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• The Important Relationship Between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

  Today successful website owners are someone who takes advantages from both the forms of Internet Marketing that is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as Social Media Marketing (SMM). At an initial glimpse you may not find any connection between the two.

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• game engine done, ideas missing

  - by Thoms

  I read at many places how people have this GREAT ideas but are not able to program themselves. I have quite the opposite problem. I have developed game engine, level editor, embedded Lua scripting language, I have even made wrapper for Android and it all works well. But I have no good idea about how to proceed with actual levels; I have no good ideas. The engine itself is very generic and can be used in many game concepts, but I just cannot think of anything useful. Do you have any thoughts on how to proceed? Where should I seek ideas? Who should I ask? I am sorry if this question is a duplicate.

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• C++ Game Engine Book/Tutorial/Anything recent?

  - by TheNoob

  Before I get flamed, please understand that I have been looking for a while now. Yes, I have found a good amount of game engine tutorials...except filled with errors, out of date syntax, missing crucial information, and so on. Is there anywhere with a recent tutorial, or a book, anything at all? I'm not asking for an opinion in graphics API's, just a point in the right direction to get started on game engine development. I just want to make it clear, I have googled/stacked like crazy. Any help appreciated. Thank you.

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• Mobile Game Engine

  - by Jason Crosby

  I am trying to track down a game engine for developing mobile games for ios and android. I have been looking for weeks now and havent found what i am looking for. I like jmonkey engine for making desktop games. Its easy to use and it comes with everything you need. Its more that just some libraries. I'm looking for something similar for developing mobile games. I'd like it to be easy to use and have everything included not just a collection of libraries. And I would prefer to write in c++. I'm not looking for "the best". I'm just looking for some engines that match my criteria so I can try them out and see which one works best for me.

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• Separate parts of a game engine [on hold]

  - by user272716

  I'm pretty new in developing videogames. By now I only used SDL with C/C++ to create games. I'm currently learning OpenGL and I realized that to be fluid and easy to maintain the code must be logically separated. Since I want to use OpenGLES on iOS and Android I was wondering how the engine must be imagined in a technical way, some questions came up: Do I have to separate input/update functions from draw functions in different threads? Is there only one proper way to think a game engine/loop? What kind of assets should I use to create a 3D game using openGl ES to get better performance?

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• 2d trajectory planning of a spaceship with physics.

  - by egarcia

  I'm implementing a 2D game with ships in space. In order to do it, I'm using LÖVE, which wraps Box2D with Lua. But I believe that my question can be answered by anyone with a greater understanding of physics than myself - so pseudo code is accepted as a response. My problem is that I don't know how to move my spaceships properly on a 2D physics-enabled world. More concretely: A ship of mass m is located at an initial position {x, y}. It has an initial velocity vector of {vx, vy} (can be {0,0}). The objective is a point in {xo,yo}. The ship has to reach the objective having a velocity of {vxo, vyo} (or near it), following the shortest trajectory. There's a function called update(dt) that is called frequently (i.e. 30 times per second). On this function, the ship can modify its position and trajectory, by applying "impulses" to itself. The magnitude of the impulses is binary: you can either apply it in a given direction, or not to apply it at all). In code, it looks like this: def Ship:update(dt) m = self:getMass() x,y = self:getPosition() vx,vy = self.getLinearVelocity() xo,yo = self:getTargetPosition() vxo,vyo = self:getTargetVelocity() thrust = self:getThrust() if(???) angle = ??? self:applyImpulse(math.sin(angle)*thrust, math.cos(angle)*thrust)) end end The first ??? is there to indicate that in some occasions (I guess) it would be better to "not to impulse" and leave the ship "drift". The second ??? part consists on how to calculate the impulse angle on a given dt. We are in space, so we can ignore things like air friction. Although it would be very nice, I'm not looking for someone to code this for me; I put the code there so my problem is clearly understood. What I need is an strategy - a way of attacking this. I know some basic physics, but I'm no expert. For example, does this problem have a name? That sort of thing. Thanks a lot.

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• 3D Ball Physics Theory: collision response on ground and against walls?

  - by David

  I'm really struggling to get a strong grasp on how I should be handling collision response in a game engine I'm building around a 3D ball physics concept. Think Monkey Ball as an example of the type of gameplay. I am currently using sphere-to-sphere broad phase, then AABB to OBB testing (the final test I am using right now is one that checks if one of the 8 OBB points crosses the planes of the object it is testing against). This seems to work pretty well, and I am getting back: Plane that object is colliding against (with a point on the plane, the plane's normal, and the exact point of intersection. I've tried what feels like dozens of different high-level strategies for handling these collisions, without any real success. I think my biggest problem is understanding how to handle collisions against walls in the x-y axes (left/right, front/back), which I want to have elasticity, and the ground (z-axis) where I want an elastic reaction if the ball drops down, but then for it to eventually normalize and be kept "on the ground" (not go into the ground, but also not continue bouncing). Without kluging something together, I'm positive there is a good way to handle this, my theories just aren't getting me all the way there. For physics modeling and movement, I am trying to use a Euler based setup with each object maintaining a position (and destination position prior to collision detection), a velocity (which is added onto the position to determine the destination position), and an acceleration (which I use to store any player input being put on the ball, as well as gravity in the z coord). Starting from when I detect a collision, what is a good way to approach the response to get the expected behavior in all cases? Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to assist... I am grateful for any pointers, and happy to post any additional info or code if it is useful. UPDATE Based on Steve H's and eBusiness' responses below, I have adapted my collision response to what makes a lot more sense now. It was close to right before, but I didn't have all the right pieces together at the right time! I have one problem left to solve, and that is what is causing the floor collision to hit every frame. Here's the collision response code I have now for the ball, then I'll describe the last bit I'm still struggling to understand. // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... if (m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal) <= 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold // -- NOTE: this was an experimental idea I had to solve the "jitter" bug I'll describe below float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position + intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); The above snippet is run after a collision is detected on the ball (collider) with a collidee (floor in this case). With a dampening force of 1.8f, the ball's reflected "upward" velocity will eventually be overcome by gravity, so the ball will essentially be stuck on the floor. THIS is the problem I have now... the collision code is running every frame (since the ball's z-velocity is constantly pushing it a collision with the floor below it). The ball is not technically stuck, I can move it around still, but the movement is really goofy because the velocity and position keep getting affected adversely by the above snippet. I was experimenting with an idea to clamp the z-velocity to zero if it was "close to zero", but this didn't do what I think... probably because the very next frame the ball gets a new gravity acceleration applied to its velocity regardless (which I think is good, right?). Collisions with walls are as they used to be and work very well. It's just this last bit of "stickiness" to deal with. The camera is constantly jittering up and down by extremely small fractions too when the ball is "at rest". I'll keep playing with it... I like puzzles like this, especially when I think I'm close. Any final ideas on what I could be doing wrong here? UPDATE 2 Good news - I discovered I should be subtracting the intersection.diff from the m_position (position prior to collision). The intersection.diff is my calculation of the difference in the vector of position to destPosition from the intersection point to the position. In this case, adding it was causing my ball to always go "up" just a little bit, causing the jitter. By subtracting it, and moving that clamper for the velocity.z when close to zero to being above the dot product (and changing the test from <= 0 to < 0), I now have the following: // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... float dotprod = m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal); if (dotprod < 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration? // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position - intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); UpdateWorldMatrix(m_destWorldMatrix, m_destOBB, m_destPosition, false); This is MUCH better. No jitter, and the ball now "rests" at the floor, while still bouncing off the floor and walls. The ONLY thing left is that the ball is now virtually "stuck". He can move but at a much slower rate, likely because the else of my dot product test is only letting the ball move at a rate multiplied against the tRemaining... I think this is a better solution than I had previously, but still somehow not the right idea. BTW, I'm trying to journal my progress through this problem for anyone else with a similar situation - hopefully it will serve as some help, as many similar posts have for me over the years.

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• Search Engine Optimization - How Search Engine Optimization Works

  There are many ways to direct extra traffic to your web site, but search engine optimization may be the best. Unlike many traditional types of advertising, such as banner ads, this technique does not cast a wide net and hope for the best. Instead, it takes the opposite approach, simply making your site easier to find for people who are looking for a site that is similar to it. This is a much more reliable method of gaining additional viewers for your site, especially because it only targets people who are interested in you in the first place.

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• Game engine like Unity 3D that allow me to use .NET code

  - by Pking

  I've been looking at Unity 3D for developing a 3D PC game and I really like the scene editor and how it simplifies the process of constructing 3D scenes, managing assets, animations, transitions etc. However, I don't want to restrict myself to using the Unity 3D scripts for handling every bit of game logic in the game. E.g. If I want to construct a RPG dialogue system I don't want to do it with unity 3d scripts - I'd like to use C#/.net. Also, I might want to use e.g. windows azure and sql azure as backend, and use 3rd party .net libraries such as reactive-extensions etc. Is there a .net engine out there that helps me with asset loading, animations, physics, transitions, etc. with a scene editor, but allow me to plug it into a visual studio .net project? Thanks

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• Jitter during wall collisions with Bullet Physics: contact/penetration tolerance?

  - by Niriel

  I use the bullet physics engine through Panda3d. My scene is still very simple, think 'Wolfenstein3d': tile-based, walls are solid cubes. I expect walls to block the player, and I expect the player to slide along the walls in case of non-normal incidence. What I get is what I expect, with one difference: there is some jitter. If I try to force myself into the wall, then I see the frames blinking quickly between two positions. These differ by about 0.04 units of distance, which corresponds to 4 cm in my game. I noticed a 4 cm elsewhere: the bottom of my player capsule is 4 cm below ground, when at rest. Does that mean that there is somewhere in the Bullet engine a default 0.04-units-long tolerance to differentiate contact from collision? If so, what should I do ? Should I change the scale of my game so that these 0.04 units correspond to 0.4 cm, making the jitter ten times smaller? Or can I ask bullet to change its tolerance to a smaller value? Edit This is the jitter I get: 6.155 - 6.118 = 0.036 LPoint3f(0, 6.11694, 0.835) LPoint3f(0, 6.15499, 0.835) LPoint3f(0, 6.11802, 0.835) LPoint3f(0, 6.15545, 0.835) LPoint3f(0, 6.11817, 0.835) LPoint3f(0, 6.15726, 0.835) LPoint3f(0, 6.11876, 0.835) LPoint3f(0, 6.15911, 0.835) LPoint3f(0, 6.11937, 0.835) I found a setMargin method. I set it to 5 mm both on the BoxShape for the walls and on the Capsule shape for the player. It still jitters by about 35 mm as illustrated by this log (11.117 - 11.082 = 0.035): LPoint3f(0, 11.0821, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.1169, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.082, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.117, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.082, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.117, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.0821, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.1175, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.0822, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.1178, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.0823, 0.905) LPoint3f(0, 11.1183, 0.905) The margin on the capsule did change my penetration with the floor though, I'm a bit higher (0.905 instead of 0.835). However, it did not change anything when colliding with the walls. How can I make the collisions against the walls less jittery? Edit, the day after: After more investigation, it appears that dynamic objects behave well. My problem comes from the btKinematicCharacterController that I use for moving my character; that stuff is totally bugged, according to the whole Internet :/.

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• Help me choose an engine

  - by Gjorgji

  So far i've been trying to make a RTS in pygame but, i feel like 2d is not enough and pygame has me do a lot of stuff that i would not like doing. What i would like doing is working on the AI gameplay and such and not worying too much about how to display stuff,physics and the like too much. So far Unity has boo which is supposed to be similar to python i wonder if that could work. How similar is it to python should i use this? Other options as far as i can see are ogre3d python bindings and UDK. Which would best suit my needs?

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• Google indexing and ranking a custom domain served by Google App Engine

  - by Hugues

  I have a website served on the following URL : "http://www.plugimmo.com" which is a custom domain served by Google App Engine on the following URL : http://plugimmo.appspot.com Since a while I have tried to optimise the Google indexing and ranking with no success. The problem is that searching on Google the keywords in the title of my home page does not retrieve my website at all even not in the 1,000 first results : When checking the cached version of google ( cache:www.plugimmo.com), it says that the cached version is the one of 20-Aug-12 of "plugimmo.appspot.com". It looks there are several issues : 1 - The cached version is really old. I have made a lot of changes since the 20-Aug-12 and I saw the googlebot crawling my site several times. 2 - The cached version is for "plugimmo.appspot.com" 3 - When looking at the Google Webmaster tools, I see that the number of pages indexed for www.plugimmo.com is 0, but that can't be the case given the number of changes I made since then. My questions would therefore be the following : Why is the version of the cache so old although I saw the googlebot crawling the site many times since 20-Aug-12 ? Is there a problem with indexing a custom domain served by Google App Engine ? Why is the Google Webmaster tools showing 0 pages indexed although new pages have been crawled and that no errors have been reported in the indexing ? Also, the site has been developed with Google Web Toolkit. I have followed the guidelines regarding crawling Ajax sites. The home page when crawled by a robot is redirected to http://www.plugimmo.com/HomeSnapshot.html Thanks a lot for your help ! Hugues

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• .Net search engine architecture and technology choice

  - by shrivb

  I am in the process of designing a search engine for an asp.net site. The site currently uses Microsoft Indexing Server to index and search content which range from simple text files to MS documents to PDFs. MIS is also used to crawl File servers. MIS in tandem with Index Server Companion crawls for content from external sites. I intend to replace MIS with the indexer/crawler I am trying to build. Since my platform is completely on the Microsoft stack, I cant afford to have a Java application server. Thus, Solr, and effectively, SolrNet is ruled out. With this being the context, I have couple of questions. 1.Technology choice I had done my initial investigation and looked at Lucene.Net. There seemed to be 2 issues in using Lucene.Net. First being, it cant crawl external content. There doesn't seem to be a direct port of Nutch in .Net. Second, since it is just an indexer, it cant parse various document types. The parsing is left to the developer. So, what would be best technology choice on the .Net platform to achieve indexing & crawling? Are there any .Net open source libraries available for document parsing? 2.Architectural pattern Is there any general architectural pattern or best practice that needs to be followed in designing such a search engine? Thanks in advance.

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• Question about separating game core engine from game graphics engine...

  - by Conrad Clark

  Suppose I have a SquareObject class, which implements IDrawable, an interface which contains the method void Draw(). I want to separate drawing logic itself from the game core engine. My main idea is to create a static class which is responsible to dispatch actions to the graphic engine. public static class DrawDispatcher<T> { private static Action<T> DrawAction = new Action<T>((ObjectToDraw)=>{}); public static void SetDrawAction(Action<T> action) { DrawAction = action; } public static void Dispatch(this T Obj) { DrawAction(Obj); } } public static class Extensions { public static void DispatchDraw<T>(this object Obj) { DrawDispatcher<T>.DispatchDraw((T)Obj); } } Then, on the core side: public class SquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<SquareObject>(); } #endregion } And on the graphics side: public static class SquareRender{ //stuff here public static void Initialize(){ DrawDispatcher<SquareObject>.SetDrawAction((Square)=>{//my square rendering logic}); } } Do this "pattern" follow best practices? And a plus, I could easily change the render scheme of each object by changing the DispatchDraw parameter, as in: public class SuperSquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<SquareObject>(); } #endregion } public class RedSquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<RedSquareObject>(); } #endregion } RedSquareObject would have its own render method, but SuperSquareObject would render as a normal SquareObject I'm just asking because i do not want to reinvent the wheel, and there may be a design pattern similar (and better) to this that I may be not acknowledged of. Thanks in advance!

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• Low-level game engine renderer design

  - by Mark Ingram

  I'm piecing together the beginnings of an extremely basic engine which will let me draw arbitrary objects (SceneObject). I've got to the point where I'm creating a few sensible sounding classes, but as this is my first outing into game engines, I've got the feeling I'm overlooking things. I'm familiar with compartmentalising larger portions of the code so that individual sub-systems don't overly interact with each other, but I'm thinking more of the low-level stuff, starting from vertices working up. So if I have a Vertex class, I can combine that with a list of indices to make a Mesh class. How does the engine determine identical meshes for objects? Or is that left to the level designer? Once we have a Mesh, that can be contained in the SceneObject class. And a list of SceneObject can be placed into the Scene to be drawn. Right now I'm only using OpenGL, but I'm aware that I don't want to be tying OpenGL calls right in to base classes (such as updating the vertices in the Mesh, I don't want to be calling glBufferData etc). Are there any good resources that discuss these issues? Are there any "common" heirachies which should be used?

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• Cry Engine 3 vs UDK

  - by Daniele Riccardelli

  I'm new here and I hope that other people may find this question interesting. Me and a bunch of guys from my University are thinking about getting started in game development, but, even though the game design is kind of ready, we are stucked at the point "which Engine should we choose". At first, we were thinking about Unity3D Free, in particular because we are pretty familiar with C# and, even better, it's completely free, but on the other hand there are some cons like no dynamic shadowing that make the realization of our game kinda hard. So, we are thinking about moving either to UDK or Cry Engine, since they are not as expensive as Unity3D Pro (at least before the game deployment) . The thing we are worried the most, though, is that we are kind of scared about the support for team work(i mean, that we might find it hard to coordinate our efforts without software support), since in Unity3D the team features are part of purchasable content, and we are not interested in paying that much for a project we are not even sure we can complete. So, finally, I hope one of you knows the mentioned engines enough to give us a tip telling which one offers better team features and is advisable for guys that have barely worked before on videogames but have good object oriented programming skills. Probably might be helpful for your suggestion, if i say that our game is an exploration game. Thanks to anybody who's going to answer.

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• Game engine lib and editor

  - by luke

  I would like to know the best way/best practice to handle the following situation. Suppose the project you are working on is split in two sub-projects: game engine lib editor gui. Now, you have a method bool Method( const MethodParams &params ) that will be called during game-level initialization. So it is a method belonging to the game engine lib. Now, the parameters of this method, passed as a reference the structure MethodParams can be decided via the editor, in the level design phase. Suppose the structure is the following: enum Enum1 { E1_VAL1, E1_VAL2, }; enum Enum2 { E2_VAL1, E2_VAL2, E2_VAL3, }; struct MethodParams { float value; Enum1 e1; Enum2 e2; // some other member } The editor should present a dialog that will let the user set the MethodParams struct. A text control for the field value. Furthermore, the editor needs to let the user set the fields e1 and e2 using, for example, two combo boxes (a combo box is a window control that has a list of choices). Obviously, every enum should be mapped to a string, so the user can make an informed selection (i have used E1_VAL1 etc.., but normally the enum would be more meaningful). One could even want to map every enum to a string more informative (E1_VAL1 to "Image union algorithm", E1_VAL2 to "Image intersection algorithm" and so on...). The editor will include all the relevant game egine lib files (.h etc...), but this mapping is not automatic and i am confused on how to handle it in a way that, if in future i add E1_VAL3 and E1_VAL4, the code change will be minimal.

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• 2D platformer gravity physics with slow-motion

  - by DD

  Hi all, I fine tuned my 2d platformer physics and when I added slow-motion I realized that it is messed up. The problem I have is that for some reason the physics still depends on framerate. So when I scale down time elapsed, every force is scaled down as well. So the jump force is scaled down, meaning in slow-motion, character jumps vertically smaller height and gravity force is scaled down as well so the character goes further in the air without falling. I'm sending update function in hopes that someone can help me out here (I separated vertical (jump, gravity) and walking (arbitrary walking direction on a platform - platforms can be of any angle) vectors): characterUpdate:(float)dt { //Compute walking velocity walkingAcceleration = direction of platform * walking acceleration constant * dt; initialWalkingVelocity = walkingVelocity; if( isWalking ) { if( !isJumping ) walkingVelocity = walkingVelocity + walkingAcceleration; else walkingVelocity = walkingVelocity + Vector( walking acceleration constant * dt, 0 ); } // Compute jump/fall velocity if( !isOnPlatform ) { initialVerticalVelocity = verticalVelocity; verticalVelocity = verticalVelocity + verticalAcceleration * dt; } // Add walking velocity position = position + ( walkingVelocity + initialWalkingVelocity ) * 0.5 * dt; //Add jump/fall velocity if not on a platform if( !isOnPlatform ) position = position + ( verticalVelocity + initialVerticalVelocity ) * 0.5 * dt; verticalAcceleration.y = Gravity * dt; }

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• Drawing Shape in DebugView (Farseer)

  - by keyvan kazemi

  As the title says, I need to draw a shape/polygon in Farseer using debugview. I have this piece of code which converts a Texture to polygon: //load texture that will represent the tray trayTexture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("tray"); //Create an array to hold the data from the texture uint[] data = new uint[trayTexture.Width * trayTexture.Height]; //Transfer the texture data to the array trayTexture.GetData(data); //Find the vertices that makes up the outline of the shape in the texture Vertices verts = PolygonTools.CreatePolygon(data, trayTexture.Width, false); //Since it is a concave polygon, we need to partition it into several smaller convex polygons _list = BayazitDecomposer.ConvexPartition(verts); Vector2 vertScale = new Vector2(ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(1)); foreach (Vertices verti in _list) { verti.Scale(ref vertScale); } tray = BodyFactory.CreateCompoundPolygon(MyWorld, _list, 10); Now in DebugView I guess I have to use "DrawShape" method which requires: DrawShape(Fixture fixture, Transform xf, Color color) My question is how can I get the variables needed for this method, namely Fixture and Transform?

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• Sony PSM sdk and 2d Game engine

  - by Notbad

  I have started with Sony PSM sdk this week. I'm interested to create a little 2D game and have been reading through the web about a so called "2D game engine" integrated in psm. Some information I read suggested that it was going to be added on january 2012, but I have been going through the documentation and haven't been able to find any reference to it. Does anybody know if they finally introduced the 2D game engien for psm? Thanks in advance.

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• Game engine development in C++ [closed]

  - by Chris Cochran

  I am arriving at completion on a multithreaded concurrency framework designed for high-performance computing. Though I am not a gamer, it has occurred to me that this stand-alone software core could be an ideal basis for a multiprocessor game engine (64-bit native C++, 5000+ entry points). Are there any websites I could visit to discuss this technology with programmers and developers who could really benefit from it?

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• Getting into the details of game engine programming

  - by Darkslash

  I am interested in learning game programming, but I really have an interest in the lower level engineering in games. I have OpenGL experience, and I am really interested in learning more about implementing AI, Physics, etc. I have a computer science degree, so I really like getting into technical stuff. Many times when I ask about this sort of thing, I get a lot of "Use an engine", "Use Unity3d", "Why waste your time writing code that already exists", etc, etc. My idea was to use simpler libraries such as SFML or XNA so that I could learn how to implement the more complex systems. The thing is, although I do want to write games, I want to learn things that using something like Unity simply doesn't teach you. My goal is not to make a current generation quality 3D game to sell, I just want to make some cool smaller games and learn all I can about the programming side of game development. Is this something that people just do not do anymore? It seems like everywhere I turn people are using Unity or UDK or GameMaker. I fully understand why you would use a tool like these, but I cant see how they would suit my purposes. So where does someone like myself turn? Am I trying to learn something that people just do not bother doing anymore? Is the innovation in this area gone and just all about gameplay now? I'm sorry if this question seems silly, but I am genuinely interested in knowing more about this and meeting more people who are interested in this sort of thing.

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• I need a very rapid game engine with as many presets as possible [closed]

  - by GLycan

  I have to make a game about the immune system (with as many grotesque simplifications as I want) in roughly two weeks. I'm thinking of something along the lines of bubble tanks, but I think I can roll with pretty much anything that fits the following: Working engine that handles mouvement, objects The fighting system can be done in any way that allows a bare minimum of configuration Scripting should be, preferably, Python Art should be customizable I'm hoping that there is some existing game that I could adapt. Any sggestions (aside from not leaving projects until later) ?

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• Movement prediction for non-shooters

  - by ShadowChaser

  I'm working on an isometric 2D game with moderate-scale multiplayer, approximately 20-30 players connected at once to a persistent server. I've had some difficulty getting a good movement prediction implementation in place. Physics/Movement The game doesn't have a true physics implementation, but uses the basic principles to implement movement. Rather than continually polling input, state changes (ie/ mouse down/up/move events) are used to change the state of the character entity the player is controlling. The player's direction (ie/ north-east) is combined with a constant speed and turned into a true 3D vector - the entity's velocity. In the main game loop, "Update" is called before "Draw". The update logic triggers a "physics update task" that tracks all entities with a non-zero velocity uses very basic integration to change the entities position. For example: entity.Position += entity.Velocity.Scale(ElapsedTime.Seconds) (where "Seconds" is a floating point value, but the same approach would work for millisecond integer values). The key point is that no interpolation is used for movement - the rudimentary physics engine has no concept of a "previous state" or "current state", only a position and velocity. State Change and Update Packets When the velocity of the character entity the player is controlling changes, a "move avatar" packet is sent to the server containing the entity's action type (stand, walk, run), direction (north-east), and current position. This is different from how 3D first person games work. In a 3D game the velocity (direction) can change frame to frame as the player moves around. Sending every state change would effectively transmit a packet per frame, which would be too expensive. Instead, 3D games seem to ignore state changes and send "state update" packets on a fixed interval - say, every 80-150ms. Since speed and direction updates occur much less frequently in my game, I can get away with sending every state change. Although all of the physics simulations occur at the same speed and are deterministic, latency is still an issue. For that reason, I send out routine position update packets (similar to a 3D game) but much less frequently - right now every 250ms, but I suspect with good prediction I can easily boost it towards 500ms. The biggest problem is that I've now deviated from the norm - all other documentation, guides, and samples online send routine updates and interpolate between the two states. It seems incompatible with my architecture, and I need to come up with a better movement prediction algorithm that is closer to a (very basic) "networked physics" architecture. The server then receives the packet and determines the players speed from it's movement type based on a script (Is the player able to run? Get the player's running speed). Once it has the speed, it combines it with the direction to get a vector - the entity's velocity. Some cheat detection and basic validation occurs, and the entity on the server side is updated with the current velocity, direction, and position. Basic throttling is also performed to prevent players from flooding the server with movement requests. After updating its own entity, the server broadcasts an "avatar position update" packet to all other players within range. The position update packet is used to update the client side physics simulations (world state) of the remote clients and perform prediction and lag compensation. Prediction and Lag Compensation As mentioned above, clients are authoritative for their own position. Except in cases of cheating or anomalies, the client's avatar will never be repositioned by the server. No extrapolation ("move now and correct later") is required for the client's avatar - what the player sees is correct. However, some sort of extrapolation or interpolation is required for all remote entities that are moving. Some sort of prediction and/or lag-compensation is clearly required within the client's local simulation / physics engine. Problems I've been struggling with various algorithms, and have a number of questions and problems: Should I be extrapolating, interpolating, or both? My "gut feeling" is that I should be using pure extrapolation based on velocity. State change is received by the client, client computes a "predicted" velocity that compensates for lag, and the regular physics system does the rest. However, it feels at odds to all other sample code and articles - they all seem to store a number of states and perform interpolation without a physics engine. When a packet arrives, I've tried interpolating the packet's position with the packet's velocity over a fixed time period (say, 200ms). I then take the difference between the interpolated position and the current "error" position to compute a new vector and place that on the entity instead of the velocity that was sent. However, the assumption is that another packet will arrive in that time interval, and it's incredibly difficult to "guess" when the next packet will arrive - especially since they don't all arrive on fixed intervals (ie/ state changes as well). Is the concept fundamentally flawed, or is it correct but needs some fixes / adjustments? What happens when a remote player stops? I can immediately stop the entity, but it will be positioned in the "wrong" spot until it moves again. If I estimate a vector or try to interpolate, I have an issue because I don't store the previous state - the physics engine has no way to say "you need to stop after you reach position X". It simply understands a velocity, nothing more complex. I'm reluctant to add the "packet movement state" information to the entities or physics engine, since it violates basic design principles and bleeds network code across the rest of the game engine. What should happen when entities collide? There are three scenarios - the controlling player collides locally, two entities collide on the server during a position update, or a remote entity update collides on the local client. In all cases I'm uncertain how to handle the collision - aside from cheating, both states are "correct" but at different time periods. In the case of a remote entity it doesn't make sense to draw it walking through a wall, so I perform collision detection on the local client and cause it to "stop". Based on point #2 above, I might compute a "corrected vector" that continually tries to move the entity "through the wall" which will never succeed - the remote avatar is stuck there until the error gets too high and it "snaps" into position. How do games work around this?

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• Floating point precision and physics calculations

  - by Vee

  The gravity Vector2 in my physics world is (0; 0.1). The number 0.1 is known to be problematic, since "it cannot be represented exactly, but is approximately 1.10011001100110011001101 × 2-4". Having this value for the gravity gives me problems with collisions and creates quite nasty bugs. Changing the value to 0.11 solves these problems. Is there a more elegant solution that doesn't require changing the value at all?

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