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Look Up: (916 Terms)
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Contributions by Kazgoroth
antialias
Antialiasing refers to the process of adding additional pixels around the border of an object in order to blend it into it's background more smoothly, and to reduce the appearance of jagged edges. Typically, the colour used is the average of the surrounding background pixels and that of the object being antialiased, or an approximation of the average. This technique was invented by MIT's Media Lab.
Assembler
An assembler is basically a low level compiler which translates assembly instructions into object code, which can be read by the processor. See also: Assembly language.
Game Programming Wiki
The Game Programming Wiki (or GPWiki for short) is an online community dedicated to covering material related to games development. This Wiki was created, and is maintained by the creator of the now defunct Lucky's VB Gaming tutorials, but unlike the previous site, covers material in any programming language, as well as a lot of material not specific to any particular language. The GPWiki can be found at www.gpwiki.org.
Hash Table
The Hash Table is a data structure which is suited to searching large amounts of information by a key value. Hash tables are most useful with a large number of records are stored, and allow information to easily be located. Hash tables function by processing the key using a function which returns a hash value - this value determines where the the data the particular record will be stored. This same value can then be used to search the hash table, and will point to the same location.
Interface
The means by which an entity interacts with something. In programming, an interface is often used to provide abstraction of functions. The interface defines what methods that a function or class MUST possess. This allows the simple replacement of functions with any other function which also meets the requirments, without requiring any modification elsewhere in the program (particular useful when porting to a different platform, or using an alternate rendering system, etc).
MOD
A music file format composed of sound samples in digitized format. Mod files both record the position, pitch and duration of notes, as well as including the actual sample data, and in this respect are almost a hybrid of some of the better features of both the WAV and MIDI formats. A free editor for mod files can be found at www.modplug.com.
See Also:MIDI, WAV File
Noise Gate
The noise gate is a piece of studio equipment used to control the volume of an audio signal. The original intended purpose of this is to clean up unwanted noise from a recording, but some nice effects can also be achieved using a noise gate. Used simply, the noise gate only allows an audio signal above a certain threshold to play. This can be used to clean up unwanted noise by setting the threshold above the level of the noise. A typical use of the noise gate as an audio effect is to have it controlled by an additional track - for example, a beat supplied by a drum machine. In this case, the gate can be applied over the top of an audio track such as a synth pad, or perhaps vocal 'oohs'. By 'opening' and 'closing' the gate based on the rhythm supplied by another track (which may or may not be audible itself), the track in question is effectively cut up into a nice rythm. This is often used in electronic music, especially Trance. Software noise gates are also available.
Refactor
To rewrite a piece of code in order to improve structure and/or readability without changing it's external behavior or overall meaning. Refactoring code will often result in simpler code which will potentially be more performant and/or readable than the original version.
Shell
The program that presents an interface to various operating system functions and services. The name of the shell is derived from the fact that it is an outer layer of interface between users and the inner-workings of the operating systems. Shells are generally classified as either graphical, or command line (text based). As an example, the default shell for Microsoft Windows is called explorer, and some of the functionality it includes is the taskbar and system tray, as well as desktop icons.
Tracker
A music sequencing program, in which the interface is primarily numeric. The interface of a tracker allows the user to arrange sound-samples on a timeline across several monophonic channels. Trackers generally save songs to disk incorporating both sequencing data and samples. This can give a relatively small file size, while still providing a generally better quality of sound that MIDI often produces.


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