6tools reviewed
About Jacob
Jacob Seto studies computer science at Cornell University, with a minor in game design and music. He has been a teaching assistant for two Cornell courses on computer game architecture and works as a Unity developer and tutor. On binarytranslator.ai he checks tool results and worked examples against hand calculations.
In Jacob's words
I check tool results the slow way, by hand. If my answer and the tool's answer don't match, one of us is wrong, and it's worth finding out which.
Tools Jacob reviewed
Questions for Jacob
- Where does binary come up in game development?
- Colors and flags, mostly. A color is often written in hex, like FF8800, and game code packs on and off settings into the bits of one number. Reading those quickly saves a lot of debugging time.
- How do you check a tool's results?
- I pick a few values, work them out on paper, then compare. I always include the ones where people slip, like 128 and 255 in 8 bits, or the hex digits A to F.
- What would you tell a student learning this?
- Convert small numbers by hand until it's automatic, then use a tool to check your work, not to do it for you. As a tutor, I've seen that's what makes it stick.