The new stuff didn't come so soon, did it?
I'm sorry but I just haven't got the time to finish tweaking some minor details. I'll finish this release and upload as soon as I have some free time. The work and the university have been very time consuming these days.

JG.

New stuff coming very soon.

• Integrated python interpreter, thanks to Samuel Christie
• Some useful scripts to trace variables
• Mouse controller sliders to tweak your variables on runtime
  
• Logging
• A lot more

Stay tuned.

JG

Debug Console - Second Release

Hello, I fixed a lot of issues I had with the console I didn't know about.

• I'm now using the same effect (an instance of XNA's BasicEffect) for every component.
• Lines are now traceable. That is, each line you draw have a name, then when you draw a line with the same name, the previous line gets moved.
• Some of you might had problems with the ShowLine and ShowMark methods, fixed.
• I have created a new command parser in order to add scalability. You can now for example use Game1.console.Execute("trace Player1.position", position); and would be the same as using Game1.console.Show("Player1.position", position);. This is because later I will add the feature to trace values in runtime, something that will decrease debugging time for your games.

Things I need to fix:

• console.DrawBox
• console.Log
• Test it on the XBOX
  

The code is now commited. and here's the .dll library

JG

LINQ Benchmark fixed.
I posted about the benchmark in the Creators Club forums and they explained me why these results were incorrect. I measured it wrong.
The thing is that on the LINQ test I wasn't actually running the query. To run it, I must at least iterate over the result, this is because the defered execution of the IEnumerable implementation, and the return yield it runs.

So I rewrote it, and the results came out more predictable, here you have them.

I also increased the valueCount to a hundred million values. And there you have it, even though LINQ version is more elegant, it took almost twice the time, so for time critical operation I would prefer avoiding it.

JG

LINQ Benchmark

For those of you that doesn't know LINQ yet, it's a new technology from c# 3.0 that lets you run queries independently from your database, even on c# objects (like arrays, List, LinkedList, etc) with a SQL-like statement .

Yesterday I was wondering how fast LINQ could run some queries compared to more traditional methods. I'm not talking about LINQ to SQL on an external database, but running a query on some IEnumerable object instead. So I created a small benchmark. I'm not sure if it is correct because there is some stuff that I might be timing erroneously, so please tell me if I should be considering things like JIT time, GC, or any other housekeeping.

Anyway, on a very simple test the results came out unexpectedly.

Here's the method I wrote:

static void Main(string[] args)
   {
       int valueCount = 1000000;
       Random random = new Random();
       float[] values = new float[valueCount];
  
       Stopwatch timer;
       // Initialize the values
       for (int i = 0; i < valueCount; i++)
       {
           values[i] = random.Next(valueCount);
       }
       GC.Collect();

  
       // LINQ
       Console.WriteLine("Try with the LINQ query");
       timer = Stopwatch.StartNew();
       IEnumerable<float> extracted1 = from v in values where v < 500000 select v;
       timer.Stop();
       Console.WriteLine(timer.Elapsed.TotalSeconds);
       Console.ReadLine();

       // Regular for
       Console.WriteLine("Try with the 'for' iteration");
       List<float> extracted2 = new List<float>();
       timer = Stopwatch.StartNew();
       float var;
       for (int i = 0; i < valueCount; i++)
       {
           var = values[i];
           if (var < 500000)
               extracted2.Add(var);
       }
       timer.Stop();
       Console.WriteLine(timer.Elapsed.TotalSeconds);
       Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Counts: {0}, {1}", extracted1.Count(), extracted2.Count()));
       Console.ReadLine();
   }

It creates an array of random values ranging from 0 up to 1 million. Then both tests try to extract 500000 numbers from the values given the simple rule (x < 500000). So here are the results:

This is one of the results I got. LINQ was 50 times faster??? Am I measuring this wrong?

JG

Hey ya, next week I have planned to add the Log method, so you can keep a historical log of the runtime. Plus, i'll fix some minor bugs.
Another thing I should begin to care is "threadsafeness", because sometimes calling methods from different threads can cause consistency problems.

JG

Not much people have downloaded the console, so I decided I'll post the things you'll get by using it. Probably some of you are wondering, why use this crappy component if I have my old school .NET's Console.WriteLine(debugThis) that hasn't ever let me down?. I'll explain the neat features:

The main feature is the Show method. It receives two parameters: a string identifying what you are showing, and a value. For example: Console.Show("Player1.Position", pos); you can write this call inside the Update of your main character and a new variable will be added to the Console's TreeView, and everytime this gets called the value in the TreeView gets updated. Let me show you a screenshot.

So, as you can see you will get live coverage of some variables of interest, and they will stay right there, visible everytime you need them. Another thing to note is that the console creates a hierarchy of values, if you need some other variables from Player1 you will get them grouped under the same node so you can quickly check the state of some component of your game. I'm planning to use the reflection API to add variables from the console itself, for example you could write "Game.Player1.Position" at runtime and you will see the value being added and updated every frame, I'm not sure if the .NET reflection API is available on the XBOX.