Welcome to Tormented Devices, Rob Colbert's corner of the Web. My blog Innovashun is much less formal and not entirely dedicated to computer programming. The goal of this site, by contrast, is to gather and present programming information and knowledge. This is where I will be linking to pages, articles, technologies and people as well as writing up my own information as often as possible. I'll probably also be posting code and hopefully a framework or two. Generally, I'm just trying to share what I've learned about the scientific craft of computer programming over the years and going forward. Everyone is welcome to contribute and comment.

So, why Tormented Devices? Well, as a video game programmer, the code I've encountered and written over the years does little more than truly torment the devices on which it is executed. I have seen some miraculously great and miraculously bad code in my time. I have written some miraculously great and miraculously bad code in my time. Video game programmers are slaves to the schedule. We tend to beat on our devices as hard as possible to achieve competitive results. We push in ways that would shock and horrify the uninitiated. It's almost a sport or, at least, an X Game.

Consider the volume of data: Textures, polygons, motion capture, sound effects, voice, streaming music files, text, controller input and more. Consider the processing on that data: Physics, math, AI, animation and kinematics, scripting, networking and other general purpose programming. Consider how much work goes into the construction and composition of each and every rendered frame presented by a video game in order to bring its content to life on your screen. Consider the amount of time over which a video game is typically played and replayed. Realize the beating...the torment...the device on which the game is being played is enduring.

Hence: Tormented Devices

Video games are cruel and relentless consumers of system resources. Most games literally behave like resource-starved ravening hoards of wombats. You think you know what it means to be a hunter? Well, if there is a spare cycle on a processor somewhere, if there is a spare byte of RAM, if there is as much as a bit per second of network bandwidth remaining...a game programmer will find it. It's what we do. We hunt and gather resources, adapt them to our needs and put them to use for your entertainment. We're magicians. We can seriously do Voodoo. And we don't stop. Ever. We torment our devices.