Visual Studio

Update [2020/10/23]: Since I wrote this tutorial many things has changed in Cocos2d-x and I haven’t been using it in years as I switched to Unreal Engine 4. According to this GitHub issue opened by my blog readers, in order for this code to work there has to be some modifications to the code which is provided on that issue by @lazerfalcon and @madrazo. I was also having trouble with render to texture on Sprite3D which seems to have been solved in newer versions.

Despite the fact that Cocos2d-x uses the OpenGL ES Shading Language v1.0 for the shaders (in order to learn more about the language, please refer to: OpenGL ES Shading Language v1.0 Spec) the engine does not provide an out-of-the-box API to apply post-processing effects to the whole game scene output at once.

In this tutorial we will learn an easy way to apply multiple post-processing effects to the game scene output all at once.

Almost three weeks ago I received a review request from one of the Packt Publishing staffs to review Application Development with Qt Creator, 2nd Edition written by Ray Rischpater which has been recently published by Packt Publishing. Since I’ve been developing cross platform Qt (cute, often mispronounced as Q-T cue-tee) applications from Qt 4 era back in 2008 – when Qt Creator was not around yet and the project was running by Trolltech at the time – and a handful of Qt Quick mobile applications over the past two years, I consider myself eligible enough to write a brief review on it. So, I was provided with a review copy and after reading it cover to cover, my thoughts on the book are as follows.

Previously I’ve described the process of building Crypto++ on both FreeBSD and Windows using the GCC, MinGW and VC++ compilers.

Now, we want to develop our own cross-platform cryptographic wrapper library around Crypto++. I’ve already uploaded the full source code to GitHub. You can find the link to the code on GitHub at the end of this article.

Before you proceed, you have to build the Crypto++ library as I mentioned earlier here.

Crypto++ is an awesome free and open source C++ class library of cryptographic algorithms and schemes which fully supports 32-bit and 64-bit architectures for many major operating systems, including FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X and iOS. Currently, Crypto++ officially supports the following compilers:

• MSVC 6.0 - 2010
• GCC 3.3 - 4.5
• C++Builder 2010
• Intel C++ Compiler 9 - 11.1
• Sun Studio 12u1, Express 11/08, Express 06/10

The latest version at the time of this writing is 5.6.1.

In spite of the power that Crypto++ offers, building and using it can be a little bit tricky. In the following we will describe the process of building Crypto++ on both FreeBSD and Windows using the GCC, MinGW and VC++ compilers.

Most of the time I see some C++ programmers who check if a pointer is NULL before deleting it.

if (ptr != NULL) {
    delete ptr;
    ptr = NULL;
}

Well, according to C++03 [ISO/IEC IS 14882:2003] §5.3.5/2 which explicitly states:

…if the value of the operand of delete is the null pointer the operation has no effect.

Therefore, deleting a NULL pointer has no effect (if the deallocation function is one supplied in the standard library), so it is not necessary to check for a NULL pointer before calling delete.

delete ptr;
ptr = NULL;

• Note: Keep in mind that deleting a void* pointer results in undefined behavior whether it’s NULL or not.