. However, enums in pre-C++0x exhibit some drawbacks which will be discussed and improved upon in this post.
Even though static_cast is assumed to be the safest of all C++ casts, it can still be the cause of hard-to-find bugs, or unforeseen crashes. These bugs most often occur when casting between signed and unsigned types, or casting values into types which are not large enough to hold them.
This is the final installment in a series of posts about Molecule’s memory system. Today, we are going to look at the final piece of the puzzle, glueing together different things like raw memory allocation, bounds checking, memory tracking, and more.
Molecular Musings 