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  • Object construction design

    - by James
    I recently started to use c# to interface with a database, and there was one part of the process that appeared odd to me. When creating a SqlCommand, the method I was lead to took the form: SqlCommand myCommand = new SqlCommand("Command String", myConnection); Coming from a Java background, I was expecting something more similar to SqlCommand myCommand = myConnection.createCommand("Command String"); I am asking, in terms of design, what is the difference between the two? The phrase "single responsibility" has been used to suggest that a connection should not be responsible for creating SqlCommands, but I would also say that, in my mind, the difference between the two is partly a mental one of the difference between a connection executing a command and a command acting on a connection, the latter of which seems less like what I have been lead to believe OOP should be. There is also a part of me wondering if the two should be completely separate, and should only come together in some sort of connection.execute(command) method. Can anyone help clear up these differences? Are any of these methods "more correct" than the others from an OO point of view? (P.S. the fact that c# is used is completely irrelevant. It just highlighted to me that different approaches were used)

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  • What are good sites that provide free media resources for hobby game development?

    - by m_oLogin
    Please redirect me if this is a duplicate. I haven't been able to find a suitable question. I really suck at graphics / music / 3D modeling / animation and it's a must-have when you have a hundred hobby game development projects you're working on. I'm looking for different quality sources on the web that provide free resources. [EDIT] Some resources given by the answers: (I'll complete it with time) MUSIC Jamendo (need to ask for permission for uses) OpSound SOUND EFFECTS FreeSound StoneWashed SPRITES LostGarden The protagonist domain Reiner's Tilesets (also contains a couple of 3D models OpenGameArt (beta, not many resources but promising) Flying Yogi ANIMATED SPRITES The Spriters Resource MODELS archive3d TurboSquid 3Dvia Google Sketchup ShareCG Gamasutraexchange.com ANIMATED MODELS TurboSquid TEXTURES CG Textures OpenFrag Other precompiled lists FreeGameDev.net

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  • Are there any good videos out there on Java Design Patterns?

    - by Becky Reamy
    My team would like to spend some time at lunch learning design patterns. Previously, we watched some videos on Javascript which we found very useful as a way to start discussions. We would like to do the same thing with design patterns so that we don't have to spend a lot of time (outside of work) researching individual patterns in order to give a presentation. I did a little searching and came up fairly empty handed. Any help would be appreciated. It doesn't even have to be a video, even something that we can listen to (maybe a book on tape even).

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  • Overwhelmed by design patterns... where to begin?

    - by Pete
    I am writing a simple prototype code to demonstrate & profile I/O schemes (HDF4, HDF5, HDF5 using parallel IO, NetCDF, etc.) for a physics code. Since focus is on IO, the rest of the program is very simple: class Grid { public: floatArray x,y,z; }; class MyModel { public: MyModel(const int &nip1, const int &njp1, const int &nkp1, const int &numProcs); Grid grid; map<string, floatArray> plasmaVariables; }; Where floatArray is a simple class that lets me define arbitrary dimensioned arrays and do mathematical operations on them (i.e. x+y is point-wise addition). Of course, I could use better encapsulation (write accessors/setters, etc.), but that's not the concept I'm struggling with. For the I/O routines, I am envisioning applying simple inheritance: Abstract I/O class defines read & write functions to fill in the "myModel" object HDF4 derived class HDF5 HDF5 using parallel IO NetCDF etc... The code should read data in any of these formats, then write out to any of these formats. In the past, I would add an AbstractIO member to myModel and create/destroy this object depending on which I/O scheme I want. In this way, I could do something like: myModelObj.ioObj->read('input.hdf') myModelObj.ioObj->write('output.hdf') I have a bit of OOP experience but very little on the Design Patterns front, so I recently acquired the Gang of Four book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". OOP designers: Which pattern(s) would you recommend I use to integrate I/O with the myModel object? I am interested in answering this for two reasons: To learn more about design patterns in general Apply what I learn to help refactor an large old crufty/legacy physics code to be more human-readable & extensible. I am leaning towards applying the Decerator pattern to myModel, so I can attach the I/O responsibilities dynamically to myModel (i.e. whether to use HDF4, HDF5, etc.). However, I don't feel very confident that this is the best pattern to apply. Reading the Gang of Four book cover-to-cover before I start coding feels like a good way to develop an unhealthy caffeine addiction. What patterns do you recommend?

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  • Help with C# program design implementation: multiple array of lists or a better way?

    - by Bob
    I'm creating a 2D tile-based RPG in XNA and am in the initial design phase. I was thinking of how I want my tile engine to work and came up with a rough sketch. Basically I want a grid of tiles, but at each tile location I want to be able to add more than one tile and have an offset. I'd like this so that I could do something like add individual trees on the world map to give more flair. Or set bottles on a bar in some town without having to draw a bunch of different bar tiles with varying bottles. But maybe my reach is greater than my grasp. I went to implement the idea and had something like this in my Map object: List<Tile>[,] Grid; But then I thought about it. Let's say I had a world map of 200x200, which would actually be pretty small as far as RPGs go. That would amount to 40,000 Lists. To my mind I think there has to be a better way. Now this IS pre-mature optimization. I don't know if the way I happen to design my maps and game will be able to handle this, but it seems needlessly inefficient and something that could creep up if my game gets more complex. One idea I have is to make the offset and the multiple tiles optional so that I'm only paying for them when needed. But I'm not sure how I'd do this. A multiple array of objects? object[,] Grid; So here's my criteria: A 2D grid of tile locations Each tile location has a minimum of 1 tile, but can optionally have more Each extra tile can optionally have an x and y offset for pinpoint placement Can anyone help with some ideas for implementing such a design (don't need it done for me, just ideas) while keeping memory usage to a minimum? If you need more background here's roughly what my Map and Tile objects amount to: public struct Map { public Texture2D Texture; public List<Rectangle> Sources; //Source Rectangles for where in Texture to get the sprite public List<Tile>[,] Grid; } public struct Tile { public int Index; //Where in Sources to find the source Rectangle public int X, Y; //Optional offsets }

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  • Do you know Best Practise and Design Patterns for Adobe Air/Flex Applications?

    - by Julian
    I'm going to write an application with the Air/Flex-Framework. I'm looking for Best Practise and general Design Patterns for designing software especially in Air/Flex. I have experience with this framework but never had the pleasure to write a piece of software from scratch. For instance: I stumbled across lots of software written in Air/Flex with nearly infinity global vars :-) Most of the software I saw was not object-oriented How can I pack the asynchronous method calls nicely? I'm familiar with general design patterns by gamma. I'm looking more for advise in designing good quality software with Adobe Air/Flex.

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  • How to design parts of the application in XAML and how to reusing it then?

    - by MartyIX
    I'm working on a main window in my application and I would like to design parts of my window separately in Visual Studio designer. Main window Game desk (actually more of them and therefore it would be nice to design the game desk, mark it as a resource and then just via simple code (something like creating a new object and setting DataContext) create it. Console And so on Is it possible in VS to do this thing? I just need to know what to look for if it is possible. I don't need a whole solution. Thank you for suggestions!

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  • 2D Game: Fast(est) way to find x closest entities for another entity - huge amount of entities, high

    - by Pygmy
    I'm working on a 2D game that has a huge amount of dynamic entities. For fun's sake, let's call them soldiers, and let's say there are 50000 of them (which I just randomly thought up, it might be much more or much less :)). All these soldiers are moving every frame according to rules - think boids / flocking / steering behaviour. For each soldier, to update it's movement I need the X soldiers that are closest to the one I'm processing. What would be the best spatial hierarchy to store them to facilitate calculations like this without too much overhead ? (All entities are updated/moved every frame, so it has to handle dynamic entities very well)

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  • Which is the best design practice for edit data in RIA?

    - by Onet Two
    Hi, First of all it is a UI design question! Which is the best design practice for edit data in RIA, for example in Flex or Silverlight? I would like to show customer's details, but there will be an edit window, than the datas of customer will be editable. I would like to show a new form where the data can be edited. What is the simplest way to show this form. I can make my ui tabbed, so I can open the form in a new tab, or I can open the form in a popup/modal dialog (Save-cancel). Maybe I can use in line editing. What is the most user friendly solution in a Silverlight or Flex GUI? What is your opinion? Thanks!

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  • how should i load a bitmap for an android game?

    - by Heysus Escobar
    i been working on a game with no bitmaps or anything, I'm using rectangles as objects and changing their color for their purpose like a red rectangles for player and gray rectangles for walls. My question is what is the right way to replace the rectangles with bitmaps/images? I know to load Bitmaps you can just do this : Bitmap randomBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), com.example.android4gametest.R.drawable.ic_launcher); Should i load all my Bitmaps and pass them to their Classes or should i load the bitmap inside their class instead of passing it ? and how would i do that because i cannot use the BitmapFactory because i have no access to the getResources()! or should i load my bitmaps/images from my assets folder which i know i wont have the same "tools" you can say to mess with the bitmap.

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  • How to efficiently render different things at different times in a game?

    - by Baqjohanson
    Sorry for the ambiguous title. What I am wondering is what is an efficient way to alternate rendering between lets say a main menu, options menu, and "in the game." The only two ways I've come up with so far are to have 1 render function, with code for each part (menu, ...) and a variable to control what gets drawn, or to have multiple render functions, and use a function pointer to point to the appropriate one, and then just call the function pointer. I always wonder how more professional games do it.

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  • DAO/Webservice Consumption in Web Application

    - by Gavin
    I am currently working on converting a "legacy" web-based (Coldfusion) application from single data source (MSSQL database) to multi-tier OOP. In my current system there is a read/write database with all the usual stuff and additional "read-only" databases that are exported daily/hourly from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system by SSIS jobs with business product/item and manufacturing/SCM planning data. The reason I have the opportunity and need to convert to multi-tier OOP is a newer more modern ERP system is being implemented business wide that will be a complete replacement. This newer ERP system offers several interfaces for third party applications like mine, from direct SQL access to either a dotNet web-service or a SOAP-like web-service. I have found several suitable frameworks I would be happy to use (Coldspring, FW/1) but I am not sure what design patterns apply to my data access object/component and how to manage the connection/session tokens, with this background, my question has the following three parts: Firstly I have concerns with moving from the relative safety of a SSIS job that protects me from downtime and speed of the ERP system to directly connecting with one of the web services which I note seem significantly slower than I expected (simple/small requests often take up to a whole second). Are there any design patterns I can investigate/use to cache/protect my data tier? It is my understanding data access objects (the component that connects directly with the web services and convert them into the data types I can then work with in my Domain Objects) should be singletons (and will act as an Adapter/Facade), am I correct? As part of the data access object I have to setup a connection by username/password (I could set up multiple users and/or connect multiple times with this) which responds with a session token that needs to be provided on every subsequent request. Do I do this once and share it across the whole application, do I setup a new "connection" for every user of my application and keep the token in their session scope (might quickly hit licensing limits), do I set the "connection" up per page request, or is there a design pattern I am missing that can manage multiple "connections" where a requests/access uses the first free "connection"? It is worth noting if the ERP system dies I will need to reset/invalidate all the connections and start from scratch, and depending on which web-service I use might need manually close the "connection/session"

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  • Today I talk about you

    - by BuckWoody
    Some time back I posted a blog entry (mirrored here and here) asking you how you design databases. Out of those responses, my own experience, studies I read, and interviews I conducted, I collected a wealth of data. Thanks for your responses. So what am I going to do with that information? Well, all along I had planned for that to be used today. I am giving a presentation at an event called “TechReady” called “How Your Customers Design Databases”. This is a Microsoft-internal event, where technical professionals like myself, salespeople, and the product team get together to talk about what has been working, what doesn’t, what is coming and hopefully (fingers crossed here) what the product team can do to help us help the SQL Server community. I’ve mentioned before that I teach database design as part of a course I run at the University of Washington. I’m also planning to give a mini-lecture from that series at TechEd 2010, so if you’re coming stop by. I’d love to meet you. So today I talk about you – thanks for the input. I hope you and I can make a difference in the product. Might take a while, but it’s nice to know your voice is being heard. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Library Organization in .NET

    - by Greg Ros
    I've written a .NET bitwise operations library as part of my projects (stuff ranging from get MSB set to some more complicated bitwise transformations) and I mean to release it as free software. I'm a bit confused about a design aspect of the library, though. Many of the methods/transformations in the library come with different endianness. A simple example is a getBitAt method that regards index 0 as the least significant bit, or the most significant bit, depending on the version used. In practice, I've found that using separate functions for different endianness results in much more comprehensible and reusable code than assuming all operations are little-endian or something. I'm really stumped regarding how best to package the library. Should I have methods that have LE and BE versions take an enum parameter in their signature, e.g. Endianness.Little, Endianness.Big? Should I have different static classes with identically named methods? such as MSB.GetBit and LSB.GetBit On a much wider note, is there a standard I could use in cases like this? Some guide? Is my design issue trivial? I have a perfectionist bent, and I sometimes get stuck on tricky design issues like this... Note: I've sort of realized I'm using endianness somewhat colloquially to refer to the order/place value of digital component parts (be they bits, bytes, or words) in a larger whole, in any setting. I'm not talking about machine-level endianness or serial transmission endianness. Just about place-value semantics in general. So there isn't a context of targeting different machines/transmission techniques or something.

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  • Is there a better strategy than relying on the compiler to catch errors?

    - by koan
    I've been programming in C and C++ for some time, although I would say I'm far from being an expert. For some time, I've been using various strategies to develop my code such as unit tests, test driven design, code reviews and so on. When I wrote my first programs in BASIC, I typed in long blocks before finding they would not run and they were a nightmare to debug. So I learned to write a small bit and then test it. These days, I often find myself repeatedly writing a small bit of code then using the compiler to find all the mistakes. That's OK if it picks up a typo but when you start adjusting the parameters types etc just to make it compile you can screw up the design. It also seems that the compiler is creeping into the design process when it should only be used for checking syntax. There's a danger here of over reliance on the compiler to make my programs better. Are there better strategies than this? I vaguely remember some time ago an article on a company developing a type of C compiler where an extra header file also specified the prototypes. The idea was that inconsistencies in the API definition would be easier to catch if you had to define it twice in different ways.

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  • Reliance on the compiler

    - by koan
    I've been programming in C and C++ for some time, although I would say I'm far from being expert. For some time I've been using various strategies to develop my code such as unit tests, test driven design, code reviews and so on. When I wrote my first programs in BASIC I typed in long listings before finding they would not run and they were a nightmare to debug. So I learnt to write a small bit and then test it. These days I often find myself repeatedly writing a small bit of code then using the compiler to find all the mistakes. That's OK if it picks up a typo but when you start adjusting the parameters types etc just to make it compile you can screw up the design. It also seems that the compiler is creeping into the design process when it should only be used for checking syntax. There's a danger here of over reliance on the compiler to make my programs better. Are there better strategies than this ? I vaguely remember some time ago an article on a company developing a type of C compiler where an extra header file also specified the prototypes. The idea was that inconsistencies in the API definition would be easier to catch if you had to define it twice in different ways.

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  • Game Design Dilemma

    - by Chris Williams
    I'm working on a 2d tilemapped RPG. I've actually made quite a fair amount of progress, but I'm at a point where I need to make a UI decision. I have the overland world completely mapped out, and I have several towns and special areas. I'm on the fence about how to integrate the two. Scenario 1: I have one ginormous map, where everything is the same scale. This means you can walk in and out of towns without having to load or wait and transition in any way. With everything the same scale, movement costs the same no matter where you are (in terms of time/turns/energy/hunger/whatever/etc...)  The potential downside to this is that it could take quite a long time to get anywhere on foot. Scenario 2: I have an overland map, a set of town maps, overland tactical maps, dungeon maps & special area maps. The overland map is at a different scale than the other maps. This means that time/turns/energy/hunger/whatever/etc is calculated at a different rate than on the other maps, which have a 1:1 scale. When entering a town, dungeon, special area or having a random encounter, you would effectively zoom in from the overland scale to the tactical scale. When you are done with combat, or exit a dungeon or town, it would zoom back out to the overland map. The downside to this is that at the zoomed out scale, the overland map isn't all that big (comparitively) and you can traverse it fairly quickly (in real time, not game world time.) Options: 1) Go with scenario 1, as is. 2) Go with scenario 1 and introduce a slightly speedier version of overland travel, such as a horse. 3) Go with scenario 1 and introduce "instant" travel, via portals or some kind of "click the big map" mechanism. This would only work with places you've already been, or somehow unlocked (perhaps via a quest.) 4) Go with Scenario 2, as is.   Thoughts, opinions, suggestions?  Feedback appreciated.

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  • Improving first person camera and implementing third person camera

    - by brainydexter
    I want to improve upon my first person camera implementation and extend it to, so the user can toggle between third person/first person view. My current setup: draw():: glPushMatrix(); m_pCamera->ApplyCameraTransform(); // Render gameObjects glPopMatrix(); Camera is strongly coupled to the player, so much so, that it is a friend of player. This is what the Camera::ApplyCameraTransform looks like: glm::mat4 l_TransformationMatrix; m_pPlayer->m_pTransformation->GetTransformation(l_TransformationMatrix, false); l_TransformationMatrix = glm::core::function::matrix::inverse(l_TransformationMatrix); glMultMatrixf(glm::value_ptr(l_TransformationMatrix)); So, I take the player's transformation matrix and invert it to yield First person camera view. Since, Third person camera view is just a 'translated' first person view behind the player; what would be a good way to improve upon this (keeping in mind that I will be extending it to Third person camera as well. Thanks

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  • Design considerations on JSON schema for scalars with a consistent attachment property

    - by casperOne
    I'm trying to create a JSON schema for the results of doing statistical analysis based on disparate pieces of data. The current schema I have looks something like this: { // Basic key information. video : "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uwfjpfK0jo", start : "00:00:00", end : null, // For results of analysis, to be populated: // *** This is where it gets interesting *** analysis : { game : { value: "Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition Ver. 2012", confidence: 0.9725 } teams : [ { player : { value : "Desk", confidence: 0.95, } characters : [ { value : "Hakan", confidence: 0.80 } ] } ] } } The issue is the tuples that are used to store a value and the confidence related to that value (i.e. { value : "some value", confidence : 0.85 }), populated after the results of the analysis. This leads to a creep of this tuple for every value. Take a fully-fleshed out value from the characters array: { name : { value : "Hakan", confidence: 0.80 } ultra : { value: 1, confidence: 0.90 } } As the structures that represent the values become more and more detailed (and more analysis is done on them to try and determine the confidence behind that analysis), the nesting of the tuples adds great deal of noise to the overall structure, considering that the final result (when verified) will be: { name : "Hakan", ultra : 1 } (And recall that this is just a nested value) In .NET (in which I'll be using to work with this data), I'd have a little helper like this: public class UnknownValue<T> { T Value { get; set; } double? Confidence { get; set; } } Which I'd then use like so: public class Character { public UnknownValue<Character> Name { get; set; } } While the same as the JSON representation in code, it doesn't have the same creep because I don't have to redefine the tuple every time and property accessors hide the appearance of creep. Of course, this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, the above is code while the JSON is data. Is there a more formalized/cleaner/best practice way of containing the creep of these tuples in JSON, or is the approach above an accepted approach for the type of data I'm trying to store (and I'm just perceiving it the wrong way)? Note, this is being represented in JSON because this will ultimately go in a document database (something like RavenDB or elasticsearch). I'm not concerned about being able to serialize into the object above, because I can always use data transfer objects to facilitate getting data into/out of my underlying data store.

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  • Windows 8: Everything from design, build, and how to sell a Metro style app

    - by Thomas Mason
    For me, there are a lot of similarities between an application developed for Windows Phone and a Metro style app developed for Windows 8. A Windows Phone 7 application (rather than an XNA game) is built in .NET and XAML against a subset of the .NET framework and the application has a lifecycle which needs to be conscious of battery life and so is split out into foreground/background pieces. The application is sandboxed in terms of its interactions with the local device and is packaged with a manifest which describes those interactions. The app needs to be aware of network connectivity status and its work on the network is done asynchronously to preserve the user experience.The app is packaged and deployed to a Marketplace which the user browses to find the app, read reviews, perhaps purchase it and then install it and receive updates over time. Quite a lot of those statements are as true of a Windows 8 Metro style app as they are for a Windows Phone app and so a Windows Phone app developer already has a good head start when it comes to building Metro style apps for Windows 8. With that in mind, there is an event to help developers with a Windows Phone app in Marketplace to begin the process of looking at Windows 8 and whether you can get a quick win by bringing your Phone application onto Windows. The idea of the event was to provide a space where developers can get together over 2 days and take the time out to look at what it means to take their app from Windows Phone to Windows 8. Kicking off on Saturday 16th June at 10am, we are told they have plenty of power sockets, WiFi, whiteboards, drinks, pizza, games, prizes and some quiet space that you can work in. Including people on hand with Windows Phone and Windows 8 experience to help everything along the way. There will be an attendee-voted schedule of talks but we’ll keep these out of your way if you just want to get on and code. We’ll also provide information around submitting your app to the Windows Store If you have a Windows Phone app in Marketplace, now’s a great time to look at getting it onto Windows 8. Sign up. Bring your laptop. Bring your app. Bring Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11. And everyone will their best to help you get your app onto Windows 8. Location & Venue TBA but it will be in central London, accessible by major railway and underground transportation. Day 1 Saturday 16th June 10am – 9pm Day 2 Sunday 17th June 10am – 4pm

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  • A Brief History of Video Games [Video]

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you ready to take a trip down nostalgia lane? This compilation of video game footage provides a brief but interesting look at some of our favorite games over the years and how much the look and feel of them has changed. A Brief History of Video Games [via Neatorama] HTG Explains: What Is RSS and How Can I Benefit From Using It? HTG Explains: Why You Only Have to Wipe a Disk Once to Erase It HTG Explains: Learn How Websites Are Tracking You Online

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