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• Random/Procedural vs. Previously Made Level Generation

  - by PythonInProgress

  I am making a game (called "Glory") that is a top-down explorer game, and am wondering what the advantages/disadvantages of using random/procedural generation vs. pre-made levels are. There seems to be few that i can think of, other than the fact that items may be a problem to distribute in randomly generated terrain, and that the generated terrain may look weird. The downside to previously made levels is that I would need to make a level editor, though. I cannot decide what is better to use.

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• Should I close database connections after use in PHP?

  - by Sprottenwels

  I wonder if I should close any unnecessary database connection inside of my PHP scripts. I am aware of the fact that database connections are closed implicitly when the block stops executing and 'manually' closing the connections could kinda bloat the codebase with unnecessary code. But shouldn't I do so in order to make by code as readable and as easy understandable as possible, while also preventing several possible issues during run time? Also, if I would do, would it be enough to unset() my database object?

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• Web designer help needed [closed]

  - by Felipe Caiado

  I have a ongoing problem, not knowing where to start to learn how to program websites, and which languages I should learn first, I have already taken a good look on the web, and I havn't found a clear awnser yet. Help would be much apreciated, in the cents of finding some good languages to start to program; and a good learning source such as a book or a website that covers from the basiscs to the most advanced of those languages.

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• How to explain bad software to non-technical people?

  - by mtutty

  In discussing software development with non-technical people (customers, business owners, project sponsors, etc.), I often resort to analogies and metaphors. It's relatively easy and effective to use a "house" or other metaphor for describing the size and complexity of new development. However, we often inherit someone else's code or data, and this approach doesn't seem to hold up as well when trying to explain why we're gutting something that already seems to work. Of course we can point to cycle time and cost to be saved in the future but this generally means nothing to business folks. I know doctors can say "just take this pill," but I'm not sure that software devs have the same authority. Ideas? EDIT: Let me add a bit to the discussion. The specific project I'm talking about has customers that don't realize (or care) about specific aspects of the system we're retiring (i.e., they think it was just fine): The system would save a NEW RECORD every time someone updated a field The system contained tables for reference data. These tables had new records added every day, even though they were duplicates of previous records. And there was no way to tie the reference data used for a particular case at the time it was closed. This is like 99% of the data in the old system. The field NAMES also have spaces, apostrophes and other inappropriate characters in them, making everything harder to work with. In addition to the incredible amount of duplicate data, they have around 1000 XLS files with data they want added to the system. Previously, they would do a spreadsheet for each case in the database, IN ADDITION TO what they typed into the database. Getting rid of this old, unneeded information and piping in the XLS data comprises about 80% of the total project effort, and was not something we could accurately predict. I'm trying to find a concrete way to describe how bad this thing was, mostly so that the customer will understand why the migration process has been so time-consuming. The actual coding was done pretty quickly and the new system works fine, but without the old data they won't be happy. Sorry to get into the weeds, but most of the answers I've seen so far are pretty basic scope/schedule/cost things. I've been doing this for 15 years, so this really is more of a reflective, philosophical question - but without some of the details it can be difficult to really appreciate the awful beauty of this problem.

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• Is having 'Util' classes a cause for concern? [closed]

  - by Matt Fenwick

  I sometimes create 'Util' classes which primarily serve to hold methods and values that don't really seem to belong elsewhere. But every time I create one of these classes, I think "uh-oh, I'm gonna regret this later ...", because I read somewhere that it's bad. But on the other hand, there seem to be two compelling (at least for me) cases for them: implementation secrets that are used in multiple classes within a package providing useful functionality to augment a class, without cluttering its interface Am I on the way to destruction? What you say !! Should I refactor?

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• Using "prevent execution of method" flags

  - by tpaksu

  First of all I want to point out my concern with some pseudocode (I think you'll understand better) Assume you have a global debug flag, or class variable named "debug", class a : var debug = FALSE and you use it to enable debug methods. There are two types of usage it as I know: first in a method : method a : if debug then call method b; method b : second in the method itself: method a : call method b; method b : if not debug exit And I want to know, is there any File IO or stack pointer wise difference between these two approaches. Which usage is better, safer and why?

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• Designing exceptions for conversion failures

  - by Mr.C64

  Suppose there are some methods to convert from "X" to "Y" and vice versa; the conversion may fail in some cases, and exceptions are used to signal conversion errors in those cases. Which would be the best option for defining exception classes in this context? A single XYConversionException class, with an attribute (e.g. an enum) specifying the direction of the conversion (e.g. ConversionFromXToY, ConversionFromYToX). A XYConversionException class, with two derived classes ConversionFromXToYException and ConversionFromYToXException. ConversionFromXToYException and ConversionFromYToXException classes without a common base class.

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• Expiring timed actions a good idea?

  - by Bart van Heukelom

  We have an online game where players sometimes have to wait a while (say 30 minutes) before a process they intiated completes. This encourages them to come back later. An example of this is growing crops in Farmville or basically any action in the Sims Play4Free. Now, however, there is the idea to let these processes expire, so if the player doesn't 'reap' them in time (e.g. within 4 hours) they are aborted. I'm a bit sceptical about this. How will this make players come back more often? Is not the reward of reaping the process enough for that? Can we expect players to fit their daily schedule around our game, maybe even set the alarm clock at night? Won't this just cause players to give up on starting these processes in the first place? I realise this may be too subjective for this site, so I'll end with a concrete question: Do (m)any other online free-to-play games employ this technique?

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• Is acoustic fingerprinting too broad for one audio file only?

  - by IBG

  We were looking for some topics related to audio analysis and found acoustic fingerprinting. As it is, it seems like the most famous application for it is for identification of music. Enter our manager, who requested us to research and possible find an algorithm or existing code that we can use for this very simple approach (like it's easy, source codes don't show up like mushrooms): Always-on app for listening Compare the audio patterns to a single audio file (assume sound is a simple beep) If beep is detected, send notification to server With a flow this simple, do you think acoustic fingerprinting is a broad approach to use? Should we stop and take another approach? Where to best start? We haven't started anything yet (on the development side) on this regard, so I want to get other opinion if this is pursuit is worth it or moot.

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• How to fix this navigation issue in my site?

  - by David

  First off I use webs.com for the creation of my site. I have a very basic layout. List of links of the left and content on the right with a heading up top. Now in my list of links every link is an article that I wrote, I have about 25 links going down the left hand side of my site. Problem is when I try out new themes that support horizontal navigation as opposed to vertical navigation I get either a messy overflow of links Or a link called "more" which lists the rest of the articles in a drop down-list across my site. What I wish I had was a simple horizontal navigation like" "home, about, articles" and when the user clicks on articles it would then bring them to a page containing all my articles there. I would prefer it to be in a table like display. That way is not a long list. Anyways any ideas on how I can fix this issue im having? Please let me know if you need more information.

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• Designing and refactoring of payment logic

  - by jokklan

  Im currently working on an application that helps users to coordinate dinner clubs and all related accounting. (A dinner club is where people in a group, take turns to cook for the rest and then you pay a small amount to participate. This is pretty normal in dorms and colleges where im from). However there is some different models that all have a price and the accounting aspect is therefore a little spread. We both have DinnerClub, ShoppingItem and are about to implement the third Payment when users pay their debts (or get refunded for expenses). Each of these have a "price" attribute and a users expense (that he or she needs refunded) is calculated by the total of these "prices" minus what other users have bought and he or she have used/participated in. My question is then if someone have some hints to refactor this bring all this behavior together in one place? For now have i thought about a Transaction class that are responsible for this behaviour, but I'm a little worried about the performance impact on having to query for another polymorphic record each time i want to show the price on dinner clubs and shopping items (i have a standard index page with a list for both so it's a lot of extra records being queried)...

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• Have you worked with a well designed application?

  - by Vilx-

  Inspired by this question, I started wondering - is there or has there ever been such a thing as a "well designed application"? One where the architecture would be perfect and no refactoring would ever be needed; code would be easy to read and understand even for someone new to the project; changes could be done with a 100% certainty that they won't break anything; etc? I must admit that whatever codebases I've worked with, they've all been more or less a mess. Even code that I start myself only stays organized at the start, and then slowly deteriorates as the time passes. I'm even starting to accept this as part of life and can't figure out whether I should be worried about that or not. So... is there such a thing as a "well designed application"? Or is all our code so shitty that there isn't even a point in trying to make it better, because it will never be good anyway?

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• Story and news-feed ideas for social network games

  - by arpine

  I am currently working on a educational and fun 2-in-1 game. As I am not a professional, I need advice on story and news-feed. The goal is simple-get richer, the story is about a worker who is trying to get over his/her financial problems and become rich. During the whole gaming process there is a news-feed (every day there are a couple of fresh news about what is going on). The news are fresh and individual so I need to write about 2000 pieces of news for 2 year gaming, maybe more. The problem is that I am not sure whether repetitive news can interest in this game. What can be done to make the news-making process easier but not boring from the point of view of the player?

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• Square One to Game Development

  - by Ian Quach

  How does someone even get into developing a game. What would they need to know, how would someone find the knowledge to program a game? I've always looked at game development as a future career. Now that I'm getting closer to university I was hoping to find a way to head start this future in game development. What would be the best place to start? I would love any help or tips from anyone. Thanks for reading this. :)

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• How to have operations with character/items on binary with concrete operations on C++?

  - by Piperoman

  I have the next problem. A item can have a lot of states: NORMAL = 0000000 DRY = 0000001 HOT = 0000010 BURNING = 0000100 WET = 0001000 COLD = 0010000 FROZEN = 0100000 POISONED= 1000000 A item can have some states at same time but not all of them Is impossible to be dry and wet at same time. If you COLD a WET item, it turns into FROZEN. If you HOT a WET item, it turns into NORMAL A item can be BURNING and POISON Etc. I have tried to set binary flags to states, and use AND to combine different states, checking before if it is possible or not to do it, or change to another status. Does there exist a concrete approach to solve this problem efficiently without having an interminable switch that checks every state with every new state? It is relatively easy to check 2 different states, but if there exists a third state it is not trivial to do.

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• Visually and audibly unambiguous subset of the Latin alphabet?

  - by elliot42

  Imagine you give someone a card with the code "5SBDO0" on it. In some fonts, the letter "S" is difficult to visually distinguish from the number five, (as with number zero and letter "O"). Reading the code out loud, it might be difficult to distinguish "B" from "D", necessitating saying "B as in boy," "D as in dog," or using a "phonetic alphabet" instead. What's the biggest subset of letters and numbers that will, in most cases, both look unambiguous visually and sound unambiguous when read aloud? Background: We want to generate a short string that can encode as many values as possible while still being easy to communicate. Imagine you have a 6-character string, "123456". In base 10 this can encode 10^6 values. In hex "1B23DF" you can encode 16^6 values in the same number of characters, but this can sound ambiguous when read aloud. ("B" vs. "D") Likewise for any string of N characters, you get (size of alphabet)^N values. The string is limited to a length of about six characters, due to wanting to fit easily within the capacity of human working memory capacity. Thus to find the max number of values we can encode, we need to find that largest unambiguous set of letters/numbers. There's no reason we can't consider the letters G-Z, and some common punctuation, but I don't want to have to go manually pairwise compare "does G sound like A?", "does G sound like B?", "does G sound like C" myself. As we know this would be O(n^2) linguistic work to do =)...

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• Strategy to use two different measurement systems in software

  - by Dennis

  I have an application that needs to accept and output values in both US Custom Units and Metric system. Right now the conversion and input and output is a mess. You can only enter in US system, but you can choose the output to be US or Metric, and the code to do the conversions is everywhere. So I want to organize this and put together some simple rules. So I came up with this: Rules user can enter values in either US or Metric, and User Interface will take care of marking this properly All units internally will be stored as US, since the majority of the system already has most of the data stored like that and depends on this. It shouldn't matter I suppose as long as you don't mix unit. All output will be in US or Metric, depending on user selection/choice/preference. In theory this sounds great and seems like a solution. However, one little problem I came across is this: There is some data stored in code or in the database that already returns data like this: 4 x 13/16" screws, which means "four times screws". I need the to be in either US or Metric. Where exactly do I put the conversion code for doing the conversion for this unit? The above already mixing presentation and data, but the data for the field I need to populate is that whole string. I can certainly split it up into the number 4, the 13/16", and the " x " and the " screws", but the question remains... where do I put the conversion code? Different Locations for Conversion Routines 1) Right now the string is in a class where it's produced. I can put conversion code right into that class and it may be a good solution. Except then, I want to be consistent so I will be putting conversion procedures everywhere in the code at-data-source, or right after reading it from the database. The problem though is I think that my code will have to deal with two systems, all throughout the codebase after this, should I do this. 2) According to the rules, my idea was to put it in the view script, aka last change to modify it before it is shown to the user. And it may be the right thing to do, but then it strikes me it may not always be the best solution. (First, it complicates the view script a tad, second, I need to do more work on the data side to split things up more, or do extra parsing, such as in my case above). 3) Another solution is to do this somewhere in the data prep step before the view, aka somewhere in the middle, before the view, but after the data-source. This strikes me as messy and that could be the reason why my codebase is in such a mess right now. It seems that there is no best solution. What do I do?

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• Breaking up classes and methods into smaller units

  - by micahhoover

  During code reviews a couple devs have recommended I break up my methods into smaller methods. Their justification was (1) increased readability and (2) the back trace that comes back from production showing the method name is more specific to the line of code that failed. There may have also been some colorful words about functional programming. Additionally I think I may have failed an interview a while back because I didn't give an acceptable answer about when to break things up. My inclination is that when I see a bunch of methods in a class or across a bunch of files, it isn't clear to me how they flow together, and how many times each one gets called. I don't really have a good feel for the linearity of it as quickly just by eye-balling it. The other thing is a lot of people seem to place a premium of organization over content (e.g. 'Look at how organized my sock drawer is!' Me: 'Overall, I think I can get to my socks faster if you count the time it took to organize them'). Our business requirements are not very stable. I'm afraid that if the classes/methods are very granular it will take longer to refactor to requirement changes. I'm not sure how much of a factor this should be. Anyway, computer science is part art / part science, but I'm not sure how much this applies to this issue.

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• I need an approach to the problem of preventing inserting duplicate records into the database

  - by Maurice

  Apologies is this question is asked on the incorrect "stack" A webservice that I call returns a list of data. The data from the webservice is updated periodically, so a call to the webservice done in one hour could return the same data as a call done in an hour. Also, the data is returned based on a start and end date. We have multiple users that can run the webservice search, and duplicate data is most likely to be returned (especially for historical data). However I don't want to insert this duplicate data in the database. I've created a db table in which the data is stored (most important columns are) Id int autoincrement PK Date date not null --The date to which the data set belongs. LastUpdate date not null --The date the data set was last updated. UserName varchar(50) --The name of the user doing the search. I use sql server 2008 express with c# 4.0 and visual studio 2010. Entity Framework is used as the ORM. If stored procedures could be avoided in the proposed solution, then that will be a plus. Another way of looking interpreting what I'm asking a solution for is as follows: I have a million unique records in my table. A user does a new search. The search results from the user contains around 300k of the data that is already in the db. An efficient solution to finding an inserting only the unique records is needed.

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• What are good ways to find collaborators for a coding weekend?

  - by tarrasch

  Not sure if this belongs here, feel free to push it somewhere else if needed. When i was at university we would sometimes come together into a room full of beer and fast food and crank out software in a weekend. Unfortunately the group has kind of split up and its just not possible any more. My question is now: Where can i find like-minded people on the Internet that would like to do something like this? I have an idea what i wanted to do next, but of course other people have ideas too.

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• Java word scramble game [closed]

  - by Dan

  I'm working on code for a word scramble game in Java. I know the code itself is full of bugs right now, but my main focus is getting a vector of strings broken into two separate vectors containing hints and words. The text file that the strings are taken from has a colon separating them. So here is what I have so far. public WordApp() { inputRow = new TextInputBox(); inputRow.setLocation(200,100); phrases = new Vector <String>(FileUtilities.getStrings()); v_hints = new Vector<String>(); v_words = new Vector<String>(); textBox = new TextBox(200,100); textBox.setLocation(200,200); textBox.setText(scrambled + "\n\n Time Left: \t" + seconds/10 + "\n Score: \t" + score); hintBox = new TextBox(200,200); hintBox.setLocation(300,400); hintBox.hide(); Iterator <String> categorize = phrases.iterator(); while(categorize.hasNext()) { int index = phrases.indexOf(":"); String element = categorize.next(); v_words.add(element.substring(0,index)); v_hints.add(element.substring(index +1)); phrases.remove(index); System.out.print(index); } The FileUtilities file was given to us by the pofessor, here it is. import java.util.*; import java.io.*; public class FileUtilities { private static final String FILE_NAME = "javawords.txt"; //------------------ getStrings ------------------------- // // returns a Vector of Strings // Each string is of the form: word:hint // where word contains no spaces. // The words and hints are read from FILE_NAME // // public static Vector<String> getStrings ( ) { Vector<String> words = new Vector<String>(); File file = new File( FILE_NAME ); Scanner scanFile; try { scanFile = new Scanner( file); } catch ( IOException e) { System.err.println( "LineInput Error: " + e.getMessage() ); return null; } while ( scanFile.hasNextLine() ) { // read the word and follow it by a colon String s = scanFile.nextLine().trim().toUpperCase() + ":"; if( s.length()>1 && scanFile.hasNextLine() ) { // append the hint and add to collection s+= scanFile.nextLine().trim(); words.add(s); } } // shuffle Collections.shuffle(words); return words; } }

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• Procedural object generation and unique identification

  - by 2080

  My question relates to procedural content generation and data management of the emerging objects in a database. I assume a networked game, with a server-client model. Unspecified objects in the game world are generated while the game is running with procedural algorithms (for example perlin noise). The players (/clients) can modify the properties of these objects, but have to notify the server of these changes. How could this communication address unique objects, so that both the server and the client know of which object they are speaking? Not only the inner properties of the objects can differ, but also visible, such as the position. When the player wants to select one of these objects the game has to find out the id - does anyone know which methods or algorithms can accomplish that?

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• Why don't languages include implication as a logical operator?

  - by Maciej Piechotka

  It might be a strange question, but why there is no implication as a logical operator in many languages (Java, C, C++, Python Haskell - although as last one have user defined operators its trivial to add it)? I find logical implication much clearer to write (particularly in asserts or assert-like expressions) then negation with or: encrypt(buf, key, mode, iv = null) { assert (mode != ECB --> iv != null); assert (mode == ECB || iv != null); assert (implies(mode != ECB, iv != null)); // User-defined function }

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• Provide an OnChange event for an internal property which is controlled externally?

  - by NGLN

  For fun and by request I am updating this ImageGrid component, a kind of listbox for images that has a FileNames property of type TStrings. For ease of writing, I have been misusing its FileNames.Objects property for bitmap storage. But since the TStrings type suggests that users of the component could or would want to use the Objects property for custom data, e.g. like TListBox.Items, I am rewriting the component to store the bitmaps elsewhere and leave FileNames.Objects untouched for unknown future usage. Now I am wondering whether to provide an OnChange event. And if so, whether to fire it when one or more FileNames.Objects changes. Trying to answer it myself, I dove in Delphi's own VCL and stumbled on: TMemo: has an OnChange event, but ignores Lines.Objects TListBox: has no OnChange event, but is capable of storing Items.Objects TStringGrid: has no OnChange event, but is capable of storing Objects, Rows.Objects, Cols.Objects So now I am somewhat puzzeled, because I cannot imagine Borland's developers didn't add events for several Objects properties out of ease. Sure, when a user changes a FileNames.Object in my component, he knows he does and could implement appropriate interaction himself. But wouldn't it be convenient when the component does automatically? What would you expect from this component in this regard?

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• What is the general definition of something that can be included or excluded?

  - by gutch

  When an application presents a user with a list of items, it's pretty common that it permits the user to filter the items. Often a 'filter' feature is implemented as a set of include or exclude rules. For example: include all emails from [email protected], and exclude those emails without attachments I've seen this include/exclude pattern often; for example Maven and Google Analytics filter things this way. But now that I'm implementing something like this myself, I don't know what to call something that could be either included or excluded. In specific terms: If I have a database table of filter rules, each of which either includes or excludes matching items, what is an appropriate name of the field that stores include or exclude? When displaying a list of filters to a user, what is a good way to label the include or exclude value? (as a bonus, can anyone recommend a good implementation of this kind of filtering for inspiration?)

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