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Look Up: (916 Terms)
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Contributions by Josh Pennington
Header Files
A header file is a file that is included into your program source. For Instance: #include "gamestuff.h" Whatever is in gamestuff.h is availible to the program.
Variable
A place in the computer's main memory in which a certain piece of information is stored. Each variable is composed of four parts:

1;
The memory location in which the information is stored
2:
The type of information which will be stored in that location
3:
The information which is stored in that location
4:
An identifier (The name of the variable) When the programmer declares a variable, he is telling the computer to set aside a certain amount of space in memory. The computer needs to know how much space to set aside, and the programmer gives this information by declaring what type of information will be stored. (Some types of data require more space in memory than others.)

The programmer must also have some way of keeping track of which information is stored in which location. Modern computer games require tremendous amounts of information. Keeping track of the exact memory location of each piece of information would be tedious. So the programmer assigns the variable an identifier. This is the name by which the programmer will refer to the variable.

Suppose a programmer needs to retrieve the hit points of a character named Toadbottom. If the programmer needed to refer to this as "the information stored at 00FF 92CA" it would be a nightmare. But by using an identifier, the programmer could refer to this information as "Toadbottom.hitPoints", or something equally nice.

WAV File
A file which stores audio information, saved with a ".wav" extension. WAV files are commonly used in big budget games because they provide excellent sound quality. But it takes a lot of data to provide such high quality sound. So WAV files are larger than those of other audio file formats. (Microsoft's standard sound exchange format.)


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