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• Is OpenTK Dead?

  - by ashes999

  Looking at OpenTK, I notice some disturbing signs: The last news item was posted on December 31st, 2010 The main forum gets about one post a day On SourceForge, the last nightly build was in March, and the last release was 2010. Does OpenTK exist anymore, or is it abandonware now? Edit: Some people have expressed concern at my use of "ambiguous" and "loaded terms" like "dead," "abandonware," and others. What I'm asking is this: software projects comprise of many pieces: The actual software project (such as OpenTK) A group of people who maintain the software (project leads, core developers) Some vehicle by which users can find and consume the latest versions (such as releasing daily builds) A community (can I ask questions about it? Get answers?) Updates (are there new features? New releases? Active development? A roadmap?) Some projects have all of these things. Most have a few. Some have nothing, other than maybe the actual software project itself. Is OpenTK one of these? Because it seems like: The actual software project is stable The maintainers don't contribute to it anymore There are no more latest versions (daily builds), not since 2010 (2+ years) The community is very low-traffic (nobody is asking/answering questions, who is actually using this anyway?) There are no updates since 2010

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• How to Code Faster (Without Sacrificing Quality)

  - by ashes999

  I've been a professional coder for a several years. The comments about my code have generally been the same: writes great code, well-tested, but could be faster. So how do I become a faster coder, without sacrificing quality? For the sake of this question, I'm going to limit the scope to C#, since that's primarily what I code (for fun) -- or Java, which is similar enough in many ways that matter. Things that I'm already doing: Write the minimal solution that will get the job done Write a slew of automated tests (prevents regressions) Write (and use) reusable libraries for all kinds of things Use well-known technologies where they work well (eg. Hibernate) Use design patterns where they fit into place (eg. Singleton) These are all great, but I don't feel like my speed is increasing over time. I do care, because if I can do something to increase my productivity (even by 10%), that's 10% faster than my competitors. (Not that I have any.) Besides which, I've consistently gotten this feeback from my managers -- whether it was small-scale Flash development or enterprise Java/C++ development. Edit: There seem to be a lot of questions about what I mean by fast, and how I know I'm slow. Let me clarify with some more details. I worked in small and medium-sized teams (5-50 people) in various companies over various projects and various technologies (Flash, ASP.NET, Java, C++). The observation of my managers (which they told me directly) is that I'm "slow." Part of this is because a significant number of my peers sacrificed quality for speed; they wrote code that was buggy, hard to read, hard to maintain, and difficult to write automated tests for. My code generally is well-documented, readable, and testable. At Oracle, I would consistently solve bugs slower than other team-members. I know this, because I would get comments to that effect; this means that other (yes, more senior and experienced) developers could do my work in less time than it took me, at nearly the same quality (readability, maintainability, and testability). Why? What am I missing? How can I get better at this? My end goal is simple: if I can make product X in 40 hours today, and I can improve myself somehow so that I can create the same product at 20, 30, or even 38 hours tomorrow, that's what I want to know -- how do I get there? What process can I use to continually improve? I had thought it was about reusing code, but that's not enough, it seems.

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• MonoGame: PC + Mobile?

  - by ashes999

  I'm researching Monogame. Their goal is to allow "easy" porting of an existing XNA/Windows game to mobile. Does this mean you can have one solution (theoretically) with shared code, and it works on all three platforms (PC, Android, iPhone)? Or do you need to port your game from PC to Android, and then again to iPhone? I'm sure "write once, run anywhere" works 80% of the time, I'm not worried about that other 20% like support for GPS, acceleratometer, etc. which doesn't exist on all platforms.

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• Performance of pixel shaders vs. SpriteBatch: XNA

  - by ashes999

  Precondition: I read this question/answer about using shaders, or spritebatch, to render and mark a sprite. I need to do something like that. I also have a 2D lighting PoC which I need to write. The way it will work will basically be something like: Draw all the sprites Draw lighting gradients to create a lighting texture Multiply/add the lighting texture to achieve different effects (I use multiple passes of add/multiply the lighting texture to achieve different effects.) My question is really about a generalization: can I say with certainty that pixel shaders are always faster than adding/multiplying textures to the SpriteBatch? Or that adding/multiplying is always faster? Or if it's not generalizable, how do I decide which approach to take, given that I can probably code either of them? (If it matters, I'm using MonoGame 3.0 beta for Windows games)

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• Sprite and Physics components or sub-components?

  - by ashes999

  I'm taking my first dive into creating a very simple entity framework. The key concepts (classes) are: Entity (has 0+ components, can return components by type) SpriteEntity (everything you need to draw on screen, including lighting info) PhysicsEntity (velocity, acceleration, collision detection) I started out with physics notions in my sprite component, and then later removed them to a sub-component. The separation of concerns makes sense; a sprite is enough information to draw anything (X, Y, width, height, lighting, etc.) and physics piggybacks (uses the parent sprite to get X/Y/W/H) while adding physics notions of velocity and collisions. The problem is that I would like collisions to be on an entity level -- meaning "no matter what your representation is (be it sprites, text, or something else), collide against this entity." So I refactored and redirected collision handling from entities to sprite.physics, while mapping and returning the right entity on physics collisions. The problem is that writing code like this.GetComponent<SpriteComponent>().physics is a violation of abstraction. Which made me think (this is the TLDR): should I keep physics as a separate component from sprites, or a sub-component, or something else? How should I share data and separate concerns?

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• Storing and Finding Art Assets

  - by ashes999

  I've started down a line of art asset development that will allow me to (hopefully) reuse and improve assets for several games. But how do I go about storing and finding them? Let's say for example I decide to focus on RPGs for ~2 years. I would create items, monsters, etc. and store them somewhere. How would I categorize them and make them easier to search later on? Is the best solution "use directories with broad categories like landscape/items/monsters/etc.?"

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• Stats on Screen Size for Flash Games

  - by ashes999

  I'm working on a Flash game after many, many years. I'm trying to figure out size to make my application run (eg. 600x800). Because it's a tall (not wide) game, I'm confused. I know about (and love) the Steam hardware stats. However, for Flash gaming, I have two nit-picks with their survey sample: 1) Caters to more hardcore gamers with better hardware (overall) 2) Captures only a subset of Flash gamers. Doesn't capture people who play at school, work, etc. or not netbooks and lighter machines. Are there any sort of statistics I can use to determine which size to use? Ideally, I would like to know something like: 800x600 will fit 94% of users screens 1024x768 will fit 74% of users screens 1200x960 will fit 53% of users screens etc.

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• Which iPhone/iPod Hardware to Support for iPhone Game

  - by ashes999

  I'm coming from a background of Android. I would like to figure out what kind of iBlah device hardware I need to support for iPhone game development. From my research, it seems that I need to support both iPod and iPhone. But which versions of hardware? is 3G still used? What about 3GS? For example, the -S phones seem to have dual core instead of single-core CPUs. I also worry about performance. In Android, I had a severely low-end phone, which meant pretty much anything that ran okay there ran okay on other phones. For iPhone, how do I figure out what to support in terms of performance?

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• 2D Tile-Based Concept Art App

  - by ashes999

  I'm making a bunch of 2D games (now and in the near future) that use a 2D, RPG-like interface. I would like to be able to quickly paint tiles down and drop character sprites to create concept art. Sure, I could do it in GIMP or Photoshop. But that would require manually adding each tile, layering on more tiles, cutting and pasting particular character sprites, etc. and I really don't need that level of granularity; I need a quick and fast way to churn out concept art. Is there a tool that I can use for this? Perhaps some sort of 2D tile editor which lets me draw sprites and tiles given that I can provide the graphics files.

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• Resolution Independence in libGDX

  - by ashes999

  How do I make my libGDX game resolution/density independent? Is there a way to specify image sizes as "absolute" regardless of the underlying density? I'm making a very simple kids game; just a bunch of sprites displayed on-screen, and some text for menus (options menu primarily). What I want to know is: how do I make my sprites/fonts resolution independent? (I have wrapped them in my own classes to make things easier.) Since it's a simple kids game, I don't need to worry about the "playable area" of the game; I want to use as much of the screen space as possible. What I'm doing right now, which seems super incorrect, is to simply create images suitable for large resolutions, and then scale down (or rarely, up) to fit the screen size. This seems to work okay (in the desktop version), even with linear mapping on my textures, but the smaller resolutions look ugly. Also, this seems to fly in the face of Android's "device independent pixels" (DPs). Or maybe I'm missing something and libGDX already takes care of this somehow? What's the best way to tackle this? I found this link; is this a good way of solving the problem?: http://www.dandeliongamestudio.com/2011/09/12/android-fragmentation-density-independent-pixel-dip/ It mentions how to control the images, but it doesn't mention how to specify font/image sizes regardless of density.

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• Platform for DS/Gameboy Dev - Managed Memory, Tools, and Unit Testing

  - by ashes999

  I'm interested in dabbling in Nintendo DS, 3DS, or GBA development. I would like to know what my (legal) options for development tools and IDEs are. In particular, I would not consider moving in this direction unless I can find: A programming language that has managed memory (garbage collection) A unit testing tool akin to JUnit, NUnit, etc. for unit tests I would also prefer if other tools exist, like code-coverage, etc. for that platform. But the main thing is managed memory and unit testing. What options are out there?

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• Porting Ruby/NCruses Rogue-Like to .NET and FlatRedBall

  - by ashes999

  I created an awesome rogue-like game in Ruby. For the GUI, I used NCurses. Since I'm using FlatRedBall as my engine of choice for Silverlight game development, I want to port this game over. What is the best way to efficiently doing this, and what are the pitfalls I should expect? For example, Ruby is object-oriented, like C#, and I should be able to just convert (rewrite) classes one by one. However, I will run into issues like: NCurses API. I need to possibly create my own notions of a "Window", or else rewrite GUI code. It's one class, but it's BIG. Mix-Ins. These are essentially aspect-oriented development. There are a couple of solutions in .NET, like dynamic classes. What else? Also, I should mention that I want to create a C# application out of this. As much as possible, I'll dump reusable and helper code, algorithms, etc. into separate projects and generate reusable DLLs.

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• Strategies to Defeat Memory Editors for Cheating - Desktop Games

  - by ashes999

  I'm assuming we're talking about desktop games -- something the player downloads and runs on their local computer. Many are the memory editors that allow you to detect and freeze values, like your player's health. How do you prevent cheating via memory-modifiation? What strategies are effective to combat this kind of cheating? For reference, I know that players can: - Search for something by value or range - Search for something that changed value - Set memory values - Freeze memory values I'm looking for some good ones. Two I use that are mediocre are: Displaying values as a percentage instead of the number (eg. 46/50 = 92% health) A low-level class that holds values in an array and moves them with each change. (For example, instead of an int, I have a class that's an array of ints, and whenever the value changes, I use a different, randomly-chosen array item to hold the value)

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• Leveraging Code in Ever Bigger Games

  - by ashes999

  Summary: The same way that I continually build complex engines and libraries within a single platform and technology to allow me to build increasingly bigger and better games, how to continue this when development crosses into different platforms? If I switch platforms, how do I leverage past code and experiences? Games are hard to build. Big games are even harder to build. I've decided that to be able to make big games, I need to start building smaller games, and building up an asset base of code, assets (graphics, sounds), tools, and most importantly, game engines, so that I can eventually get there. One game at a time. Let me give an analogy. To build an MMO 3D RPG, I would approach this by building and releasing small games with increasingly more features. This could entail, for example: A simple 2D game A tile-based game A game with RPG elements (items, equipment, monsters, battle) A full-fledged RPG A 3D RPG The problem now is if I have to change platforms or tools, I don't know how to leverage past code-bases (and experience) to start with a mature product. Right now, I'm writing Silverlight (FlatRedBall) games. Let's say I stick with this for ten years, and then suddenly decide to write a PS6 game, which is in a different programming language entirely. Granted, I have ten years of game-development experience (and correspondingly ten years of professional software development experience from my day job) to back me up. But I would still like some way to transplant that 2D RPG engine into the new programming language, or else leverage it somehow. Is this even possible? What are my options?

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• Sound not playing on Windows XP - SoundEffect or Song: Monogame

  - by ashes999

  I'm trying to integrate sound into my Monogame game. I don't have the content pipeline hack -- just straight Monogame (Beta 3) at this point. (I tried adding the content pipeline, but ran into some issues.) I added a .wav file to my /Content directory, and I can create and instantiate both SoundEffect and Song classes. However, both show durations of 00:00:00 (on a ten-second long file), and neither plays. I can call LoadContent without any issue. But when I call Play, nothing plays. I've tried a couple of different sounds, and different formats (MP3 and WAV) to rule that out. Only WAV seems to even load without crashing out, but it doesn't play. There seems to be a GitHub issue that fixes this problem in 2.5.1. Downgrading to 2.5.1 doesn't fix this problem; it seems like it's fixed in 3.0 (_data is set in the SoundEffect instance). This issue only occurs on Windows XP. I tested it on a Windows 7 laptop, and the sound plays fine.

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• Sprites rendering blurry with velocity

  - by ashes999

  After adding velocity to my game, I feel like my textures are twitching. I thought it was just my eyes, until I finally captured it in a screenshot: The one on the left is what renders in my game; the one on the right is the original sprite, pasted over. (This is a screenshot from Photoshop, zoomed in 6x.) Notice the edges are aliasing -- it looks almost like sub-pixel rendering. In fact, if I had not forced my sprites (which have position and velocity as ints) to draw using integer values, I would swear that MonoGame is drawing with floating point values. But it isn't. What could be the cause of these things appearing blurry? It doesn't happen without velocity applied. To be precise, my SpriteComponent class has a Vector2 Position field. When I call Draw, I essentially use new Vector2((int)Math.Round(this.Position.X), (int)Math.Round(this.Position.Y)) for the position. I had a bug before where even stationary objects would jitter -- that was due to me using the straight Position vector and not rounding the values to ints. If I use Floor/Ceiling instead of round, the sprite sinks/hovers (one pixel difference either way) but still draws blurry.

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• Strategies to Defeat Memory Editors for Cheating - Desktop Games

  - by ashes999

  I'm assuming we're talking about desktop games -- something the player downloads and runs on their local computer. Many are the memory editors that allow you to detect and freeze values, like your player's health. How do you prevent cheating? What strategies are effective to combat this kind of cheating? I'm looking for some good ones. Two I use that are mediocre are: Displaying values as a percentage instead of the number (eg. 46/50 = 92% health) A low-level class that holds values in an array and moves them with each change

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• Is there a good way to get pixel-perfect collision detection in XNA?

  - by ashes999

  Is there a well-known way (or perhaps reusable bit of code) for pixel-perfect collision detection in XNA? I assume this would also use polygons (boxes/triangles/circles) for a first-pass, quick-test for collisions, and if that test indicated a collision, it would then search for a per-pixel collision. This can be complicated, because we have to account for scale, rotation, and transparency. WARNING: If you're using the sample code from the link from the answer below, be aware that the scaling of the matrix is commented out for good reason. You don't need to uncomment it out to get scaling to work.

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• Non-Obvious Topics to Learn for Game Development

  - by ashes999

  I've been writing games for around 10 years now (from QBasic to C# and everything in-between). I need to start stretching my skills into different areas. What are other, surprising topics I should read up on? Expected topics would include the usual suspects: Programming language of your choice Scripting language Source control Project management (or Agile) Graphics API Maybe some AI (A* path-finding?) Physics (projectile physics) Unit testing (automated testing) I'm looking for more esoteric topics; things that you don't expect to need to know, but if you do know them, they make a difference. This could include things like: Art skills (drawing, lighting, colouring, layout, etc.) Natural language processing The physics of sound (sound-waves, doppler effect, etc.) Personally, I feel that having technical art skills (eg. can make decent art-work if you can only come up with ideas; or, following Photoshop/GIMP tutorials) was the most beneficial for me. This is not intended to be an open-ended question; I'm looking for specific skills that helped you and you expect will continue to benefit you in the short- and long-term.

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• Assets.getBytes returns null in test environment

  - by ashes999

  I'm using the latest Haxe (2.10), NME (3.4.3), and MUnit. I've written some unit tests that need to fetch bitmap data from SWF symbols. The first step is to actually load the SWF data. To do this, I use NME's getByteArray along with the swf library, like so: var blah:SWF = new SWF(Assets.getBytes("assets/swf/test.swf")); The call to Assets.getBytes returns null when I'm running this under MUnit. When running my actual game code, I'm able to get the byte array (and consequentially, instantiate the SWF class). Am I doing something wrong? What am I missing? Edit: My directory structure is: . (root .\assets .\assets\*.png (other images) .\assets\swf\*.swf (SWFs) .\Source\*.hx (source code) .\Test\*.hx (tests)

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• On-Site Factors that Affect CPC

  - by ashes999

  I have a few websites on various niche topics, all running Adsense. The most promising one currently has a CPC that hovers around $1; the rest have CPCs of $0.25-$0.50. I'm curious to know what on-site factors affect CPC. That is to say, what I can do, legally (in white-hat compliance) to increase my CPC? Some factors that affect CPC but are not within my control (and therefore, beyond the scope of my question -- they're just examples) include: What advertisers are paying for keywords on my site What pages people are landing on etc.

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• Alpha From PNGs Butchered

  - by ashes999

  I have a pretty vanilla Monogame game. I'm using PNG for all my sprites (made in Photoshop). I noticed that XNA is butchering the aliasing; no matter what I do, my graphics appear jaggedy. Below is a screenshot. The bottom half is what XNA shows me when I zoom in 2X using a Matrix on my GraphicsDevice (to make the effect more obvious). The top is when I pasted the same sprites from Photoshop and scaled them to 200%. Note that partially transparent pixels are turning whiteish. Is there a way to fix this? What am I doing wrong? Here's the relevant call to draw to the SpriteBatch: spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.positionVector, null, Color.White, this.Angle, this.originVector, 1f, SpriteEffects.None, 0f); (this.positionVector can easily be Vector.Zero; Color.White as 100% alpha, I think; this.Angle can be a real angle (small > in the image) or zero (the orb itself).

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• Leveraging Code Across Platforms in Ever Bigger Games

  - by ashes999

  Summary: The same way that I continually build complex engines and libraries within a single platform and technology to allow me to build increasingly bigger and better games, how to continue this when development crosses into different platforms? If I switch platforms, how do I leverage past code and experiences? Games are hard to build. Big games are even harder to build. I've decided that to be able to make big games, I need to start building smaller games, and building up an asset base of code, assets (graphics, sounds), tools, and most importantly, game engines, so that I can eventually get there. One game at a time. Let me give an analogy. To build an MMO 3D RPG, I would approach this by building and releasing small games with increasingly more features. This could entail, for example: A simple 2D game A tile-based game A game with RPG elements (items, equipment, monsters, battle) A full-fledged RPG A 3D RPG The problem now is if I have to change platforms or tools, I don't know how to leverage past code-bases (and experience) to start with a mature product. Right now, I'm writing Silverlight (FlatRedBall) games. Let's say I stick with this for ten years, and then suddenly decide to write a PS6 game, which is in a different programming language entirely. Granted, I have ten years of game-development experience (and correspondingly ten years of professional software development experience from my day job) to back me up. But I would still like some way to transplant that 2D RPG engine into the new programming language, or else leverage it somehow. Is this even possible? What are my options?

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• Techniques for Working Without a Debugger [closed]

  - by ashes999

  Possible Duplicate: How to effectively do manual debugging? Programming in a debugger is ideal. When I say a debugger, I mean something that will allow you to: Pause execution in the middle of some code (like a VM) Inspect variable values Optionally set variable values and call methods Unfortunately, we're not always blessed to work in environments that have debuggers. This can be for reasons such as: Debugger is too too too slow (Flash circa Flash 8) Interpreted language (Ruby, PHP) Scripting language (eg. inside RPG Maker XP) My question is, what is an effective way to debug without a debugger? The old method of "interleave code with print statements" is time-consuming and not sufficient.

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• Optimal Compression for Speech

  - by ashes999

  I'm designing a game that depends heavily on audio; I will have some 300+ speech files (most of them just a word or two long). This can very quickly escalate the size of my final game. What's the optimal way to encode/compress speech files to keep the size minimal without getting audio artifacts? Please address both per-file compression/encoding, and also zipping/compressing the set of all speech files together in your answer. Because I'm not sure which (or combination of both) factors will give me the best results. Edit: I need this to run in Silverlight and Android, so I'm presumably stuck with only MP3 as my option (other than uncompressed wave files).

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