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• Suggestions for implementing a dynamic 2D level

  - by Wouter

  I am working on a game that needs a level that is completely generated. Currently my approach is to draw textures for the levels pixel by pixel during the game (in XNA with SpriteBatch). This is too intensive unfortunately. The game has frame drops even when I only draw 1 level texture each draw cycle. Here is an example of the current prototype. It is a simple sidescroller with the avatar swimming through a cave. The shape of this cave will alter throughout the level (textures and physics collision shapes). You can clearly see the boundaries of the level tiles in the screenshot below. These are generated just before they move into camera view. For inspiration I looked at PixelJunk Shooter 2. These levels are obviously not generated, but some of the levels have movement. How do you guys think they implemented it? My guess is that the level and other objects in the game are actually flat 3d models, but I am not sure..

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• javascript fixed timestep gameloop with requestanimation frame

  - by coffeecup

  hello i just started to read through several articles, including http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/ ...://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1589/fixed-time-step-vs-variable-time-step/ ...//dewitters.koonsolo.com/gameloop.html ...://nokarma.org/2011/02/02/javascript-game-development-the-game-loop/index.html my understanding of this is that i need the currentTime and the timeStep size and integrate all states to the next state the time which is left is then passed into the render function to do interpolation i tried to implement glenn fiedlers "the final touch", whats troubling me is that each FrameTime is about 15 (ms) and the update loop runs at about 1500 fps which seems a little bit off? heres my code this.t = 0 this.dt = 0.01 this.currTime = new Date().getTime() this.accumulator = 0.0 this.animate() animate: function(){ var newTime = new Date().getTime() , frameTime = newTime - this.currTime , alpha if ( frameTime > 0.25 ) frameTime = 0.25 this.currTime = newTime this.accumulator += frameTime while (this.accumulator >= this.dt ) { this.prev_state = this.curr_state this.update(this.t,this.dt) this.t += this.dt this.accumulator -= this.dt } alpha = this.accumulator / this.dt this.render( this.t, this.dt, alpha) requestAnimationFrame( this.animate ) } also i would like to know, are there differences between glenn fiedlers implementation and the last solution presented here ? gameloop1 gameloop2 [ sorry couldnt post more than 2 links.. ] edit : i looked into it again and adjusted the values this.currTime = new Date().getTime() this.accumulator = 0 this.p_t = 0 this.p_step = 1000/100 this.animate() animate: function(){ var newTime = new Date().getTime() , frameTime = newTime - this.currTime , alpha if(frameTime > 25) frameTime = 25 this.currTime = newTime this.accumulator += frameTime while(this.accumulator >= this.p_step){ // prevstate = currState this.update() this.p_t+=this.p_step this.accumulator -= this.p_step } alpha = this.accumulator / this.p_step this.render(alpha) requestAnimationFrame( this.animate ) now i can set the physics update rate, render runs at 60 fps and physics update at 100 fps, maybe someone could confirm this because its the first time i'm playing around with game development :-)

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• Where do I place XNA content pipeline references?

  - by Zabby Wabby

  I am relatively new to XNA, and have started to delve into the use of the content pipeline. I have already figured out that tricky issue of adding a game library containing classes for any type of .xml file I want to read. Here's the issue. I am trying to handle the reading of all XML content through use of an XMLHandler object that uses the intermediate deserializer. Any time reading of such data is required, the appropriate method within this object would be called. So, as a simple example, something like this would occur when a character levels: public Spell LevelUp(int levelAchived) { XMLHandler.FindSkillsForLevel(levelAchived); } This method would then read the proper .xml file, sending back the spell for the character to learn. However, the XMLHandler is having issues even being created. I cannot get it to use the using namespace of Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline. I get an error on my using statement in the XMLHandler class: using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Serialization.Intermediate; The error is a typical reference error: Type or namespace name "'Pipeline' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content' (are you missing an assembly reference?)" I THINK this is because this namespace is already referenced in my game's content. I would really have no issue placing this object within my game's content (since that is ALL it deals with anyways), but the Content project does not seem capable of holding anything but content files. In summary, I need to use the Intermediate Deserializer in my main project's logic, but, as far as I can make out, I can't safely reference the associated namespace for it outside of the game's content. I'm not a terribly well-versed programmer, so I may be just missing some big detail I've never learned here. How can I make this object accessible for all projects within the solution? I will gladly post more information if needed!

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• Scaling background without scaling foreground in platformer?

  - by David Xu

  I'm currently developing a platform game and I've run into a problem with scaling resolutions. I want a different resolution of the game to still display the foreground unscaled (characters, tiles, etc) but I want the background to be scaled to fit into the window. To explain this better, my viewport has 4 variables: (x, y, width, height) where x and y are the top left corner and width and height are the dimensions. These can be either 800x600, 1024x768 or 1280x960. When I design my levels, I design everything for the highest resolution (1280x960) and expect the game engine to scale it down if a user is running in a lower resolution. I have tried the following to make it work but nothing I've come up with solves it so far: scale = view->width/1280; drawX = x * scale; drawY = y * scale; (this makes the translation too small for low resolution) and scale = view->width/1280; bgWidth = background->width*scale; bgHeight = background->height*scale; drawX = x + background->width/2 - bgWidth/2; drawY = y + background->height/2 - bgHeight/2; (this makes the translation completely wrong at the edges of the map) The thing is, no matter what resolution the game is run at, the map remains the same size, and the foreground is unscaled. (With a lower resolution you just see less of the foreground in the viewport) I was wondering if anyone had any idea how to solve this problem? Thank you in advance!

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• How are events in games handled?

  - by Alex

  In may games that I have played, I have seen events being triggered, such as when you walk into a certain land area while holding a specific object, it will trigger a special creature to spawn. I was wondering, how do games deal with events such as this? Not in a specific game, but in general among games. The first thought I had was that each place has a hard-coded set of events that it will call when something happens there. However, that would be too inefficient to maintain, as when something new is added, that would require modification of every part of the game that would potentially cause the event to be called. Next up, I had the idea of maybe how GUI programming works. In all of the GUI programming I've done, you create a component and a callback function, or a listener. Then, when the user interacts when the button, the callback function is called, allowing you to do something with it. So, I was thinking that in terms of a game, when a land area gets loaded the game loops over a list of all events, creating instances of them and calling public methods to bind them to the current scene. The events themselves then handle what scene it is, and if it is a scene that pertains to the event, will call the public method of the scene to bind the event to an action. Then, when the action takes place, the scene would call all events that are bound to that action. However, I'm sure that's not how games would operate either, as that would require a lot of creating of events all the time. So how to video games handle events, are either of those methods correct, or is it something completely different?

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• How can I better implement A star algorithm with a very large set of nodes?

  - by Stephen

  I'm making a game with nodejs in which many enemies must converge on the player as the player moves around a relatively open space (right now it is an open field with few obstacles, but eventually there may be some small buildings in the field with 1 or 2 rooms). It's a multiplayer game using websockets, so the server needs to keep track of enemies and players. I found this javascript A* library which I've modified to be used on the server as a nodejs module. The library utilizes a Binary Heap to track the nodes for the algorithm, so it should be pretty fast (and indeed, with a small grid, say 100x100 it is lightning fast). The problem is that my game is not really tile-based. As the player moves around the map, he is moving on a more or less 1-to-1 per-pixel coordinate system (the player can move in 8 directions, 1 or 2 pixels at a time). In preliminary tests, on an 800x600 field, the path-finding can take anywhere from 400 to 1000 ms. Multiply that by 10 enemies and the game starts to get pretty choppy. I have already set it up so that each enemy will only do a path-finding call once per second or even as slow as once every 2 seconds (they have to keep updating their path because the players can move freely). But even with this long interval, there are noticeable lag spikes or chops every couple of seconds as the enemies update their paths. I'm willing to approach the problem of path-finding differently, if there's another option. I'm assuming that the real problem is the enormous grid (800x600). It also occurs to me that maybe the large arrays are to blame, as I've read that V8 has trouble with large arrays.

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• Resolution Independence in libGDX

  - by ashes999

  How do I make my libGDX game resolution/density independent? Is there a way to specify image sizes as "absolute" regardless of the underlying density? I'm making a very simple kids game; just a bunch of sprites displayed on-screen, and some text for menus (options menu primarily). What I want to know is: how do I make my sprites/fonts resolution independent? (I have wrapped them in my own classes to make things easier.) Since it's a simple kids game, I don't need to worry about the "playable area" of the game; I want to use as much of the screen space as possible. What I'm doing right now, which seems super incorrect, is to simply create images suitable for large resolutions, and then scale down (or rarely, up) to fit the screen size. This seems to work okay (in the desktop version), even with linear mapping on my textures, but the smaller resolutions look ugly. Also, this seems to fly in the face of Android's "device independent pixels" (DPs). Or maybe I'm missing something and libGDX already takes care of this somehow? What's the best way to tackle this? I found this link; is this a good way of solving the problem?: http://www.dandeliongamestudio.com/2011/09/12/android-fragmentation-density-independent-pixel-dip/ It mentions how to control the images, but it doesn't mention how to specify font/image sizes regardless of density.

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• 2D non-tile based map editor

  - by Jonesy

  I am currently developing a relatively simple 2D, topdown oriented adventure game for the iPhone and was wondering what would be the easiest way to create the maps for my game. I figured I would need some kind of visual editor that would give me immediate feedback and would allow me to place all objects in the world exactly where I want them. I could then load the saved representation of the world I create in the editor in my game. So, I am looking for a simple map editor that allows me to do this. All the objects in my game are simply textured rectangles build up from two triangles. All I need to be able to do is position different rectangles/objects in the map, and give them a texture. I am using texture atlases, so it would be useful to be able to assign portions of textures to the objects. I then need to be able to extract all the objects from the saved representation of my maps, together with the name/identifier of the texture(atlas) they use, and the area of the texture atlas. I have looked at some tile-based map editors like Tiled and Ogmo, but they don't seem to be able to do what I want. Any suggestions? EDIT: a more concrete example: something like the GameMaker level editor, but then with added export functionality in a handy format.

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• Resolution independence - resize on the fly or ship all sizes?

  - by RecursiveCall

  My game relies heavily on textures of various sizes with some being full-screen. The game is targeted for multiple resolutions. I found that resizing textures (downsizing) works quite well for this game’s art type (it’s not Pixel Art or anything like that). I asked my artist to ensure that all textures at the edges of the screen to be created in such a way that they can safely “overflow” off screen; this means that aspect ratio is not an issue. So with no aspect ratio issues, I figured that I would simply ask my artist to create assets in very high resolution, and then resize them down to the appropriate screen resolution. The question is, when and how do I do that? Do I pre-resize everything to common resolutions in Photoshop and package all assets in the final product (increasing the size download that the user has to deal with) and then select the appropriate asset based on the detected resolution? Or do I ship with the largest set of Textures, detect the resolution on load, set a render target and draw all downsized assets to it and use that? Or for the latter, do I use some sort of a CPU-sided algorithm to resize on game load?

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• 2D non-tile based map editor

  - by user5468

  I am currently developing a relatively simple 2D, topdown oriented adventure game for the iPhone and was wondering what would be the easiest way to create the maps for my game. I figured I would need some kind of visual editor that would give me immediate feedback and would allow me to place all objects in the world exactly where I want them. I could then load the saved representation of the world I create in the editor in my game. So, I am looking for a simple map editor that allows me to do this. All the objects in my game are simply textured rectangles build up from two triangles. All I need to be able to do is position different rectangles/objects in the map, and give them a texture. I am using texture atlases, so it would be useful to be able to assign portions of textures to the objects. I then need to be able to extract all the objects from the saved representation of my maps, together with the name/identifier of the texture(atlas) they use, and the area of the texture atlas. I have looked at some tile-based map editors like Tiled and Ogmo, but they don't seem to be able to do what I want. Any suggestions? EDIT: a more concrete example: something like the GameMaker level editor, but then with added export functionality in a handy format.

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• Fastest way to group units that can see each other?

  - by mac

  In the 2D game I'm working with, the game engine is able to give me, for each unit, the list of other units that are in its view range. I would like to know if there is an established algorithm to sort the units in groups, where each group would be defined by all those units which are "connected" to each other (even through others). An example might help understand the question better (E=enemy, O=own unit). First the data that I would get from the game engine: E1 can see E2, E3, O5 E2 can see E1 E3 can see E1 E4 can see O5 E5 can see O2 E6 can see E7, O9, O1 E7 can see E6 O1 can see E6 O2 can see O5, E5 O5 can see E1, E4, O2 O9 can see E6 Then I should compute the groups as follow: G1 = E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, O2, O5 G2 = O1, O9, E6, E7 It can be safely assumed that there is a transitive property for the field of view: [if A sees B, then B sees A]. Just to clarify: I already wrote a naïve implementation that loops on each row of the game engine info, but from the look of it, it seems a problem general enough for it to have been studied in depth and have various established algorithms (maybe passing through some tree-like structure?). My problem is that I couldn't find a way to describe my problem that returned useful google hits. Thank you in advance for your help!

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• How to check Early Z efficiency on AMD GPU with Windows 7

  - by Suma

  I have a game using DirectX 9, and a development station using Win 7 x64. I am still able to get access to another station with Vista x64 / dual booted with WinXP x86. I wanted to check early Z efficiency in the game and to my sadness all tools I have tried seem to be unable to perform this task: AMD PerfStudio AMD GPUPerfStudio 2 does not support DirectX 9 at all AMD GPUPerfStudio 1.2 does not install correctly on Windows 7. When I have tweaked the MSI package (a simple OS version check adjustment was needed), it complained the drivers I have do not provide needed instrumentation. The drivers old enough to support the GPUPerfStudio would most likely not be able to operate with my Radeon 5750 card (though this is something I am not 100 % sure, I did not attempt to try any older drivers, not knowing which I should look for) PIX PIX does not seem to contain any counters like this. It offers some ATI specific counters, but when I try to activate them, the PIX reports "PIX encountered a problem while attaching to the target program." I do not want to upgrade to DX 10/11 just to be able to profile the game, but it seems without the step I am somewhat locked with a toolset which is no longer supported. I see only one obvious options which would probably work, and that is using WinXP (or with a little bit of luck even Vista) station, perhaps with some older AMD card, to make sure GPUPerfStudio 1.2 works. Other than that, can anyone recommend other options how to check GPU HW counters (HiZ / EarlyZ in particular, but if others would be enabled as well, it would be a nice bonus) for a DirectX 9 game on Windows 7, preferably on AMD GPU? (If that is not possible, I would definitely prefer switching GPU to switching the OS, but before I do so I would like to know if I will not hit the same problem with nVidia again)

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• Does Unity have existing support for Timelines?

  - by Raven Dreamer

  I am planning the development of a game in Unity3D, and trying to come to terms with what the engine has already provided, and what I must code myself. The game itself is going to be a rhythm game, which means synching audio and graphical events so that they always play when they're supposed to. What I'm looking to avoid is a potential scenario of lag where either the audio or the graphics starts to progress faster than the other. When we discussed this type of coordinating system in my game design class back at university, my professor called this type of design a "Timeline" class. The idea being that you can instantiate one or more of these to progress at different rates, schedule things to happen in the future, and synch up periodic events. However, calling this a "Timeline" class seems to have been limited to my professor himself, as googling for whether a certain API features "Timeline" functionality has been a fruitless endeavor. Is there some more common name for this kind of functionality? Does Unity have any pre-existing methods to coordinate the scheduling of events like this, or is this the kind of thing that needs to be built onto the engine? And if it does, I'd appreciate being pointed towards some tutorials!

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• Positioning a sprite in XNA: Use ClientBounds or BackBuffer?

  - by Martin Andersson

  I'm reading a book called "Learning XNA 4.0" written by Aaron Reed. Throughout most of the chapters, whenever he calculates the position of a sprite to use in his call to SpriteBatch.Draw, he uses Window.ClientBounds.Width and Window.ClientBounds.Height. But then all of a sudden, on page 108, he uses PresentationParameters.BackBufferWidth and PresentationParameters.BackBufferHeight instead. I think I understand what the Back Buffer and the Client Bounds are and the difference between those two (or perhaps not?). But I'm mighty confused about when I should use one or the other when it comes to positioning sprites. The author uses for the most part Client Bounds both for checking whenever a moving sprite is of the screen and to find a spawn point for new sprites. However, he seems to make two exceptions from this pattern in his book. The first time is when he wants some animated sprites to "move in" and cross the screen from one side to another (page 108 as mentioned). The second and last time is when he positions a texture to work as a button in the lower right corner of a Windows Phone 7 screen (page 379). Anyone got an idea? I shall provide some context if it is of any help. Here's how he usually calls SpriteBatch.Draw (code example from where he positions a sprite in the middle of the screen [page 35]): spriteBatch.Draw(texture, new Vector2( (Window.ClientBounds.Width / 2) - (texture.Width / 2), (Window.ClientBounds.Height / 2) - (texture.Height / 2)), null, Color.White, 0, Vector2.Zero, 1, SpriteEffects.None, 0); And here is the first case of four possible in a switch statement that will set the position of soon to be spawned moving sprites, this position will later be used in the SpriteBatch.Draw call (page 108): // Randomly choose which side of the screen to place enemy, // then randomly create a position along that side of the screen // and randomly choose a speed for the enemy switch (((Game1)Game).rnd.Next(4)) { case 0: // LEFT to RIGHT position = new Vector2( -frameSize.X, ((Game1)Game).rnd.Next(0, Game.GraphicsDevice.PresentationParameters.BackBufferHeight - frameSize.Y)); speed = new Vector2(((Game1)Game).rnd.Next( enemyMinSpeed, enemyMaxSpeed), 0); break;

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• How AlphaBlend Blendstate works in XNA when accumulighting light into a RenderTarget?

  - by cubrman

  I am using a Deferred Rendering engine from Catalin Zima's tutorial: His lighting shader returns the color of the light in the rgb channels and the specular component in the alpha channel. Here is how light gets accumulated: Game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(LightRT); Game.GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Transparent); Game.GraphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.AlphaBlend; // Continuously draw 3d spheres with lighting pixel shader. ... Game.GraphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque; MSDN states that AlphaBlend field of the BlendState class uses the next formula for alphablending: (source × Blend.SourceAlpha) + (destination × Blend.InvSourceAlpha), where "source" is the color of the pixel returned by the shader and "destination" is the color of the pixel in the rendertarget. My question is why do my colors are accumulated correctly in the Light rendertarget even when the new pixels' alphas equal zero? As a quick sanity check I ran the following code in the light's pixel shader: float specularLight = 0; float4 light4 = attenuation * lightIntensity * float4(diffuseLight.rgb,specularLight); if (light4.a == 0) light4 = 0; return light4; This prevents lighting from getting accumulated and, subsequently, drawn on the screen. But when I do the following: float specularLight = 0; float4 light4 = attenuation * lightIntensity * float4(diffuseLight.rgb,specularLight); return light4; The light is accumulated and drawn exactly where it needs to be. What am I missing? According to the formula above: (source x 0) + (destination x 1) should equal destination, so the "LightRT" rendertarget must not change when I draw light spheres into it! It feels like the GPU is using the Additive blend instead: (source × Blend.One) + (destination × Blend.One)

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• What are the possible options for AI path-finding etc when the world is "partitionned"?

  - by Sebastien Diot

  If you anticipate a large persistent game world, and you don't want to end up with some game server crashing due to overload, then you have to design from the ground up a game world that is partitioned in chunks. This is in particular true if you want to run your game servers in the cloud, where each individual VM is relatively week, and memory and CPU are at a premium. I think the biggest challenge here is that the player receives all the parts around the location of the avatar, but mobs/monsters are normally located in the server itself, and can only directly access the data about the part of the world that the server own. So how can we make the AI behave realistically in that context? It can send queries to the other servers that own the neighboring parts, but that sounds rather network intensive and latency prone. It would probably be more performant for each mob AI to be spread over the neighboring parts, and proactively send the relevant info to the part that contains the actual mob atm. That would also reduce the stress in a mob crossing a border between two parts, and therefore "switching server". Have you heard of any AI design that solves those issues? Some kind of distributed AI brain? Maybe some kind of "agent" community working together through message passing?

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• Common way of animating 'motion' for walk cycle animations

  - by Ben Hymers

  I've just posted this at the Blender artists' forums before realising I would probably get a better response from a more game development-specific audience, so apologies for cross-posting! It's for the right reasons :) I'm a programmer trying to animate a character walking for a game project, using Ogre. I've made a very simple walk cycle in Blender and exported it to Ogre, and it plays just fine. By fine, I mean it works, but there's terrible foot sliding. This is because I just animated the walk in-place (at the origin) in Blender, and of course I don't know what "speed of walk" that corresponds to, so when I move the character in-game the motion doesn't necessarily match up with the movement of the feet in the animation. So my question is: what's the normal approach for this kind of thing? At work we use Maya, and the animators either animate a special 'moveTrans' node that represents the "position" of the character (or have the exporter generate it for them from the movement of the root node), then the game can read this to know how fast the animation moves the character. So in the Maya file, the character will walk forward for one cycle and this extra node will follow along with them by their feet. I've not seen anything like this in open-source land, and there's certainly no provision for that in the Ogre Exporter script. What do you chaps normally do for this?

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• How to define type-specific scripts when using a 'type object' programming pattern?

  - by Erik

  I am in the process of creating a game engine written in C++, using the C/C++ SQLite interface to achieve a 'type object' pattern. The process is largely similar to what is outlined here (Thank you Bob Nystrom for the great resource!). I have a generally defined Entity class that when a new object is created, data is taken from a SQLite database and then is pushed back into a pointer vector, which is then iterated through, calling update() for each object. All the ints, floats, strings are loaded in fine, but the script() member of Entity is proving an issue. It's not much fun having a bunch of stationary objects laying around my gameworld. The only solutions I've come up with so far are: Create a monolithic EntityScript class with member functions encompassing all game AI and then calling the corresponding script when iterating through the Entity vector. (Not ideal) Create bindings between C++ and a scripting language. This would seem to get the job done, but it feels like implementing this (given the potential memory overhead) and learning a new language is overkill for a small team (2-3 people) that know the entirety of the existing game engine. Can you suggest any possible alternatives? My ideal situation would be that to add content to the game, one would simply add a script file to the appropriate directory and append the SQLite database with all the object data. All that is required is to have a variety of integers and floats passed between both the engine and the script file.

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• Updating games for iOS 6 and new iPhone/iPod Touch

  - by SundayMonday

  Say I have a game that runs full-screen on iPhone 4S and older devices. The balance of the game is just right for the 480 x 320 screen and associated aspect ratio. Now I want to update my game to run full-screen on the new iPhone/iPod Touch where the aspect ratio of the screen is different. It seems like this can be challenging for some games in terms of maintaining the "balance". For example if the extra screen space was just tacked onto the right side of Jet Pack Joyride the balance would be thrown off since the user now has more time to see and react to obstacles. Also it could be challenging in terms of code maintenance. Perhaps Jet Pack Joyride would slightly increase the speed of approaching obstacles when the game is played on newer devices. However this quickly becomes messy when extra conditional statements are added all over the code. One solution is to have some parameters that are set in once place at start-up depending on the device type. What are some strategies for updating iOS games to run on the new iPhone and iPod Touch?

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• How AlphaBlend Blendstate works in XNA 4 when accumulighting light into a RenderTarget?

  - by cubrman

  I am using a Deferred Rendering engine from Catalin Zima's tutorial: His lighting shader returns the color of the light in the rgb channels and the specular component in the alpha channel. Here is how light gets accumulated: Game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(LightRT); Game.GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Transparent); Game.GraphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.AlphaBlend; // Continuously draw 3d spheres with lighting pixel shader. ... Game.GraphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque; MSDN states that AlphaBlend field of the BlendState class uses the next formula for alphablending: (source × Blend.SourceAlpha) + (destination × Blend.InvSourceAlpha), where "source" is the color of the pixel returned by the shader and "destination" is the color of the pixel in the rendertarget. My question is why do my colors are accumulated correctly in the Light rendertarget even when the new pixels' alphas equal zero? As a quick sanity check I ran the following code in the light's pixel shader: float specularLight = 0; float4 light4 = attenuation * lightIntensity * float4(diffuseLight.rgb,specularLight); if (light4.a == 0) light4 = 0; return light4; This prevents lighting from getting accumulated and, subsequently, drawn on the screen. But when I do the following: float specularLight = 0; float4 light4 = attenuation * lightIntensity * float4(diffuseLight.rgb,specularLight); return light4; The light is accumulated and drawn exactly where it needs to be. What am I missing? According to the formula above: (source x 0) + (destination x 1) should equal destination, so the "LightRT" rendertarget must not change when I draw light spheres into it! It feels like the GPU is using the Additive blend instead: (source × Blend.One) + (destination × Blend.One)

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• Running multiple box2D world objects on a server

  - by CharbelAbdo

  I'm creating a multiplayer game using LibGdx (with Box2d) and Kryonet. Since this is the first time I work on multiplayer games, I read a bit about server - client implementations, and it turns out that the server should handle important tasks like collision detection, hits, characters dying etc... Based on some articles (like the excellent Gabriel Gambetta Fast paced multiplayer series), I also know that the client should work in parallel to avoid the lag while the server responds to commands. Physics wise, each game will have 2 players, and any projectiles fired. What I'm thinking of doing is the following: Create a physics world on the client When the game is signaled to start, I create the same physics world on the server (without any rendering obviously). Whenever the player issues a command (move or fire), I send the command to the server and immediately start processing it on the client. When the server receives the command, it applies it on the server's world (set velocity etc...) Each 100ms, the server sends the new state to the client which corrects what was calculated locally. Any critical action (hit, death, level up) is calculated only on the server and sent to the client. Essentially, I would have a Box2d World object running on the server for each game in progress, in sync with the worlds running on the clients. The alternative would be to do my own calculations on the server instead of relying on Box2D to do them for me, but I'm trying to avoid that. My question is: Is it wise to have, for example, 1000 instances of the World object running and executing steps on the server? Tomcat used around 750 MBytes of memory when trying it without any object added to the world. Anybody tried that before? If not, is there any alternative? Google did not help me, are there any guidelines to use when you want to have physics on both the client and the server? Thanks for any help.

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• Complexity of defense AI

  - by Fredrik Johansson

  I have a non-released game, and currently it's only possible to play with another human being. As the game rules are made up by me, I think it would be great if new players could learn basic game play by playing against an AI opponent. I mean it's not like Tennis, where the majority knows at least the fundamental rules. On the other hand, I'm a bit concerned that this AI implementation can be quite complex. I hope you can help me with an complexity estimation. I've tried to summarize the gameplay below. Is this defense AI very hard to do? Basic Defense Game Play Player Defender can move within his land, i.e. inside a random, non-convex, polygon. This land will also contain obstacles modeled as polygons, that Defender has to move around. Player Attacker has also a land, modeled as another such polygon. Assume that Defender shall defend against Attacker. Attacker will then throw a thingy towards Defender's land. To be rewarded, Attacker wants to hit Defender's land, and Defender will want to strike away the thingy from his land before it stops to prevent Attacker from scoring. To feint Defender, Attacker might run around within his land before the throw, and based on these attacker movements Defender shall then continuously move to the best defense position within his land.

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• Limiting the speed of the mouse cursor

  - by idlewire

  I am working on a simple game where you can drag objects around with the mouse cursor. As I drag the object around quickly, I notice there is some juddering, which seems to be due to the fact that I can move the mouse cursor faster than the game's update/draw. So, although I maintain the offset from where the player initially clicked on the object, the mouse's relative position to the object shifts around slightly before settling as I move the object very quickly. The only way I have found to get smooth, exact 1:1 movement is if I turn both IsFixedTimeStep and SynchronizeWithVerticalRetrace to false. However, I'd rather not have to do that. I have also tried making a custom mouse cursor, hiding the real mouse, taking the real mouse delta and clamping it to a maximum speed. Here is the problem: In windowed mode, the "real" mouse cursor moves off the window while the custom mouse cursor (since it's movement is being scaled) is still somewhere inside the game window. This becomes bizarre and is obviously not desired, as clicking at this point means clicking on things outside the game window. Is there any way to accomplish this in windowed mode? In fullscreen mode, the "real" mouse cursor is bounded to the edges of the screen. So I get to a point where there is no more mouse delta, yet my custom cursor is still somewhere in the middle of the screen and hence can't move further in that direction. If I wanted to clamp it to the edge of the screen when the real cursor is at the edge, then I would get an abrupt jump to the edge of the screen, which isn't desired either Any help would be appreciated. I'd like to be able to limit the speed of the mouse, but also would appreciate help with the first issue (the non-smooth relative offset between mouse cursor movement and object movement).

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• Send less Server Data with "AFK"

  - by Oliver Schöning

  I am working on a 2D (Realtime) MultiPlayer Game. With Construct2 and a Socket.IO JavaScript Server. Right now the code does not include the Array for each Player. var io = require("socket.io").listen(80); var x = 10; io.sockets.on("connection", function (socket) { socket.on("message", function(data) { x = x+1; }); }); setInterval(function() { io.sockets.emit("message", 'Pos,' + x); },100); I noticed a very annoying problem with my server today. It sends my X Coordinates every 100 milliseconds. The Problem was, that when I went into another Browser Tab, the Browser stopped the Game from running. And when I went back, I think the Game had to run through all the packages. Because my Offline Debugging Button still worked immediately and the Online Button only responded after some seconds. So then I changed my Code so that it would only send out an update when it received a player Input: var io = require("socket.io").listen(80); var x = 10; io.sockets.on("connection", function (socket) { socket.on("message", function(data) { x = x+1; io.sockets.emit("message", 'Pos,' + x); }); }); And it Updated Immediately, even when I had been inactive on the Browser Tab for a long time. Confirming my suspicion that it had to get through all the data. Confirm Please! It would be insane to only send information on Client Input in a Real Time Game. But how would I write a AFK function? I would think it is easier to run a AFK Boolean Loop on the Server. Here is what I need help for: playerArray[Me] if ( "Not Given any Input for X amount of Seconds" ) { "Don't send Data" } else { "Send Data" }

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• GPU based procedual terrain borders?

  - by OnePie

  I'm working on a game that preferibly should feature a combination of designed and procedually generated terrain where the designer specifies in somewhat detailed terms what type of terrain a given area will have (grasslands, forest etc...) and then a precedual algorithm takes care of the rest. I'm not talking about minecraft style biomoes, but rather the game map for a strategy game. Each 'area' will not take up that much of the screen, and thus be more akin to a tile whose texture is procedually generated. While procedually generating terrain textures on the GPU are not that difficult, the hard part is making the borders between them look good. Currently, the 'tiles' are large enough to be visible (due to memory constraints mainly, we are talking planetary sized textures for a game taking place in space and on a continental ground view with seamless transitions between them) and creating good borders between them with an algorithm that is fast enough to be useful has proven difficult. Sampling the n-surrounding pixels and using the combiened result did not yield very good borders and was fairly slow on the GPU to boot (ca 12ms for me, that is without any lighning or shading and with very simple terrain texture shaders). So are there any practical known methods to solve this problem?

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