Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Heavy Iron Programming Challenge

We’ve added a programming challenge to the Heavy Iron site. People wanting to apply for a programming position can either send in their resume as usual, or have a go at our programming challenge. Doing the challenge is a good way of showing off your coding skills, and it’s also fun. (Well, I find it fun:)

The challenge takes the form of a C++ program we’ve written, which isn’t working as well as it could. It’s quite fun and graphical in nature.

To try the challenge, go to the Heavy Iron site, click ‘Now Hiring’ on the main page, then click on ‘Programming’ on the right hand side and follow the instructions.

4 comments:

Rup said...

Ooh, neat. I've got a few ideas.

BTW there's one excess line in CollideSprites: the dist variable is never used so the calculation is wasted. A left-over before someone added Vec2Normalize? Of course there's way more to it than that :-) removing it makes no perceptible difference.

Mark Pope said...

I'm going to say that that was intentional - an extra chance for people to optimize it :P

Thanks for trying it out!

Anonymous said...

Hi Mark i have few questions regarding programming challenge.

What is the acceptable FPS for the optimized code ?
Can we change the datastructure used ?
can we change the interfaces of classes ?
or do we have to optimize the available code only?

Thanks

Mark Pope said...

Hi Vinay,

FPS: Fast as you can. You'll probably hit a point of diminishing returns though.

Changes: You can change only the 'CandidateSolution.cpp/h' files, as these are the only ones you mail in. You can change what you like inside them. Changing only these files means that it's easy for us to plug in your code and analyze it.

Hope this helps. Thanks for having a go!