On "Burying the Lead"

This is a post about the currently active crowdfunding project Yooka Laylee by Playtonic Games.  They asked for £175,000 (about $266,000) to make their game, and have gotten many times that.  Congratulations to them!

I'm writing this because I have seen several comments along the lines of "Thanks, Playtonic, for not being one of those game Kickstarters that artificially inflates the budget to make tons of extra cash!!!"  As one of those game projects with a large goal and a well-defined, pretty much entirely accurate public budget, I would like to point something out...

This is from the FAQ way at the bottom of the Yooka Laylee page, in a question that is initially collapsed, which you must click on to read the answer (you can't see it by just scrolling):

"Isn’t £175k a little cheap for the game you’re promising?"

"Indeed it is, but that figure alone doesn’t give you the whole picture. We’ve already put a plan in place using personal finances to get the game done no matter what happens, however this extra money can be used by us to hire a few more talented people, get the game done sooner and allow us to commit to more features and platforms too."

(emphasis mine)

In other words, they already have enough money to make the game, and are simply asking for extra money with the Kickstarter.

Now, I have no problem with this, in principle.  What I certainly DO have a problem with is that they don't mention this up front anywhere - not in their video or anywhere else that's easily accessible on the campaign page.  They stuffed it as far into the fine print as they could without leaving it out entirely.  There is a bit in the video that obliquely alludes to the issue if you already know about it, but if you don't know about it those sentences just sound like they're talking about how nice it is that crowdfunding can raise more than the initial goal amount.

The fact that this information is not easily obtained means the casual, excited backer who eagerly reads all the information about the characters/the world/the "gibberish" audio/etc, ends up wrongly thinking that £175,000 is enough to make a game of that scope and quality.  Heck, even the news sites I've seen cover the project don't mention it!  This just further sets back the cause of game crowdfunding projects with realistic, honest budgets, which already had enough of a problem convincing people that those budgets were worthwhile.

Compile-time sizeof() in C++

Runtime sizeof() is nice for lots of reasons, but often when optimizing you don't want to build and run your entire program just to find out whether a potential optimization reduced the size of a class or struct.  This is a great trick someone taught me forever ago.  I've used it a ton to help with cross-platform optimizations in Skullgirls.

// compile-time sizeof()! Aww yeah.
template<int s> struct Wow { int x; };
Wow<sizeof(MyClass)> unused = 5;

and when you compile the file you get an error like

1>.\file.cpp(32) : error C2440: 'initializing' : cannot convert from 'int' to 'Wow<s>'

1>        with

1>        [

1>            s=1044

1>        ]

1>        No constructor could take the source type, or constructor overload resolution was ambiguous

and there's the size of your class!