Awesome tools for Windows users

I moved back to Windows on my home computer a few months back. There are a few amazing free tools I've found since then that have been making my life better and I thought they deserved a shout-out. They are:

SumatraPDF
A fantastic PDF reader. Does everything I want and nothing I don't.

RapidEE
A sane way to edit environment variables. The simple joy of just being able to resize the window is... incredible.

7-Zip
The best tool for dealing with compressed files on windows, bar none.

GPU-Z
A really handy way to see details about your GPU(s).

XnView
An amazingly good image viewer, which can also do bulk file format conversions.

If you haven't already got these... go get them!

Comments

How to outperform std::vector in 1 easy step

Everyone who's familiar with C++ knows that you should avoid resizing a std::vector inside a loop wherever possible. The reasoning's pretty obvious: the memory allocated for the vector doubles in size each time it fills up and that doubling is a costly operation. Have you ever wondered why it's so costly though? It's tempting to assume that because implementations of the STL have been around for so long that they must be pretty efficient. It turns out that's a bad assumption because the problem, in this case, is the standard itself: specifically, the allocator interface. The allocator interface provides two methods that obtain and release memory: allocate allocates uninitialized storage (public member function) deallocate deallocates storage (public member function) (taken from this page ). What's missing is a way of growing an existing memory allocation in place. In C this is provided by the realloc function, but there's no equiva...

Triangle bounding boxes in a single byte

Just thought of a way to store the bounding box for a single triangle in only one byte. It's not really practical or something you'd ever really want to use, but what the hell. Assume we have some kind of indexed mesh structure with a list of vertex positions and a list of triangle indices: struct Mesh { std::vector<vec3> verts; std::vector<uvec3> triangles; }; We can find the bounding box of a triangle by taking the min and max of all three vertices: vec3 Mesh::lowerBound(uint32_t tri) const { vec3 v0 = verts[triangles[tri].x]; vec3 v1 = verts[triangles[tri].y]; vec3 v2 = verts[triangles[tri].z]; return min(min(v0, v1), v2); } vec3 Mesh::upperBound(uint32_t tri) const { vec3 v0 = verts[triangles[tri].x]; vec3 v1 = verts[triangles[tri].y]; vec3 v2 = verts[triangles[tri].z]; return ...

Solar Sailor: semi-playable

More progress! Solar Sailor is now kinda- sorta- playable. You can't win or lose yet, but it does have all this goodness: There are gates that you have to pass through. There's a direction line showing you which gate you have to pass through next. The NPC racers now have some basic AI and will actually try to fly through the gates instead of just drifting serenely and hoping for the best. You can try it out yourself here! If you can't be bothered to try it out, this is what it's looking like now: If you do try it, I'd really appreciate any feedback - especially bug reports!

Coder Vil

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