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  • Portal Ported to a Graphing Calculator

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    It’s not exactly a 3D-rendered GPU-burner, but this calculator-based version of Portal still features the same portal-jumping tricks that delighted players in the original game. Built using Axe Parser, an advanced programming language for graphing calculators, Portal: Prelude is part an experiment in pushing the limits of Axe Parser and part long standing tradition of porting popular video games to graphing calculators. You can read more about Axe Parser and the many games and program projects under development using it here. [via Geeks Are Sexy] How to Fix a Stuck Pixel on an LCD Monitor How to Factory Reset Your Android Phone or Tablet When It Won’t Boot Our Geek Trivia App for Windows 8 is Now Available Everywhere

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  • Ten Benefits to Video Game Play [Video]

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Want to justify spending the whole weekend playing video games? We’re here to help. Courtesy of AllTime10, this video rounds up ten benefits to playing video games ranging from improved dexterity to pain relief. Want to highlight a benefit not listed in the video? Sound off in the comments. [via Geeks Are Sexy] Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate “Program Files (x86)” Folder? Why Your Android Phone Isn’t Getting Operating System Updates and What You Can Do About It How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows

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  • The Evolution of 8-Bit [Video]

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    In this nostalgia filled short video, PBS takes a retrospective look at the history and the evolution of early 8-bit video games. Beginning with early Atari and Nintendo video games, the 8-bit aesthetic has been a part of our culture for over 30 years. As it moved through the generations, 8-bit earned its independence from its video game roots. The idea of 8-bit now stands for a refreshing level of simplicity and minimalism, is capable of sonic and visual beauty, and points to the layer of technology that suffuses our modern lives. No longer just nostalgia art, contemporary 8-bit artists and chiptunes musicians have elevated the form to new levels of creativity and cultural reflection. [via Neatorama] HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me? HTG Explains: How Windows 8′s Secure Boot Feature Works & What It Means for Linux Hack Your Kindle for Easy Font Customization

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  • Will unity stop being a plugin for Compiz?

    - by Murphy1138
    I ask this as with the Unity Desktop running , when I try any games with my Ubuntu 12.04.1 I get so much frame rate drop with Unity and Compiz. If I switch to Gnome-Classic which uses mutter, I get a vast boost in performance. My system is an 8 core AMD with a Nvidia 460 SE that can play anything I chuck at it in Windows and I'm using the latest Nvidia drivers, but even simple games like the humble bundle gets serious lag with Unity and the only cause of this can be compiz (what I can guess). When Steam come to Ubuntu, how will this performance loss be addressed?

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  • Humble Indie Bundle V: Psychonauts, Superbrothers, and More at a Name Your Own Price

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    There’s a new Humble Indie with some fantastic DRM-free and cross-platform offerings and, most importantly, some fantastic games. Score a copy of Psychonauts for the best price in town! But seriously: if you’re looking to game on a budget this Humble Indie Bundle is an absolute gem. For a few bucks (that you can even opt to donate to charity) you can score five awesome games including Psychonauts. I enjoyed Psychonauts so much I’d happily pay the full original retail just to play it again. In addition, the full soundtracks for each game are included with your purchase. Hit up the link below for more information. Humble Indie Bundle V is available until 6PM EST, 6/14/2012. The Humble Indie Bundle V HTG Explains: Learn How Websites Are Tracking You Online Here’s How to Download Windows 8 Release Preview Right Now HTG Explains: Why Linux Doesn’t Need Defragmenting

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  • Run Blustacks or Android to play clash of clans on ubuntu 13.4+

    - by Joe Hanus
    I am trying to get rid of the need to dual boot Ubuntu and windows and one thing I can do with windows I can not do with Linux is to run Bluestacks to play android games my favourite one ow is clash of clans. I have tried different VM's to run android emulators and virtual box but nothing works for clash of clans I can download the game to the VM from Google Play Store but it fails to open If Ubuntu can fix this by making a way to successfully install Bluestacks on Ubuntu or Android with Virtual box with out loading errors of all apps/games it would help the Linux community to become less dependant of Windows. Thanks in advance! go Ubuntu!

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  • problems with graphic performance in Ubuntu 12.04

    - by Falk
    in advance: my English is not perfect ;) processor: Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz × 2 memory: 3,9 GiB graphics: GeForce GTX 460 Ubuntu 12.04 32-Bit fresh installed (previously 11.10 32-Bit) driver: NVIDIAs accelerated Driver (Version current-updates) probelm: In Ubuntu 12.04 I have problems with the performance of the graphics (games for example: Volley Brwawl, Neverball, Beep and Minecraft), and effects of windows (always at minimize, maximize...) There are laggs at animations, and the laggs in games are extremely annoying. Problems occur only in Ubuntu 12.04, everything was good in 11.10. No Problems with YouTube videos, HD videos. Is there a solution? BBecause I have found nothing here in the Forum and on Google. Or is an update coming soonfor driver or whatever? (This Bug is already registered in Launchpad.) Thank you!

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  • Ask The Readers: What’s Your Favorite Co-Op Game?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    For many readers, the weather is getting chillier and that means more time indoors. What better time to take a look at the best co-op games around? Jump in and put in a nod for your favorite game and setup. Wallpaper available here. Whether you’re playing DS-to-DS with your spouse, inviting all your buddies over for a whole-house LAN fest, or couch co-op’ing through your favorite RPG, we want to hear all about your favorite games and the ways you play them. Sound off in the comments with your co-op tips and tricks; make sure to check back in on Friday for the What You Said roundup to find some new titles to tide you over until the warm weather comes around again. How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows

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  • Low FPS in some games, but hardware not fully used

    - by Mario De Schaepmeester
    I just did a little funny experiment in the game/sim "Train Simulator 2013". I normally have good FPS in it (around 30) at full settings. What I did was make a really, really long train so that the calculations the sim needed to make were enormous (the sim is quite realistic, it takes all things into account like speed/acceleration, G-forces, comfort levels, possible wheel slip and many more, and most of those things on each carriage seperately). This resulted in only 14FPS as reported by the game, but it felt more like 8FPS or so. I have a Logitech G15 keyboard which has an LCD, and it allows me to monitor CPU/RAM and video card load on it. The strange thing is, all CPU cores were busy, but the total load was only about 60% maximum at all times. The video card was only on 30% load (possibly an important note, the memory was full, which is however not unusual for the game in question). The RAM had plenty of room and there weren't many operations as it didn't grow or shrink much. I just have the feeling that the game would run smoother if it used more of my hardware power. Why is it not doing so? I had the same in another game, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind when using more than 100 mods (that all use scripting) and a few high res texture mods, + a full-on graphics improvement program. The engine is very old (2003), and so I thought this might be the cause (not being optimised for multithreading). I had thought of possible causes, like: The operating system doesn't let the games use all the resources. It doesn't make use of multi-threading appropriately. To eliminate the former, I tried a CPU stress tool and that got 100% CPU juice as I let it run, so the OS is not the problem. I gave its thread the "higher" priority though. My actual question In both games, I did things the engine was not really built to do or support. Can those games' framerate be limited cause of their own engine not being able to cope? What is the real reason and more importantly, can I help it? And in any case, could something actually be wrong with my hardware? It's all reasonably new, a couple of months, and I (almost) never experience any other trouble. Modern and much more demanding games work absolutely fine. Specs CPU: AMD Phenom II 965 X4 @ 3.4gHz RAM: 8GB of DDR3 RAM Video: MSI GTX560 (nVidia chip) with 1GB of GDDR5 memory OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Nothing overclocked.

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  • protect purchased games to be downloaded on other pc

    - by JoJo
    I want to make a downloads managing system on my website, that when you purchase a download, you can always re-download it again for free. (i have read that Steam does something similar) The problem is, that someone would be able to create a account, purchase something and then give the account password to friends and family, so they can all download copies for free. Is there a way to prevent this? Or is it impossible.

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  • Are high powered 3D game engines better at 2D games than engines made for 2D

    - by Adam
    I'm a software engineer that's new to game programming so forgive me if this is a dumb question as I don't know that much about game engines. If I was building a 2D game am I better off going with an engine like Torque that looks like it's built for 2D, or would higher powered engines like Unreal, Source and Unity work better? I'm mainly asking if 2D vs 3D is a large factor in choosing an engine. For the purpose of comparison, let's eliminate variables by saying price isn't a factor (even though it probably is). EDIT: I should probably also mention that the game we're developing has a lot of RTS and RPG elements regarding leveling up

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  • Detecting wins in peer to peer RTS games like Starcraft

    - by user782220
    A typical RTS game is implemented with the standard networking model: peer to peer lockstep. Consider Starcraft 2, given that Battle.net presumably doesn't know anything about the state of game given that there is only communication between the two players in a peer to peer model, how does Battle.net know who was the winner in the end. Relying on the two peers to not try to cheat and report accurate results is naive.

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  • A few meta questions about making flash games

    - by idan
    A few questions for a beginner game maker without an artist. Is there a site where flash game creators can download (and use) free art? I don't need character sprites but environments like trees, clouds, platforms, etc. Is there a site where a programmer can collaborate with an artist and a composer? (Even if so, the chances are low for a beginner with no portfolio to find an artist willing to collaborate, right?) Do you have recommended sites for asking action script questions (dedicated solely to flash?) Thanks!

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  • List of Commonly Used Value Types in XNA Games

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    Most XNA programmers are concerned about generating garbage. More specifically about allocating GC-managed memory (GC stands for “garbage collector” and is both the name of the class that provides access to the garbage collector and an acronym for the garbage collector (as a concept) itself). Two of the major target platforms for XNA (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360) use variants of the .NET Compact Framework. On both variants, the GC runs under various circumstances (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360). Of concern to XNA programmers is the fact that it runs automatically after a fixed amount of GC-managed memory has been allocated (currently 1MB on both systems). Many beginning XNA programmers are unaware of what constitutes GC-managed memory, though. So here’s a quick overview. In .NET, there are two different “types” of types: value types and reference types. Only reference types are managed by the garbage collector. Value types are not managed by the garbage collector and are instead managed in other ways that are implementation dependent. For purposes of XNA programming, the important point is that they are not managed by the GC and thus do not, by themselves, increment that internal 1 MB allocation counter. (n.b. Structs are value types. If you have a struct that has a reference type as a member, then that reference type, when instantiated, will still be allocated in the GC-managed memory and will thus count against the 1 MB allocation counter. Putting it in a struct doesn’t change the fact that it gets allocated on the GC heap, but the struct itself is created outside of the GC’s purview). Both value types and reference types use the keyword ‘new’ to allocate a new instance of them. Sometimes this keyword is hidden by a method which creates new instances for you, e.g. XmlReader.Create. But the important thing to determine is whether or not you are dealing with a value types or a reference type. If it’s a value type, you can use the ‘new’ keyword to allocate new instances of that type without incrementing the GC allocation counter (except as above where it’s a struct with a reference type in it that is allocated by the constructor, but there are no .NET Framework or XNA Framework value types that do this so it would have to be a struct you created or that was in some third-party library you were using for that to even become an issue). The following is a list of most all of value types you are likely to use in a generic XNA game: AudioCategory (used with XACT; not available on WP7) AvatarExpression (Xbox 360 only, but exposed on Windows to ease Xbox development) bool BoundingBox BoundingSphere byte char Color DateTime decimal double any enum (System.Enum itself is a class, but all enums are value types such that there are no GC allocations for enums) float GamePadButtons GamePadCapabilities GamePadDPad GamePadState GamePadThumbSticks GamePadTriggers GestureSample int IntPtr (rarely but occasionally used in XNA) KeyboardState long Matrix MouseState nullable structs (anytime you see, e.g. int? something, that ‘?’ denotes a nullable struct, also called a nullable type) Plane Point Quaternion Ray Rectangle RenderTargetBinding sbyte (though I’ve never seen it used since most people would just use a short) short TimeSpan TouchCollection TouchLocation TouchPanelCapabilities uint ulong ushort Vector2 Vector3 Vector4 VertexBufferBinding VertexElement VertexPositionColor VertexPositionColorTexture VertexPositionNormalTexture VertexPositionTexture Viewport So there you have it. That’s not quite a complete list, mind you. For example: There are various structs in the .NET framework you might make use of. I left out everything from the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.PackedVector namespace, since everything in there ventures into the realm of advanced XNA programming anyway (n.b. every single instantiable thing in that namespace is a struct and thus a value type; there are also two interfaces but interfaces cannot be instantiated at all and thus don’t figure in to this discussion). There are so many enums you’re likely to use (PlayerIndex, SpriteSortMode, SpriteEffects, SurfaceFormat, etc.) that including them would’ve flooded the list and reduced its utility. So I went with “any enum” and trust that you can figure out what the enums are (and it’s rare to use ‘new’ with an enum anyway). That list also doesn’t include any of the pre-defined static instances of some of the classes (e.g. BlendState.AlphaBlend, BlendState.Opaque, etc.) which are already allocated such that using them doesn’t cause any new allocations and therefore doesn’t increase that 1 MB counter. That list also has a few misleading things. VertexElement, VertexPositionColor, and all the other vertex types are structs. But you’re only likely to ever use them as an array (for use with VertexBuffer or DynamicVertexBuffer), and all arrays are reference types (even arrays of value types such as VertexPositionColor[ ] or int[ ]). * So that’s it for now. The note below may be a bit confusing (it deals with how the GC works and how arrays are managed in .NET). If so, you can probably safely ignore it for now but feel free to ask any questions regardless. * Arrays of value types (where the value type doesn’t contain any reference type members) are much faster for the GC to examine than arrays of reference types, so there is a definite benefit to using arrays of value types where it makes sense. But creating arrays of value types does cause the GC’s allocation counter to increase. Indeed, allocating a large array of a value type is one of the quickest ways to increment the allocation counter since a .NET array is a sequential block of memory. An array of reference types is just a sequential block of references (typically 4 bytes each) while an array of value types is a sequential block of instances of that type. So for an array of Vector3s it would be 12 bytes each since each float is 4 bytes and there are 3 in a Vector3; for an array of VertexPositionNormalTexture structs it would typically be 32 bytes each since it has two Vector3s and a Vector2. (Note that there are a few additional bytes taken up in the creation of an array, typically 12 but sometimes 16 or possibly even more, which depend on the implementation details of the array type on the particular platform the code is running on).

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  • Flashing screen during videos and games

    - by Collif
    I recently switched from Vista to Ubuntu 12.10 on my HP laptop and I've been having issues with my graphics. Everything is fine till I watch a video/play a game or (sometimes) when I visit the software centre. At that point large portions of the screen start flashing and everything gets rather slow. I'm looking for a way to remedy this. For reference I'm using Firefox and I'm unsure what my video card is because it's listed as unknown when I check my system settings.

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  • Coding different states in Adventure Games

    - by Cardin
    I'm planning out an adventure game, and can't figure out what's the right way to implement the behaviour of a level depending on state of story progression. My single-player game features a huge world where the player has to interact with people in a town at various points in the game. However, depending on story progression, different things would be presented to the player, for e.g. the Guild Leader will change locations from the town square to various locations around the city; Doors would only unlock at certain times of the day after finishing a particular routine; Different cut-screen/trigger events happen only after a particular milestone has been reached. I naively thought of using a switch{} statement initially to decide what the NPC should say or which he could be found at, and making quest objectives interact-able only after checking a global game_state variable's condition. But I realised I would quickly run into a lot of different game states and switch-cases in order to change the behaviour of an object. That switch statement would also be massively hard to debug, and I guess it might also be hard to use in a level editor. So I thought, instead of having a single object with multiple states, maybe I should have multiple instances of the same object, with a single state. That way, if I use something like a level editor, I can put an instance of the NPC at all the different locations he could ever appear at, and also an instance for each conversation state he has. But that means there'll be a lot of inactive, invisible game objects floating around the level, which might be trouble for memory, or simply hard to see in a level editor, i don't know. Or simply, make an identical, but separate level for each game state. This feels the cleanest and bug-free way to do things, but it feels like massive manual work making sure each version of the level is really identical to each other. All my methods feel so inefficient, so to recap my question, is there a better or standardised way to implement behaviour of a level depending on state of story progression? PS: I don't have a level editor yet - thinking of using something like JME SDK or making my own.

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  • Stats on Screen Size for Flash Games

    - by ashes999
    I'm working on a Flash game after many, many years. I'm trying to figure out size to make my application run (eg. 600x800). Because it's a tall (not wide) game, I'm confused. I know about (and love) the Steam hardware stats. However, for Flash gaming, I have two nit-picks with their survey sample: 1) Caters to more hardcore gamers with better hardware (overall) 2) Captures only a subset of Flash gamers. Doesn't capture people who play at school, work, etc. or not netbooks and lighter machines. Are there any sort of statistics I can use to determine which size to use? Ideally, I would like to know something like: 800x600 will fit 94% of users screens 1024x768 will fit 74% of users screens 1200x960 will fit 53% of users screens etc.

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  • Using idle time in turn-based (RPG) games for updating

    - by The Communist Duck
    If you take any turn based RPG game there will be large periods of time when nothing is happening because the game is looping over 'wait_for_player_input'. Naturally it seems sensible to use this time to update things. However, this immediately seems to suggest that it would need to be threaded. Is this sort of design possible in a single thread? loop: if not check_something_pressed: update_a_very_small_amount else keep going But if we says 'a_very_small_amount' is only updating a single object each loop, it's going to be very slow at updating. How would you go about this, preferably in a single thread? EDIT: I've tagged this language-agnostic as that seems the sensible thing, though anything more specific to Python would be great. ;-)

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  • Using heavyweight ORM implementation for light based games

    - by Holland
    I'm just about to engulf myself in an MVC-based/Component architecture in C#, using MySQL's connector/Net for the data storage, and probably some NHibernate/FluentNHibernate Object-relational-mapping to map out the data structure. The goal is to build a scalable 2D RPG. Then I think about it...and I can't help but think this seems a little "heavy weight" for a 2D RPG, especially one which, while I plan to incorporate a lot of functionality and entertaining gameplay, may be ported to something like Windows Phone or Android in the future. Yet, on the other hand even a 2-Dimensional RPG can become very complicated, and therefore must incorporate a lot of functionality. While this can be accomplished with text/XML/JSON for data storage, is there a better way? Is something such as Object-Relational-Mapping useful in such an application? So, what do you think? Would you say that there is a place for such technologies? I don't know what to think...

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  • Which algorithm used in Advance Wars type turn based games

    - by Jan de Lange
    Has anyone tried to develop, or know of an algorithm such as used in a typical turn based game like Advance Wars, where the number of objects and the number of moves per object may be too large to search through up to a reasonable depth like one would do in a game with a smaller search base like chess? There is some path-finding needed to to engage into combat, harvest, or move to an object, so that in the next move such actions are possible. With this you can build a search tree for each item, resulting in a large tree for all items. With a cost function one can determine the best moves. Then the board flips over to the player role (min/max) and the computer searches the best player move, and flips back etc. upto a number of cycles deep. Finally it has found the best move and now it's the players turn. But he may be asleep by now... So how is this done in practice? I have found several good sources on A*, DFS, BFS, evaluation / cost functions etc. But as of yet I do not see how I can put it all together.

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  • Need game development sandbox like Etoys to do 2D games prototyping

    - by Dimitry Tato
    I am new to game development, and currently working on development a mobile 2D game (for android). As the part of the development process, I need to build a prototype and playtest it, to see if the game mechanics and user interaction is ok For example: if I have a starship shooting at ememies, I need to see what's the best size for my starship. what trajectories should the enemy ships fly and what velocity. Should the enemy ships be coming only from left to right, or also from top Should the enemy ships form a 'flock' or just fly by themselves what's the best 'powerup' pickup mechanics: to shoot it, or to pick it with the ship etc Implementing these details directly in Java (Android) is time consuming and as many of the 'hypotheses' will be rejected, I also don't want to invest a lot of time to code thigs, majority of which gonna be rejected. I found 'tool' Etoys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34cWCnLC5nM&feature=related and official website http://www.squeakland.org/ which helps to build 'prototype' quickly, but Etoys is meant for children learning programming and is too basic. SO MY QUESTION IS: Is there any prototyping tool, as simple as Etoys and with better prototype quality?

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  • Performance tracking/monitoring in games

    - by vitaliy kotik
    Let's say I have an online game with a downloadable client / browser plugin. I want to track performance of my software and automatically send summary to the server. Let it be fps, latency, load time, physics step calc. time, whatever... I also want tools to perform data analysis: per session stats, per hardware stats, avgs, totals, diagrams, etc. So that I could see what are the real world hotspots / bottlenecks. Is there any common out-of-the-box / SaS solution?

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  • Simultaneous AI in turn based games

    - by Eduard Strehlau
    I want to hack together a roguelike. Now I thought about entity and world representation and got to a quite big problem. If you want all the AI to act simultaneously you would normally(in cellular automa for examble) just copy the cell buffer and let all action of indiviual cells depend on the copy. Actions which are not valid anymore after some cell before the cell you are currently operating on changed the original enviourment(blocking the path) are just ignored or reapplied with the "current"(between turns) environment. After all cells have acted you copy the current map to the buffer again. Now for an environment with complex AI and big(datawise) entities the copying would take too long. So I thought you could put every action and entity makes into a que(make no changes to the environment) and execute the whole que after everyone took their move. Every interaction on this que are realy interacting entities, so if a entity tries to attack another entity it sends a message to it, the consequences of the attack would be visible next turn, either by just examining the entity or asking the entity for data. This would remove problems like what happens if an entity dies middle in the cue but got actions or is messaged later on(all messages would go to null, and the messages from the entity would either just be sent or deleted(haven't decided yet) But what would happen if a monster spawns a fireball which by itself tracks the player(in the same turn). Should I add the fireball to the enviourment beforehand, so make a change to the environment before executing the action list or just add the ball to the "need updated" list as a special case so it doesn't exist in the environment and still operates on it, spawing after evaluating the action list? Are there any solutions or papers on this subject which I can take a look at? EDIT: I don't need information on writing a roguelike I need information on turn based ai in respective to a complex enviourment.

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  • How should I do 3D games through Java on a mac?

    - by Steven Rogers
    I have been self-teaching myself Java on the mac mostly because the language is cross-platform. Recently, I have been only able to develop 2D games using the Graphics2D class. Now, I want to learn how to make 3D games in Java. I used to model and animate stuff in 3D, so my knowledge of 3-Dimensional stuff is okay. I have spent the last 3 hours using google to look up ways of making 3D games in java. Apparently the best one to use is OpenGL, so i looked up a tutorial on it and i cannot find a tutorial that shows how to (if there is a way) install JOGL on the Mac platform. Should i continue to use Java? How can i make 3D games using Java? What is the best way to make 3D games on a mac?

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