“The Last Slice”- a coding challenge adventure

“The Last Slice” has been a fun developer competition, organized by Microsoft and involving three challenges (between May and August 2018). Developers who passed the first two would be gifted a specially-crafted Microsoft IoT kit, needed to partecipate in the final challenge. The first five able to complete it would receive a $10000 prize. Partecipating…


Binary Patching the Razer Atrox Linux Driver

…or “how I got Retropie to handle all the 10 buttons of the Razer Atrox changing a bit in xpad.ko”. What does a videogame programmer on vacation? Well, many things, actually, but to somehow stick to stereotypes, he surely must *play* some videogames, too. So, recipe: a Raspberry PI sitting in a drawer since months…


Sony Vaio S13 – replacing the HDD with an SSD

I have plenty of posts in draft status, about the work I did for my master thesis and for Zodiac. I hope to complete and publish them in the upcoming months. Today, instead, I resurrect the blog with a quick post about the HDD-to-SSD upgrade I did recently on my Sony Vaio S13. When I…


Learning OpenGL: a few months later

Yeah, I know, I failed to post at least once a month, the previous post dates back to April… but hey, did you read the title of the blog? In this post, in March, I wrote about documentation and libraries I found useful in getting started with modern OpenGL. After a few months, I have…


Gemini Rue – working on the Italian version for Zodiac (featuring some game-dev random thoughts)

Recently, I’ve been working on the italian version of Gemini Rue,  released on Zodiac today. Gemini Rue was on my (constantly growing) “must play when I find enough time” list, and by having to work on it for the Zodiac release, I finally had a chance to play it (and to play it with the care…


Of missing textures, Assimp, the Crytek Sponza atrium, and naked women

Recently, I’m spending a lot of time in the atrium of the Sponza palace. No, I didn’t move to Dubrovnik, Croatia, nor I’m on vacation: it’s just that the Sponza atrium model, originally created for a rendering contest, has been adopted by the computer graphics community as a test model (especially in the global illumination…


Learning OpenGL: getting started and picking the “right” libraries

17/08/2013 update: after this post, you should read this addendum I’ve been working with 3D graphics in the past, but never at low level. That was something I really wanted to do: high level tools are fun for building stuff rapidly, but you know, you never get that sense of fulfilment from knowing exactly what’s…


No, seriously…

…I’m too busy to mantain a blog! But who cares, I’m going to try anyway. And I’m going to write in English (self enforced exercise, yeah! Feel free to correct me in the comments, I’ll be happy to fix stuff), attempting to offer my extremely useful and wise posts (…) to a wider audience (and,…