Search Results

Search found 56780 results on 2272 pages for 'system design'.

Page 113/2272 | < Previous Page | 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120  | Next Page >

• Implementing MVC pattern in SWT application

  - by Pradeep Simha

  I am developing an SWT application (it's basically an Eclipse plugin, so I need to use SWT). Currently my design is as follows: Model: In model, I have POJOs which represents the actual fields in views. View: It is a dumb layer, it contains just UI and contains no logic (not even event handlers) Controller: It acts as a mediator b/w those two layers. Also it is responsible for creating view layer, handling events etc. Basically I have created all of the controls in view as a static like this public static Button btnLogin and in controller I have a code like this: public void createLoginView(Composite comp) { LoginFormView.createView(comp); //This createView method is in view layer ie LoginFormView LoginFormView.btnLogin.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener() { //Code goes here }); } Similalrly I have done for other views and controls. So that in main class and other classes I am calling just createLoginView of controller. I am doing similar thing for other views. So my question, is what I am doing is correct? Is this design good? Or I should have followed any other approach. Since I am new to SWT and Eclipse plugin development (basically I am Java EE developer having 4+ years of exp). Any tips/pointers would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• How to Be a Software Engineer?

  - by Mistrio

  My problem is kind of weird so please bear with me. I have been working in a start up concerned basically with mobile development since my graduation 2 years ago. I develop apps for iOS but it's not really relevant. The start up structure is simply founders developers, with no middle-tier technical supervision or project management whatsoever. A typical project cycle of ours is like this: meet with a client send very vague recruitment to an outsourced graphics designer dig in development right after we get the design, no questions asked then improvise improvise improvise! It's not that we are unaware that stuff like requirements analysis, UML, design patterns, source code control, testing, development methodologies... etc. exist, we just simply don't use them, and I mean like never. The result is usually a clunk of hardly-maintainable yet working code. Despite everything we are literally flourishing with many successful apps on all platforms and bigger clients each project. The thing is, we want the chaos and we're looking for advice. How would you fix our company technically? Given that you can't hire project managers or team leaders just because we are barely 5 developers, so it wouldn't be a justified cost for the founders, but one-time things like courses, books, private training... etc is an option. Lastly, if it's relevant, we are based in Egypt. Thank you a lot in advance.

  Read the article

• Should one always know what an API is doing just by looking at the code?

  - by markmnl

  Recently I have been developing my own API and with that invested interest in API design I have been keenly interested how I can improve my API design. One aspect that has come up a couple times is (not by users of my API but in my observing discussion about the topic): one should know just by looking at the code calling the API what it is doing. For example see this discussion on GitHub for the discourse repo, it goes something like: foo.update_pinned(true, true); Just by looking at the code (without knowing the parameter names, documentation etc.) one cannot guess what it is going to do - what does the 2nd argument mean? The suggested improvement is to have something like: foo.pin() foo.unpin() foo.pin_globally() And that clears things up (the 2nd arg was whether to pin foo globally, I am guessing), and I agree in this case the later would certainly be an improvement. However I believe there can be instances where methods to set different but logically related state would be better exposed as one method call rather than separate ones, even though you would not know what it is doing just by looking at the code. (So you would have to resort to looking at the parameter names and documentation to find out - which personally I would always do no matter what if I am unfamiliar with an API). For example I expose one method SetVisibility(bool, string, bool) on a FalconPeer and I acknowledge just looking at the line: falconPeer.SetVisibility(true, "aerw3", true); You would have no idea what it is doing. It is setting 3 different values that control the "visibility" of the falconPeer in the logical sense: accept join requests, only with password and reply to discovery requests. Splitting this out into 3 method calls could lead to a user of the API to set one aspect of "visibility" forgetting to set others that I force them to think about by only exposing the one method to set all aspects of "visibility". Furthermore when the user wants to change one aspect they almost always will want to change another aspect and can now do so in one call.

  Read the article

• TDD - Outside In vs Inside Out

  - by Songo

  What is the difference between building an application Outside In vs building it Inside Out using TDD? These are the books I read about TDD and unit testing: Test Driven Development: By Example Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide: A Practical Guide Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code The Art of Unit Testing: With Examples in .Net Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests---This one was really hard to understand since JAVA isn't my primary language :) Almost all of them explained TDD basics and unit testing in general, but with little mention of the different ways the application can be constructed. Another thing I noticed is that most of these books (if not all) ignore the design phase when writing the application. They focus more on writing the test cases quickly and letting the design emerge by itself. However, I came across a paragraph in xUnit Test Patterns that discussed the ways people approach TDD. There are 2 schools out there Outside In vs Inside Out. Sadly the book doesn't elaborate more on this point. I wish to know what is the main difference between these 2 cases. When should I use each one of them? To a TDD beginner which one is easier to grasp? What is the drawbacks of each method? Is there any materials out there that discuss this topic specifically?

  Read the article

• Implementing game rules in a tactical battle board game

  - by Setzer22

  I'm trying to create a game similar to what one would find in a typical D&D board game combat. For mor examples you could think of games like Advance Wars, Fire Emblem or Disgaea. I should say that I'm using design by component so far, but I can't find a nice way to fit components into the part I want to ask. I'm struggling right now with the "game rules" logic. That is, the code that displays the menu, allows the player to select units, and command them, then tells the unit game objects what to do given the player input. The best way I could thing of handling this was using a big state machine, so everything that could be done in a "turn" is handled by this state machine, and the update code of this state machine does different things depending on the state. This approach, though, leads to a large amount of code (anything not model-related) to go into a big class. Of course I can subdivide this big class into more classes, but it doesn't feel modular and upgradable enough. I'd like to know of better systems to handle this in order to be able to upgrade the game with new rules without having a monstruous if/else chain (or switch / case, for that matter). So, any ideas? I'd also like to ask that if you recommend me a specific design pattern to also provide some kind of example or further explanation and not stick to "Yeah you should use MVC and it'll work".

  Read the article

• How to use the unit of work and repository patterns in a service oriented enviroment

  - by A. Karimi

  I've created an application framework using the unit of work and repository patterns for it's data layer. Data consumer layers such as presentation depend on the data layer design. For example a CRUD abstract form has a dependency to a repository (IRepository). This architecture works like a charm in client/server environments (Ex. a WPF application and a SQL Server). But I'm looking for a good pattern to change or reuse this architecture for a service oriented environment. Of course I have some ideas: Idea 1: The "Adapter" design pattern Keep the current architecture and create a new unit of work and repository implementation which can work with a service instead of the ORM. Data layer consumers are loosely coupled to the data layer so it's possible but the problem is about the unit of work; I have to create a context which tracks the objects state at the client side and sends the changes to the server side on calling the "Commit" (Something that I think the RIA has done for Silverlight). Here the diagram: ----------- CLIENT----------- | ------------------ SERVER ---------------------- [ UI ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] ---> [ Web Services ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] -> [DB] Idea 2: Add another layer Add another layer (let say "local services" or "data provider"), then put it between the data layer (unit of work and repository) and the data consumer layers (like UI). Then I have to rewrite the consumer classes (CRUD and other classes which are dependent to IRepository) to depend on another interface. And the diagram: ----------------- CLIENT ------------------ | ------------------- SERVER --------------------- [ UI ] -> [ Local Services/Data Provider ] ---> [ Web Services ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] -> [DB] Please note that I have the local services layer on the current architecture but it doesn't expose the data layer functionality. In another word the UI layer can communicate with both of the data and local services layers whereas the local services layer also uses the data layer. | | | | | | | | ---> | Local Services | ---> | | | UI | | | | Data | | | | | | | ----------------------------> | |

  Read the article

• Does concurrency inherently introduce "randomness" into a game?

  - by Jeff

  When a game is implemented with concurrency (as most games are), does this necessarily, by its very nature, introduce an element of randomness into the game that is outside of the players' control? Note that when I use the word "random", I'm not meaning to launch into a philosophical debate about the deterministic nature of the system. I understand that concurrency is deterministic in the sense that the operating system decides which processes to allow time on the CPU and in what order (or the JVM controls which Thread's turn it is to execute, etc). But my understanding of this is that there is no way to control or predict whether one thread's next command will execute before or after another. The reason I'm asking is because this seems like a fundamental difficulty for game development where a game is supposedly designed around a player's skill. Consider a game like League of Legends. Assume that two players are battling it out. It's a very close contest between the two and it's coming down to the wire -- so much so that whoever gets their last attack off will be the one to kill the other and win the game for their team. If the players are implemented using concurrency and the situation really was like this, is it essentially out of the players' hands at this point? Is the outcome of this match all up to whatever system is arbitrarily deciding which player's thread/process will execute next? If not, what am I misunderstanding about concurrency? If so, is there any way around this problem so that a game of skill can always be a game of skill, especially in those most crucial moments?

  Read the article

• How common is prototyping as the first stage of development?

  - by EpsilonVector

  I've been taking some software design courses in the past few semesters, and while I see the benefit in a lot of the formalism, I feel like it doesn't tell me anything about the program itself: You can't tell how the program is going to operate from the Use Case spec, even though it discusses what the program can do. You can't tell anything about the user experience from the requirements document, even though it can include quality requirements. Sequence diagrams are a good description of how the software works as the call stack, but are very limited, and give a highly partial view of the overall system. Class diagrams are great for describing how the system is built, but are utterly useless in helping you figure out what the software needs to be. Where in all this formalism is the bottom line: how the program looks, operates, and what experience it gives? Doesn't it make more sense to design off of that? Isn't it better to figure out how the program should work via a prototype and strive to implement it for real? I know that I'm probably suffering from being taught engineering by theoreticians, but I need to ask, do they do this in the industry? How do people figure out what the program actually is, not what it should conform to? Do people prototype a lot, or do they mostly use the formal tools like UML and I just didn't get the hang of using them yet?

  Read the article

• How common is prototyping as the first stage of development?

  - by EpsilonVector

  I've been taking some software design courses in the past few semesters, and while I see the benefit in a lot of the formalism, I still feel like it doesn't tell me anything about the program itself. You can't tell how the program is going to operate from the Use Case spec, even though it discusses what the program can do, and you can't tell anything about the user experience from the requirements document, even though it can include QA requirements. ...sequence diagrams are as good a description of how the software works as the call stack, in other words- very limited, highly partial view of the overall system, and a class diagram is great for describing how the system is built, but is utterly useless in helping you figure out what the software needs to be. Where in all this formalism is the bottom line- how the program looks, operates, and what experience it gives? Doesn't it make more sense to design off of that? Isn't it better to figure out how the program should work via a prototype and strive to implement it for real? I know that I'm probably suffering from being taught engineering by theoreticians, but I got to ask, do they do this in the industry? How do people figure out what the program actually is, not what it should conform to? Do people prototype a lot? ...or do they mostly use the formal tools like UML and I just didn't get the hang of using them yet?

  Read the article

• 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!

  Read the article

• Capitalizing on JavaScript's prototypal inheritance

  - by keithjgrant

  JavaScript has a class-free object system in which objects inherit properties directly from other objects. This is really powerful, but it is unfamiliar to classically trained programmers. If you attempt to apply classical design patterns directly to JavaScript, you will be frustrated. But if you learn to work with JavaScript's prototypal nature, your efforts will be rewarded. ... It is Lisp in C's clothing. -Douglas Crockford What does this mean for a game developer working with canvas and HTML5? I've been looking over this question on useful design patterns in gaming, but prototypal inheritance is very different than classical inheritance, and there are surely differences in the best way to apply some of these common patterns. For example, classical inheritance allows us to create a moveableEntity class, and extend that with any classes that move in our game world (player, monster, bullet, etc.). Sure, you can strongarm JavaScript to work that way, but in doing so, you are kind of fighting against its nature. Is there a better approach to this sort of problem when we have prototypal inheritance at our fingertips?

  Read the article

• How or why would this mechanic (not) work to bring game balance to a singleplayer RPG? [closed]

  - by 0xFFF1

  Mechanic details The player, the monsters, and the merchants act as three separate parties. The player needs to beat up monsters for exp points and resources to sell and to buy potions from merchants to continue to fight. The monsters need healing and reviving to survive (also bought from merchants) and the merchants need potion ingredients from the player and the monsters to make potions to sell. These potions are only able to be processed in such bulk by merchants thus their potions would be cheaper than making them yourself. Only the monsters can farm ingredients in bulk. Only the player is or has to be overly aggressive (in bulk). Monsters can farm and produce "Level up candies" that do the work of exp. they are eaten right away after they are made and are never stockpiled or held for fear of the player and merchants who want to sell to the player. The monsters will defend themselves. Reviving is very expensive. The merchants can be found either with a concerned expression or a grinning expression based on how much profit they are making compared to their morale standing. The economies of each monster town and merchant city are distinct but interconnected. Magic Swords are worth a lot. So what I need to know is what concerns would there be to design a game around this mechanic and/or design this mechanic around a developing game. which would fare better? Is game balance an issue here? (how strong the monsters get or how quickly they die off based on the player's input into the system), Or is game balance solely in the hands of the player? (he decides if he overkills monsters or get underleveled.) What do I need to think about to make sure it isn't too easy or too hard to swing the amount/strength of monsters compared to the player and the amount of profit the merchants get vs the player. Would indicating how out of whack things are getting in game help with this?

  Read the article

• Be liberal in what you accept... or not?

  - by Matthieu M.

  [Disclaimer: this question is subjective, but I would prefer getting answers backed by facts and/or reflexions] I think everyone knows about the Robustness Principle, usually summed up by Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept. I would agree that for the design of a widespread communication protocol this may make sense (with the goal of allowing easy extension), however I have always thought that its application to HTML / CSS was a total failure, each browser implementing its own silent tweak detection / behavior, making it near impossible to obtain a consistent rendering across multiple browsers. I do notice though that there the RFC of the TCP protocol deems "Silent Failure" acceptable unless otherwise specified... which is an interesting behavior, to say the least. There are other examples of the application of this principle throughout the software trade that regularly pop up because they have bitten developpers, from the top off my head: Javascript semi-colon insertion C (silent) builtin conversions (which would not be so bad if it did not truncated...) and there are tools to help implement "smart" behavior: name matching phonetic algorithms (Double Metaphone) string distances algorithms (Levenshtein distance) However I find that this approach, while it may be helpful when dealing with non-technical users or to help users in the process of error recovery, has some drawbacks when applied to the design of library/classes interface: it is somewhat subjective whether the algorithm guesses "right", and thus it may go against the Principle of Least Astonishment it makes the implementation more difficult, thus more chances to introduce bugs (violation of YAGNI ?) it makes the behavior more susceptible to change, as any modification of the "guess" routine may break old programs, nearly excluding refactoring possibilities... from the start! And this is what led me to the following question: When designing an interface (library, class, message), do you lean toward the robustness principle or not ? I myself tend to be quite strict, using extensive input validation on my interfaces, and I was wondering if I was perhaps too strict.

  Read the article

• Testcase runner for parametrized testcases

  - by Razer

  Let me explain my situation. I'm planning a kind of test case runner for doing testcases on external devices, which are microcontroller based. Lets consider the devices: Device 1 Device 2 There exist a lot of test cases which can be run with one of the devices above. For example: Testcase 1 Testcase 2 The main reason that all the testcases can be run with any device is, that the testcases validates some standard and this software should be extensible for future devices. The testcases itself must be runnable with changing parameters. For example Testcase 1 does some Timing Verification the testcase needs as input parameter the datarate: 4800, 9600, 19200. Now hoping you understand the situation, let me explain my design questions. For implementing the test cases I thought about an Attribute based approach, like nunit does it. The more complicated problem is, how to define the parametrized testcases? Like this: Device 1: Testcase 1: datarate: 4800, 9600, 19200 Testcase 2: supply: 1, 2, 3 Device 2: Testcase 1: datarate: 9600, 19200, 38400 Testcase 2: supply: 3, 4, 5 How would you design such a framework? I've done a similar desin in python where I had for every device a XML containing the testcase definitions like: <Testcase="Testcase 1" datarate=4800/> <Testcase="Testcase 1" datarate=9600/> <Testcase="Testcase 1" datarate=19200/>

  Read the article

• Class hierarchy problem in this social network model

  - by Gerenuk

  I'm trying to design a class system for a social network data model - basically a link/object system. Now I have roughly the following structure (simplified and only relevant methods shown) class Data: "used to handle the data with mongodb" "can link, unlink data and also return other linked data" "is basically a proxy object that only stores _id and accesses mongodb on requests" "it looks like {_id: ..., _out: [id1, id2,...], _inc: [id3, id4, ...]}" def get_node(self, id) "create a new Data object from the underlying mongodb" "each data object can potentially create a reference object to new mongo data" "this is needed when the data returns the linked objects" class Node: """ this class proxies linking calls to .data it includes additional network logic operations whereas Data only contains a basic database solution """ def __init__(self, data): "the infrastructure realization is stored as composition by an included object data" "Node bascially proxies most calls to the infrastructure object data" def get_node(self, data): "creates a new object of class Object or Link depending on data" class Object(Node): "can have multiple connections to Link" class Link(Node): "has one 'in' and one 'out' connection to an Object" This system is working, however maybe wouldn't work outside Python. Note that after reading links Now I have two questions here: 1) I want to infrastructure of the data storage to be replacable. Earlier I had Data as a superclass of Node so that it provided the neccessary calls. But (without dirty Python tricks) you cannot replace the superclass dynamically. Is using composition therefore recommended? The drawback is that I have to proxy most calls (link, unlink etc). Any thoughts? 2) The class Node contains the common method .get_node which is used to built new Object or Link instances after reading out the data. Some attribute of data decided whether the object which is only stored by id should be instantiated as an Object or Link class. The problem here is that Node needs to know about Object and Link in advance, which seems dodgy. Do you see a different solution? Both Object and Link need to instantiate one of all possible types depending on what the find in their linked data. Are there any other ideas how to implement a flexible Object/Link structure where the underlying database storage is isolated?

  Read the article

• Designing web-based plugin systems correctly so they don't waste as many resources?

  - by Xeoncross

  Many CMS systems which rely on third parties for much of their code often build "plugin" or "hooks" systems to make it easy for developers to modify the codebase's actions without editing the core files. This usually means an Observer or Event design pattern. However, when you look at systems like wordpress you see that on every page they load some kind of bootstrap file from each of the plugin's folders to see if that plugin will need to run that request. Its this poor design that causes systems like wordpress to spend many extra MB's of memory loading and parsing unneeded items each page. Are there alternative ways to do this? I'm looking for ideas in building my own. For example, Is there a way to load all this once and then cache the results so that your system knows how to lazy-load plugins? In other words, the system loads a configuration file that specifies all the events that plugin wishes to tie into and then saves it for future requests? If that also performs poorly, then perhaps there is a special file-structure that could be used to make educated guesses about when certain plugins are unneeded to fullfil the request. Any ideas? If anyone wants an example of the "plugin" concept you can find one here.

  Read the article

• MiniMax not working properly(for checkers game)

  - by engineer

  I am creating a checkers game but My miniMax is not functioning properly,it is always switching between two positions for its move(index 20 and 17).Here is my code: public double MiniMax(int[] board, int depth, int turn, int red_best, int black_best) { int source; int dest; double MAX_SCORE=-INFINITY,newScore; int MAX_DEPTH=3; int[] newBoard=new int[32]; generateMoves(board,turn); System.arraycopy(board, 0, newBoard, 0, 32); if(depth==MAX_DEPTH) { return Evaluation(turn,board);} for(int z=0;z<possibleMoves.size();z+=2){ source=Integer.parseInt(possibleMoves.elementAt(z).toString()); System.out.println("SOURCE= "+source); dest=Integer.parseInt(possibleMoves.elementAt(z+1).toString());//(int[])possibleMoves.elementAt(z+1); System.out.println("DEST = "+dest); applyMove(newBoard,source,dest); newScore=MiniMax(newBoard,depth+1,opponent(turn),red_best, black_best); if(newScore>MAX_SCORE) {MAX_SCORE=newScore;maxSource=source; maxDest=dest;}//maxSource and maxDest will be used to perform the move. if (MAX_SCORE > black_best) { if (MAX_SCORE >= red_best) break; /* alpha_beta cutoff */ else black_best = (int) MAX_SCORE; //the_score } if (MAX_SCORE < red_best) { if (MAX_SCORE<= black_best) break; /* alpha_beta cutoff */ else red_best = (int) MAX_SCORE; //the_score } }//for ends return MAX_SCORE; } //end minimax I am unable to find out the logical mistake. Any idea what's going wrong?

  Read the article

• Philosophy behind the memento pattern

  - by TheSilverBullet

  I have been reading up on memento pattern from various sources of the internet. Differing information from different sources has left me in confusion regarding why this pattern is actually needed. The dofactory implementation says that the primary intention of this pattern is to restore the state of the system. Wiki says that the primary intention is to be able to restore the changes on the system. This gives a different impact - saying that it is possible for a system to have memento implementation with no need to restore. And that ability of restore is a feature of this. OODesign says that It is sometimes necessary to capture the internal state of an object at some point and have the ability to restore the object to that state later in time. Such a case is useful in case of error or failure. So, my question is why exactly do we use this one? Is it to save previous states - or to promote encapsulation between the Caretaker and the Memento? Why is this type of encapsulation so important? Edit: For those visiting, check out this Implementation!

  Read the article

• Go/Obj-C style interfaces with ability to extend compiled objects after initial release

  - by Skrylar

  I have a conceptual model for an object system which involves combining Go/Obj-C interfaces/protocols with being able to add virtual methods from any unit, not just the one which defines a class. The idea of this is to allow Ruby-ish open classes so you can take a minimalist approach to library development, and attach on small pieces of functionality as is actually needed by the whole program. Implementation of this involves a table of methods marked virtual in an RTTI table, which system functions are allowed to add to during module initialization. Upon typecasting an object to an interface, a Go-style lookup is done to create a vtable for that particular mapping and pass it off so you can have comparable performance to C/C++. In this case, methods may be added /afterwards/ which were not previously known and these new methods allow newer interfaces to be satisfied; while I like this idea because it seems like it would be very flexible (disregarding the potential for spaghetti code, which can happen with just about any model you use regardless). By wrapping the system calls for binding methods up in a set of clean C-compatible calls, one would also be able to integrate code with shared libraries and retain a decent amount of performance (Go does not do shared linking, and Objective-C does a dynamic lookup on each call.) Is there a valid use-case for this model that would make it worth the extra background plumbing? As much as this Dylan-style extensibility would be nice to have access to, I can't quite bring myself to a use case that would justify the overhead other than "it could make some kinds of code more extensible in future scenarios."

  Read the article

• Procedural content (settlement) generation

  - by instancedName

  I have, lets say, something like a homework or assignment to do. Roughly said I need to write an algorithm (pseudo code is not necessary, just in depth description) of procedure that would generate settlements, environment and a people to populate it with, as part of some larger world generation procedure. The genre of game is not specified, it could be any genre (rpg, strategy, colony simulation etc.) where interacting with large and extensive world is central to the game. Procedure should be called once per settlement. At the time of calling, world generation procedure makes geography, culture and history input available. Output should be map of the village and it's immediate area, and various potential additional information like myths, history, demographic facts etc. Bonus would be quest ant similar stuff, but that not really my focus at the moment. I will leave quality of the output for later when I actually dig little deeper into this topic. I am free to change parameters as long as I have strong explanation for doing so. Setting of the game is undetermined so I am free to use anything that I like the most. Ok, so my actual question is: Can anyone who has some experience in this field of game design recommend me some good literature, or point me in the direction where I should look/reed/study? I'm somewhat experienced game programmer, but I've never been into game design till now so any help will be great. I want to do this assignment as good as I can. As for deadline, it's not strictly set, but lets say I don't want it to take longer then few weeks, one month at worst case.

  Read the article

• First Project a big one, How much should we charge?

  - by confuzzled

  Two of my cousins and I started a freelance computer repair/web design business just to make some money on the side during college, and received our first major web design project about three weeks ago. Now we've created websites before, but it was mostly for family businesses and have never really charged money, and most of the websites have been static, and don't really require a CMS. This project, however, was a big one (for us anyways). We created a news site that had several categories, we created the banners, we created a classifieds page (not a web app just something static that they control). Several links, a few graphical assets, CSS drop down menu, RSS feed from a different news site, weather, all the normal stuff you would find on a regular news site. On top of that we put in all the usual Joomla stuff (search, Jcomments, Jslide pictures, JCE, etc.). Then we uploaded the first 10 articles they gave us, and we are going to train them how to use Joomla. Now, at first we decided for 700 dollars. I assumed they just wanted a simple blog like website where they can upload articles. But then we had a meeting, and they asked for a lot more. Note: we did not hard code the template from scratch, but customized the gantry framework to fit their needs. We did code quite a bit however. I estimate that we put in about 50-60 hours in total. I'm wondering if 700 dollars is a bit low, this price is definitely not set in stone. Please keep in mind that this is our first project, and we are newbies, please be kind. Thank You!

  Read the article

• What do you wish language designers paid attention to?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  The purpose of this question is not to assemble a laundry list of programming language features that you can't live without, or wish was in your main language of choice. The purpose of this question is to bring to light corners of languge design most language designers might not think about. So, instead of thinking about language feature X, think a little more philisophically. One of my biases, and perhaps it might be controversial, is that the softer side of engineering--the whys and what fors--are many times more important than the more concrete side. For example, Ruby was designed with a stated goal of improving developer happiness. While your opinions may be mixed on whether it delivered or not, the fact that was a goal means that some of the choices in language design were influenced by that philosophy. Please do not post: Syntax flame wars (I could care less whether you use whitespace [Python], keywords [Ruby], or curly braces [Java, C/C++, et. al.] to denote program blocks). That's just an implementation detail. "Any language that doesn't have feature X doesn't deserve to exist" type comments. There is at least one reason for all programming languages to exist--good or bad. Please do post: Philisophical ideas that language designers seem to miss. Technical concepts that seem to be poorly implemented more often than not. Please do provide an example of the pain it causes and if you have any ideas of how you would prefer it to function. Things you wish were in the platform's common library but seldom are. One the same token, things that usually are in a common library that you wish were not. Conceptual features such as built in test/assertion/contract/error handling support that you wish all programming languages would implement properly--and define properly. My hope is that this will be a fun and stimulating topic.

  Read the article

• Making money from a custom built interpreter?

  - by annoying_squid

  I have been making considerable progress lately on building an interpreter. I am building it from NASM assembly code (for the core engine) and C (cl.exe the Microsoft compiler for the parser). I really don't have a lot of time but I have a lot of good ideas on how to build this so it appeals to a certain niche market. I'd love to finish this but I need to face reality here ... unless I can make some good monetary return on my investment, there is not a lot of time for me to invest. So I ask the following questions to anyone out there, especially those who have experience in monetizing their programs: 1) How easy is it for a programmer to make good money from one design? (I know this is vague but it will be interesting to hear from those who have experience or know of others' experiences). 2) What are the biggest obstacles to making money from a programming design? 3) For the parser, I am using the Microsoft compiler (no IDE) I got from visual express, so will this be an issue? Will I have to pay royalties or a license fee? 4) As far as I know NASM is a 2-clause BSD licensed application. So this should allow me to use NASM for commericial development unless I am missing something? It's good to know these things before launching into the meat and potatoes of the project.

  Read the article

• Testing of visualization projects

  - by paxRoman

  We develop small to large visualization projects for different tasks and industries and sometimes while rewriting them a couple of times in the process we hit walls because we discover that we need to add a lot of code to support new requirements. Now we have established a design process that seems to work well (at least we reduced the development time for each new project quite a bit), but we're still left scratching our heads around this question: what exactly should we test when testing visualizations? If everything that we want to explore is on the screen (bounded visualizations)? If the data is ok - if data is valid (that's one of the nice things about visualizations you can spot errors in your datasets)? Usability? User interaction? Code quality? I can tell you for sure that a simple check of the code quality is certainly not enough! Is there a classic paper / book about how to test visualizations? Also do you happen to know about classic design patterns for visualizations (except the obvious ones like Pub-Sub)?

  Read the article

• Is there a canonical source supporting "all-surrogates"?

  - by user61852

  Background The "all-PK-must-be-surrogates" approach is not present in Codd's Relational Model or any SQL Standard (ANSI, ISO or other). Canonical books seems to elude this restrictions too. Oracle's own data dictionary scheme uses natural keys in some tables and surrogate keys in other tables. I mention this because these people must know a thing or two about RDBMS design. PPDM (Professional Petroleum Data Management Association) recommend the same canonical books do: Use surrogate keys as primary keys when: There are no natural or business keys Natural or business keys are bad ( change often ) The value of natural or business key is not known at the time of inserting record Multicolumn natural keys ( usually several FK ) exceed three columns, which makes joins too verbose. Also I have not found canonical source that says natural keys need to be immutable. All I find is that they need to be very estable, i.e need to be changed only in very rare ocassions, if ever. I mention PPDM because these people must know a thing or two about RDBMS design too. The origins of the "all-surrogates" approach seems to come from recommendations from some ORM frameworks. It's true that the approach allows for rapid database modeling by not having to do much business analysis, but at the expense of maintainability and readability of the SQL code. Much prevision is made for something that may or may not happen in the future ( the natural PK changed so we will have to use the RDBMS cascade update funtionality ) at the expense of day-to-day task like having to join more tables in every query and having to write code for importing data between databases, an otherwise very strightfoward procedure (due to the need to avoid PK colisions and having to create stage/equivalence tables beforehand ). Other argument is that indexes based on integers are faster, but that has to be supported with benchmarks. Obviously, long, varying varchars are not good for PK. But indexes based on short, fix-length varchar are almost as fast as integers. The questions - Is there any canonical source that supports the "all-PK-must-be-surrogates" approach ? - Has Codd's relational model been superceded by a newer relational model ?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120  | Next Page >