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• 'Binary XML' for game data?

  - by bluescrn

  I'm working on a level editing tool that saves its data as XML. This is ideal during development, as it's painless to make small changes to the data format, and it works nicely with tree-like data. The downside, though, is that the XML files are rather bloated, mostly due to duplication of tag and attribute names. Also due to numeric data taking significantly more space than using native datatypes. A small level could easily end up as 1Mb+. I want to get these sizes down significantly, especially if the system is to be used for a game on the iPhone or other devices with relatively limited memory. The optimal solution, for memory and performance, would be to convert the XML to a binary level format. But I don't want to do this. I want to keep the format fairly flexible. XML makes it very easy to add new attributes to objects, and give them a default value if an old version of the data is loaded. So I want to keep with the hierarchy of nodes, with attributes as name-value pairs. But I need to store this in a more compact format - to remove the massive duplication of tag/attribute names. Maybe also to give attributes native types, so, for example floating-point data is stored as 4 bytes per float, not as a text string. Google/Wikipedia reveal that 'binary XML' is hardly a new problem - it's been solved a number of times already. Has anyone here got experience with any of the existing systems/standards? - are any ideal for games use - with a free, lightweight and cross-platform parser/loader library (C/C++) available? Or should I reinvent this wheel myself? Or am I better off forgetting the ideal, and just compressing my raw .xml data (it should pack well with zip-like compression), and just taking the memory/performance hit on-load?

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• How to deal with D3DX .dll hell?

  - by bluescrn

  There's a large number of versions of the D3DX dll, from each SDK update, each version having a unique name (http://www.toymaker.info/Games/html/d3dx_dlls.html). All-too-often, people have versions missing. So even though they have a compatible version of DirectX, your D3D-based project won't run on their machine. I want to be able to distribute games (little spare-time projects, game jam entries, etc) as a simple zip file, without the need for an installer. But a significant percentage of users run into missing D3DX .dll errors. And without an installer, Microsoft's official solution (the DirectX web installer/updater) isn't really much of a solution. Unfortunately, Microsoft still won't give us the option of static linking to D3DX (which would be a nice clean solution). And avoiding using D3DX isn't very practical, especially if you're working with shaders (and no, I'm not switching to OpenGL, at least for now) Does anyone have clever solutions to avoiding this DLL hell?

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• Implementing 2D CSG (for collision shapes)?

  - by bluescrn

  Are there any simple (or well documented) algorithms for basic CSG operations on 2D polygons? I'm looking for a way to 'add' a number of overlapping 2D collision shapes. These may be convex or concave, but will be closed shapes, defined as a set of line segments, with no self-intersections. The use of this would be to construct a clean set of collision edges, for use with a 2D physics engine, from a scene consisting of many arbitrarily placed (and frequently overlapping) objects, each with their own collision shape. To begin with, I only need to 'add' shapes, but the ability to 'subtract', to create holes, may also be useful.

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• IDirect3DDevice9Ex and D3DPOOL_MANAGED?

  - by bluescrn

  So I wanted to switch to IDirect3DDevice9Ex, purely for the SetFrameLatency function, as fullscreen vsynced D3D seemed to produce noticable input lag. But then it tells me 'ha ha ha! now you can't use D3DPOOL_MANAGED!': Direct3D9: (ERROR) :D3DPOOL_MANAGED is not valid with IDirect3DDevice9Ex Is this really as unpleasant as it looks (when you're relying quite heavily on managed resources) - or is there a simple solution? If it really does mean manual management of everything (reloading all static textures, VBs, and IBs on a device reset), is it worth the hassle, will IDirect3DDevice9Ex bring enough benefit to make it worth writing a new resource manager? Starting to think I must be doing something wrong, due to this: Direct3D9: (ERROR) :Lock is not supported for textures allocated with POOL_DEFAULT unless they are marked D3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC. So if I put my (static) textures in POOL_DEFAULT, they need flagging as D3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC, just because I lock them once to load the data in?

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• Audio libraries for PC indie games [closed]

  - by bluescrn

  Possible Duplicate: Cross-Platform Audio API Suggestions What options are out there these days for audio playback/mixing in C++? Primarily for Windows, but portability (particularly to Mac and iOS) would be desirable. For a small indie game, potentially commercial, though - so I'm looking for something free/low-cost. My requirements are fairly basic - I don't need 3D sound, or many-channels - simple stereo is fine. Just need to be able to mix sound effects and a music stream, maybe decoding one or more compressed audio formats (.ogg/.mp3 etc), with all the basic controls over looping, pitch, volume, etc. Is OpenAL more-or-less the standard choice, or are there other good options out there?

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