The Polyglot Developer

AUGUST 19, 2020

In 2D games, it is not uncommon to want animated backgrounds. Having static images in your levels doesn’t necessarily add to the game-play experience, so a little bit of motion can go a long way. So how can you do this without having to manage these background images like you would a typical sprite? Rather than worrying about creating, destroying, and managing sprites to represent components of your background, it might make sense to use a tile sprite, sometimes referred to as a tilemap.

Games 59

Games Performance Development 59

SQL Performance

AUGUST 19, 2020

Last year, Andy Mallon blogged about upsizing a column from int to bigint with no downtime. (Why this isn't a metadata-only operation in modern versions of SQL Server is beyond me, but that's another post.). Usually when we deal with this issue, they are wide and massive tables (in both row count and sheer size), and the column we need to change is the only/leading column in the clustering key.

Testing 89

Testing Performance Database Servers 89