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

Assert no lock required

This is a technique I learnt about from Jason Gregory's excellent book, Game Engine Architecture (3rd Edition) . If you have a shared resource accessed by multiple threads, where you're fairly certain that it's only ever accessed by one thread at a time, you can use an assert() to check for this at debug time without having to pay the runtime cost of locking a mutex. The implementation is fairly straightforward: class UnnecessaryMutex { public: void lock() { assert(!_locked); _locked = true; } void unlock() { assert(_locked); _locked = false; } private: volatile bool _locked = false; }; #ifdef ENABLE_LOCK_ASSERTS #define BEGIN_ASSERT_LOCK_NOT_REQUIRED(mutex) (mutex).lock() #define END_ASSERT_LOCK_NOT_REQUIRED(mutex) (mutex).unlock() #else #define BEGIN_ASSERT_LOCK_NOT_REQUIRED(mutex) #define END_ASSERT_LOCK_NOT_REQUIRED(mutex) #endif Usage is equally straightforward: UnnecessaryMutex gMutex; void PossiblyOverlappingFunction

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 max(max(v0, v1), v2); } This is nice and simple and probably way better than what I'm about to suggest. W

LD_DEBUG

Posting this mainly as a reminder to myself... If you ever find yourself needing to figure out a dynamic library loading problem on Linux, LD_DEBUG can be a massive help. This is an environment variable you can set to make the dynamic linker print out a ton of useful diagnostic info. There are a number of different values which control the amount and type of diagnostics printed. One of the values is help; if you set LD_DEBUG to this and run executable it will print out a list of all the available options along with brief descriptions. For example, on my Linux workstation at the office: > LD_DEBUG=help cat Valid options for the LD_DEBUG environment variable are: libs display library search paths reloc display relocation processing files display progress for input file symbols display symbol table processing bindings display information about symbol binding versions display version dependencies all all previous options combi

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