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• Resources on how to relate structured and semi- / un-structured information

  - by Fritz Meissner

  I don't have a great background in information organisation / retrieval, but I know of a few ways of dealing with the problem. For structured information, it's possible to go OOish - everything "has-a" or "has-many" something else, and you navigate the graph to find relationships between things. For unstructured information, you have techniques like text search and tagging. What resources - articles or books - are there that summarise the CS theory behind these techniques or could introduce me to others? I'm developing a system that needs to handle capture and retrieval of information that ranges from necessarily unstructured (advice about X) to structured (list of Xs that relate to Ys) to a combination (Ys that relate to the advice about X) and I'd like to get some insight into how to do it properly.

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• Calculating the "power" of a player in a "Defend Your Castle" type game

  - by Jesse Emond

  I'm a making a "Defend Your Castle" type game, where each player has a castle and must send units to destroy the opponent's castle. It looks like this (and yeah, this is the actual game, not a quick paint drawing..): Now, I'm trying to implement the AI of the opponent, and I'd like to create 4 different AI levels: Easy, Normal, Hard and Hardcore. I've never made any "serious" AI before and I'd like to create a quite complete one this time. My idea is to calculate a player's "power" score, based on the current health of its castle and the individual "power" score of its units. Then, the AI would just try to keep a score close to the player's one(Easy would stay below it, Normal would stay near it and Hard would try to get above it). But I just don't know how to calculate a player's power score. There are just too many variables to take into account and I don't know how to properly use them to create one significant number(the power level). Could anyone help me out on this one? Here are the variables that should influence a player's power score: Current castle health, the unit's total health, damage, speed and attack range. Also, the player can have increased Income(the money bag), damage(the + Damage) and speed(the + speed)... How could I include them in the score? I'm really stuck here... Or is there an other way that I could implement AI for this type of game? Thanks for your precious time.

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• Making a game "resize-safe"

  - by CPP_Person

  It's one thing to get the graphics aligned perfectly, it's another to do this for every single resolution and not take too much time and/or make the code unreadable due to size. Games like Battlefield 3 and Minecraft seem to manage this. But what do they do to keep things from stretching or going off the screen? I don't know any algorithms to do this. I'd like some help on this topic. I've always programmed games that only handle a single resolution, so help would be appreciate.

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• Advantages of Singleton Class over Static Class?

  Point 1) Singleton We can get the object of singleton and then pass to other methods. Static Class We can not pass static class to other methods as we pass objects Point 2) Singleton In future, it is easy to change the logic of of creating objects to some pooling mechanism. Static Class Very difficult to implement some pooling logic in case of static class. We would need to make that class as non-static and then make all the methods non-static methods, So entire your code needs to be changed. Point3:) Singleton Can Singletone class be inherited to subclass? Singleton class does not say any restriction of Inheritence. So we should be able to do this as long as subclass is also inheritence.There's nothing fundamentally wrong with subclassing a class that is intended to be a singleton. There are many reasons you might want to do it. and there are many ways to accomplish it. It depends on language you use. Static Class We can not inherit Static class to another Static class in C#. Think about it this way: you access static members via type name, like this: MyStaticType.MyStaticMember(); Were you to inherit from that class, you would have to access it via the new type name: MyNewType.MyStaticMember(); Thus, the new item bears no relationships to the original when used in code. There would be no way to take advantage of any inheritance relationship for things like polymorphism. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Conditions for a traditional friends system vs. open following system

  - by Dan

  I'm just curious for everyone who is developing social sites out there. When you build a method for connecting users, do you prefer to use a following-style system (follow me, you can see all of my information and I can just choose to follow you back), or instead do you choose to have a friends-style system (I have to allow you see all of my information on your homepage, even if it is open to the public, vise versa). Why and under what circumstances do you use each? How do you manage privacy between your users? Have you use another way to connect your users? Examples of what methods you've choose and how you manage the user's privacy (private by default vs open to the web) are awesome; it could show correlation and provides an actual look.

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• DDD and Value Objects. Are mutable Value Objects a good candidate for Non Aggr. Root Entity?

  - by Tony

  Here is a little problem Have an entity, with a value object. Not a problem. I replace a value object for a new one, then nhibernate inserts the new value and orphan the old one, then deletes it. Ok, that's a problem. Insured is my entity in my domain. He has a collection of Addresses (value objects). One of the addresses is the MailingAddress. When we want to update the mailing address, let's say zipcode was wrong, following Mr. Evans doctrine, we must replace the old object for a new one since it's immutable (a value object right?). But we don't want to delete the row thou, because that address's PK is a FK in a MailingHistory table. So, following Mr. Evans doctrine, we are pretty much screwed here. Unless i make my addressses Entities, so i don't have to "replace" it, and simply update its zipcode member, like the old good days. What would you suggest me in this case? The way i see it, ValueObjects are only useful when you want to encapsulate a group of database table's columns (component in nhibernate). Everything that has a persistence id in the database, is better off to make it an Entity (not necessarily an aggregate root) so you can update its members without recreating the whole object graph, specially if that's a deep-nested object. Do you concur? Is it allowed by Mr. Evans to have a mutable value object? Or is a mutable value object a candidate for an Entity? Thanks

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• What are the relative merits for implementing an Erlang-style "Continuation" pattern in C#

  - by JoeGeeky

  What are the relative merits (or demerits) for implementing an Erlang-style "Continuation" pattern in C#. I'm working on a project that has a large number of Lowest priority threads and I'm wondering if my approach may be all wrong. It would seem there is a reasonable upper limit to the number of long-running threads that any one Process 'should' spawn. With that said, I'm not sure what would signal the tipping-point for too many thread or when alternate patterns such as "Continuation" would be more suitable. In this case, many of the threads do a small amount of work and then sleep until woken to go again (Ex. Heartbeat, purge caches, etc...). This continues for the life of the Process.

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• Use adapter pattern for coupled classes

  - by kaiseroskilo

  I need (for unit testing purposes) to create adapters for external library classes.ExchangeService and ContactsFolder are Microsoft's implementations in its' EWS library. So I created my adapters that implement my interfaces, but it seems that contactsFolder has a dependency for ExchangeService in its' constructor. The problem is that I cannot instantiate ContactsFolderAdapter without somehow accessing the actual ExchangeService instance (I see only ExchangeServiceAdapter in scope). Is there a better pattern for this that retains the adapter classes? Or should I "infect" ExchangeServiceAdapter with some kind of GetActualObject method?

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• How is game development different from other software development?

  - by Davy8

  For a solid general purpose software developer, what specifically is different about game development, either fundamentally or just differences in degree? I've done toy games like Tic-tac-toe, Tetris, and a brute-force sudoku solver (with UI) and I'm now embarking on a mid-sized project (mid-sized for being a single developer and not having done many games) and one thing I've found with this particular project is that separation of concerns is a lot harder since everything affects state, and every object can interact with every other object in a myriad of ways. So far I've managed to keep the code reasonably clean for my satisfaction but I find that keeping clean code in non-trivial games is a lot harder than it is for my day job. The game I'm working on is turn-based and the graphics are going to be fairly simple (web-based, mostly through DOM manipulation) so real time and 3d work aren't really applicable to me, but I'd still be interested in answers regarding those if they're interesting. Mostly interested in general game logic though. P.S. Feel free to retag this, I'm not really sure what tags are applicable.

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• Is switch-case over enumeration bad practice?

  - by Puckl

  I have an enumeration with the commands Play, Stop and Pause for a media player. In two classes I do a switch-case over the received commands. The player runs in a different thread and I deliver the commands in a command queue to the thread. If I generate class diagrams the enumeration has dependencies all over the place. Is there a nicer way to deal with the commands? If I would change/extend the enumeration, I would have to change several classes. (Its not super important to keep the player extensible, but I try to write nice software.)

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• Balancing game difficulty against player progression

  - by Raven Dreamer

  It seems that the current climate of games seems to cater to an obvious progression of player power, whether that means getting a bigger, more explosive gun in Halo, leveling up in an RPG, or unlocking new options in Command and Conquer 4. Yet this concept is not exclusive to video or computer games -- even in Dungeons and Dragons players can strive to acquire a +2 sword to replace the +1 weapon they've been using. Yet as a systems designer, the concept of player progression is giving me headache after headache. Should I balance around the players exact capabilities and give up on a simple linear progression? (I think ESIV:Oblivion is a good example of this) Is it better to throw the players into an "arms race" with their opponents, where if the players don't progress in an orderly manner, it is only a matter of time until gameplay is unbearably difficult? (4th Edition DnD strikes me as a good example of this) Perhaps it would make most sense to untether the core gameplay mechanics from progression at all -- give them flashier, more interesting (but not more powerful!) ways to grow?

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• Help me classify this type of software architecture

  - by Alex Burtsev

  I read some books about software architecture as we are using it in our project but I can't classify the architecture properly. It's some kind of Enterprise Architecture, but what exactly... SOA, ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), Message Bus, Event Driven SOA, there are so many terms in Enterprise software.... The system is based on custom XML messages exchanges between services. (it's not SOAP, nor any other XML based standard, just plain XML). These messages represent notifications (state changes) that are applied to the Domain model, (it's not like CRUD when you serialize the whole domain object, and pass it to service for persistence). The system is centralized, and system participants use different programming languages and frameworks (c++, c#, java). Also, messages are not processed at the moment they are received as they are stored first and the treatment begins on demand. It's called SOA+EDA -:)

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• Is Paypal the best solution for payment gateway for a website?

  - by Pennf0lio

  I have a realty website that needs a payment gateway for their property reservation. The reservation fee range from $500-$600 and about 5-6 people per month. I was wondering if Paypal is the best solution for accepting Payment. What will be the Pros and Cons using Paypal. Paypal was my first choice because It's easy to integrate on my existing website and I wouldn't be minding so much on the security. P.S. It's not a part of the question, But If you can site some realty website that accept payment and would be a good inspiration. It would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

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• Should all foreign table references use foreign key constraints

  - by TecBrat

  Closely related to: Foreign key restrictions -> yes or no? I asked a question on SO and it led me to ask this here. If I'm faced with a choice of having a circular reference or just not enforcing the restraint, which is the better choice? In my particular case I have customers and addresses. I want an address to have a reference to a customer and I want each customer to have a default billing address id and a default shipping address id. I might query for all addresses that have a certain customer ID or I might query for the address with the ID that matches the default shipping or billing address ids. I'm not sure yet how the constraints (or lack of) will effect the system as my application and it's data age.

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• When following SRP, how should I deal with validating and saving entities?

  - by Kristof Claes

  I've been reading Clean Code and various online articles about SOLID lately, and the more I read about it, the more I feel like I don't know anything. Let's say I'm building a web application using ASP.NET MVC 3. Let's say I have a UsersController with a Create action like this: public class UsersController : Controller { public ActionResult Create(CreateUserViewModel viewModel) { } } In that action method I want to save a user to the database if the data that was entered is valid. Now, according to the Single Responsibility Principle an object should have a single responsibility, and that responsibility should be entirely encapsulated by the class. All its services should be narrowly aligned with that responsibility. Since validation and saving to the database are two separate responsibilities, I guess I should create to separate class to handle them like this: public class UsersController : Controller { private ICreateUserValidator validator; private IUserService service; public UsersController(ICreateUserValidator validator, IUserService service) { this.validator = validator; this.service= service; } public ActionResult Create(CreateUserViewModel viewModel) { ValidationResult result = validator.IsValid(viewModel); if (result.IsValid) { service.CreateUser(viewModel); return RedirectToAction("Index"); } else { foreach (var errorMessage in result.ErrorMessages) { ModelState.AddModelError(String.Empty, errorMessage); } return View(viewModel); } } } That makes some sense to me, but I'm not at all sure that this is the right way to handle things like this. It is for example entirely possible to pass an invalid instance of CreateUserViewModel to the IUserService class. I know I could use the built in DataAnnotations, but what when they aren't enough? Image that my ICreateUserValidator checks the database to see if there already is another user with the same name... Another option is to let the IUserService take care of the validation like this: public class UserService : IUserService { private ICreateUserValidator validator; public UserService(ICreateUserValidator validator) { this.validator = validator; } public ValidationResult CreateUser(CreateUserViewModel viewModel) { var result = validator.IsValid(viewModel); if (result.IsValid) { // Save the user } return result; } } But I feel I'm violating the Single Responsibility Principle here. How should I deal with something like this?

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• Logarithmic spacing of FFT bins

  - by Mykel Stone

  I'm trying to do the examples within the GameDev.net Beat Detection article ( http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/reference/programming/features/beatdetection/index.html ) I have no issue with performing a FFT and getting the frequency data and doing most of the article. I'm running into trouble though in the section 2.B, Enhancements and beat decision factors. in this section the author gives 3 equations numbered R10-R12 to be used to determine how many bins go into each subband: R10 - Linear increase of the width of the subband with its index R11 - We can choose for example the width of the first subband R12 - The sum of all the widths must not exceed 1024 He says the following in the article: "Once you have equations (R11) and (R12) it is fairly easy to extract 'a' and 'b', and thus to find the law of the 'wi'. This calculus of 'a' and 'b' must be made manually and 'a' and 'b' defined as constants in the source; indeed they do not vary during the song." However, I cannot seem to understand how these values are calculated...I'm probably missing something simple, but learning fourier analysis in a couple of weeks has left me Decimated-in-Mind and I cannot seem to see it.

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• Avoiding the Anaemic Domain - How to decide what single responsibility a class has

  - by thecapsaicinkid

  Even after reading a bunch I'm still falling into the same trap. I have a class, usually an enity. I need to implement more than one, similar operations on this type. It feels wrong to (seemingly arbitrarily) choose one of these operations to belong inside the entity and push the others out to a separate class; I end up pushing all operations to service classes and am left with an anaemic domain. As a crude example, imagine the typical Employee class with numeric properties to hold how many paid days the employee is entitled to for both sickness and holiday and a collection of days taken for each. public class Employee { public int PaidHolidayAllowance { get; set; } public int PaidSicknessAllowance { get; set; } public IEnumerable<Holiday> Holidays { get; set; } public IEnumerable<SickDays> SickDays { get; set; } } I want two operations, one to calculate remaining holiday, another for remaining paid sick days. It seems strange to include say, CalculateRemaingHoliday() in the Employee class and bump CalculateRemainingPaidSick() to some PaidSicknessCalculator class. I would end up with a PaidSicknessCalculator and a RemainingHolidayCalculator and the anaemic Employee entity as seen above. The other alternative would be to put both operations in the Employee class and kick Single Responsibility to the curb. That doesn't make for particularly maintainable code. I suppose the Employee class should have some initialisation/validation logic (not accepting negative alowances etc.) So maybe I just stick to basic initialisation and validation in the entities themselves and be happy with my separate calculator classes. Or maybe I should be asking myself if Anaemic Domain is actually causing me some tangible problems with my code.

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• what making a good soundtrack for social game

  - by Maged

  there are many successful social games in Facebook and other social sites like brain buddies, who has the biggest brain and word challenge.both of them have a great soundtrack while playing and in the beginning of the game . my question is how to find a good soundtrack or what's i should look for to find a good soundtrack like this that's help to attract the user specially for games that need concentration ?

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• The next next C++ [closed]

  - by Roger Pate

  It's entirely too early for speculation on what C++ will be like after C++0x, but idle hands make for wild predictions. What features would you find useful and why? Is there anything in another language that would fit nicely into the state of C++ after 0x? What should be considered for the next TC and TR? (Mostly TR, as the TC would depend more on what actually becomes the next standard.) Export was removed, rather than merely deprecated, in 0x. (It remains a keyword.) What other features carry so much baggage to also be more harmful than helpful? ISO Standards' process I'm not involved in the C++ committee, but it's also a mystery, unfortunately, to most programmers using C++. A few things worth keeping in mind: There will be 10 years between standards, barring extremely exceptional circumstances. The standard can get "bug fixes" in the form of a Technical Corrigendum. This happened to C++98 with TC1, named C++03. It fixed "simple" issues such as making the explicit guarantee that std::vector stores items contiguously, which was always intended. The committee can issue reports which can add to the language. This happened to C++98/03 with TR1 in 2005, which introduced the std::tr1 namespace.

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• Making fonts render similarly across browsers

  - by Zach L.

  I am building a website for a client, and we had hoped to use plain text, not images in the navigation bar. The font we are using is Century Gothic (I believe that this font is available on the majority of PCs and Macs) The problem is, that on different browsers the font renders significantly differnt. In Chrome we got it looking the way we want, but in firefox the text is smaller and bolder. Aside from writing browser specific javascript to alter the font properties, are there any other options to standardize the way the fonts are rendered cross-browser. Perhaps some library or API? Maybe its a matter of being more specific in declaring font properties? Honestly I am stuck and need help.

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• Developing an ELO like point system for a multiplayer gaming site

  - by Alejandro Piad

  I'm currently working on a gaming site where users will submit virtual players for different games, like Chess, Nash, Backgammon, Go, etc. The idea is that users don't compete themselves, but through their virtual players. There will be leagues, tournaments, and other competition formats. The question is which would be a good rating system for users in this environment. Take into account that every user may have many different virtual players playing in many different games. As a general guideline I would like to guarantee the following properties: Users who have a lot of mediocre players should not score higher than users with a few very good players. A user with a high rating should not be penalized if he adds a new bad player, until he has had enough time to improve his player. Users who don't play often should not score higher than users who play every day. Thanks in advance.

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• Why not expose a primary key

  - by Angelo Neuschitzer

  In my education I have been told that it is a flawed idea to expose actual primary keys (not only DB keys, but all primary accessors) to the user. I always thought it to be a security problem (because an attacker could attempt to read stuff not their own). Now I have to check if the user is allowed to access anyway, so is there a different reason behind it? Also, as my users have to access the data anyway I will need to have a public key for the outside world somewhere in between. Now that public key has the same problems as the primary key, doesn't it?

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• Use Those Schemas, People!

  - by BuckWoody

  Database Schemas are just containers – they aren’t users or anything else – think of a sub-directory on the hard drive. In early versions of SQL Server we “hid” schemas, placing all objects under “dbo”, which gave the erroneous perception that Schemas are users. In SQL Server 2005, we “un-hid” or re-introduced schemas within the database. Users can have a default schema (a place where their new objects go), you can add new schemas and transfer objects between them, and they have many other benefits. But I still see a lot of applications, developed by shops I know as well as vendors, that don’t make use of a Schema. Everything is piled under dbo. I completely understand this – since permissions can be granted to a schema, they feel a lot like a user, so it’s just easier not to worry about both users and schemas when you create a database. But if you’ll use them properly you can make your application more understandable and portable. You should at least take a few minutes and read more about them – you owe it to your users: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190387.aspx Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Collision Resolution

  - by ultifinitus

  Hey all, I'm making a simple side-scrolling game, and I would appreciate some input! My collision detection system is a simple bounding box detection, so it's really easy to implement. However my collision resolution is ridiculous! Currently I have a little formula like this: if (colliding(firstObject,secondObject)) firstObject.resolve_collision(yAxisOffset); if (colliding(firstObject,secondObject)) firstObject.resolve_collision(xAxisOffset); where yAxisOffset is only set if the first object's previous y position was outside the second object's collision frame, respectively xAxisOffset as well. Now this is working great, in general. However there is a single problem. When I have a stack of objects and I push the first object against that stack, the first object get's "stuck," on the stack. What's I think is happening is the object's collision system checks and resolves for collisions based on creation time, so If I check one axis, then the other, the object will "sink" object directly along the checking axis. This sinking action causes the collision detection routine to think there's a gap between our position and the other object's position, and when I finally check the object that I've already sunk into, my object's position is resolved to it's original position... All this is great, and I'm sure if I bang my head against a wall long enough i'll come up with a working algorithm, but I'd rather not =). So what in the heck do you think I should do? How could I change my collision resolution system to fix this? Here's the program (temporary link, not sure how long it'll last) (notes: arrow keys to navigate, click to drop block, x to jump) I'd appreciate any help you can offer!

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• Explanation of the definition of interface inheritance as described in GoF book

  - by Geek

  I am reading the first chapter of the Gof book. Section 1.6 discusses about class vs interface inheritance: Class versus Interface Inheritance It's important to understand the difference between an object's class and its type. An object's class defines how the object is implemented.The class defines the object's internal state and the implementation of its operations.In contrast,an object's type only refers to its interface--the set of requests on which it can respond. An object can have many types, and objects of different classes can have the same type. Of course, there's a close relationship between class and type. Because a class defines the operations an object can perform, it also defines the object's type . When we say that an object is an instance of a class, we imply that the object supports the interface defined by the class. Languages like c++ and Eiffel use classes to specify both an object's type and its implementation. Smalltalk programs do not declare the types of variables; consequently,the compiler does not check that the types of objects assigned to a variable are subtypes of the variable's type. Sending a message requires checking that the class of the receiver implements the message, but it doesn't require checking that the receiver is an instance of a particular class. It's also important to understand the difference between class inheritance and interface inheritance (or subtyping). Class inheritance defines an object's implementation in terms of another object's implementation. In short, it's a mechanism for code and representation sharing. In contrast,interface inheritance(or subtyping) describes when an object can be used in place of another. I am familiar with the Java and JavaScript programming language and not really familiar with either C++ or Smalltalk or Eiffel as mentioned here. So I am trying to map the concepts discussed here to Java's way of doing classes, inheritance and interfaces. This is how I think of of these concepts in Java: In Java a class is always a blueprint for the objects it produces and what interface(as in "set of all possible requests that the object can respond to") an object of that class possess is defined during compilation stage only because the class of the object would have implemented those interfaces. The requests that an object of that class can respond to is the set of all the methods that are in the class(including those implemented for the interfaces that this class implements). My specific questions are: Am I right in saying that Java's way is more similar to C++ as described in the third paragraph. I do not understand what is meant by interface inheritance in the last paragraph. In Java interface inheritance is one interface extending from another interface. But I think the word interface has some other overloaded meaning here. Can some one provide an example in Java of what is meant by interface inheritance here so that I understand it better?

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