[font="Comic Sans MS"][size="2"]Google's April Fool joke[/font][font="Comic Sans MS"][size="2"] got me reading about [/font][font="Comic Sans MS"][size="2"]why graphic designers hate Comic Sans[/font][font="Comic Sans MS"][size="2"] so much.[/font]

[font="Comic Sans MS"][size="2"]I can't help bein…

Phrase: "the black pit of despair"

Definition: When fixed timestep catch up logic fails to keep up with the target time.

Usage: "Yesterday the framerate was bad, but today it got so much worse that we fell into the black pit of despair."

Etymology:

Fixed timestep game logic works by calling …

Noun: "raiding"

Definition: Manually editing per-vertex color values to approximate static lighting or increase the perception of texture variety.

Usage: "Have you finished raiding level 3 yet?"

Etymology:

'twas long before shaders.

'twas long before realtime lighting.

'twas before even st…

Noun: "scrottox"

Definition: The opposite of a detail texture. Like a detail texture, scrottox is a monochrome image drawn using modulate2X blend mode, but where a detail texture is tiled more heavily than the base texture so as to provide fine detail when zoomed in close, a scrottox layer is til…

Verb: "fruited"

Definition: When an application is suspended due to a system timeout such as a screensaver, or because the user locks their phone.

Usage: "Be sure to pause the music if you get fruited."

Etymology: In the early days of Windows Phone development, long before someone coined the…

A common side effect of developing new technology is the invention of new terminology. At its best, this can be both fun and useful, providing a concise shorthand for what would otherwise be awkward or ambiguous concepts. These shorthands are often unique to a company or project, and different team…

Pure awesomeness.



Source

As proof of how focused and impossible to distract the XNA team is, this is where we ended up five emails into a thread that started with me asking for a code review. Drawing parallels between programming languages and the styles of famous authors, I suggested:

James Joyce = Lisp. Why limit y…

My second example of a problem where "just do the right thing" turns out to be surprisingly complicated is a feature that does not exist, but ought to.

Being a luddite who has not yet cottoned on to this newfangled MP3 player fad, I like to listen to CDs in my car. My daily commute takes around h…

I am fascinated by problems that are easy to describe, and which appear simple when solved correctly, but where the implementation must contain surprising complexity in order to do what people expect.

Example: play a list of songs in a random order.

When I had to implement this feature for MotoGP…