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• How to synchronize the ball in a network pong game?

  - by Thaars

  I’m developing a multiplayer network pong game, my first game ever. The current state is, I’ve running the physic engine with the same configurations on the server and the clients. The own paddle movement is predicted and get just confirmed by the authoritative server. Is a difference detected between them, I correct the position at the client by interpolation. The opponent paddle is also interpolated 200ms to 100ms in the past, because the server is broadcasting snapshots every 100ms to each client. So far it works very well, but now I have to simulate the ball and have a problem to understanding the procedure. I’ve read Valve’s (and many other) articles about fast-paced multiplayer several times and understood their approach. Maybe I can compare my ball with their bullets, but their advantage is, the bullets are not visible. When I have to display the ball, and see my paddle in the present, the opponent in the past and the server is somewhere between it, how can I synchronize the ball over all instances and ensure, that it got ever hit by the paddle even if the paddle is fast moving? Currently my ball’s position is simply set by a server update, so it can happen, that the ball bounces back, even if the paddle is some pixel away (because of a delayed server position). Until now I’ve got no synced clock over all instances. I’m sending a client step index with each update to the server. If the server did his job, he sends the snapshot with the last step index of each client back to the clients. Now I’m looking for the stored position at the returned step index and compare them. Do I need a common clock to sync the ball? EDIT: I've tried to sync a common clock for the server and all clients with a timestamp. But I think it's better to use an own stepping instead of a timestamp (so I don't need to calculate with the ping and so on - and the timestamp will never be exact). The physics are running 60 times per second and now I use this for keeping them synchronized. Is that a good way? When the ball gets calculated by each client, the angle after bouncing can differ because of the different position of the paddles (the opponent is 200ms in the past). When the server is sending his ball position, velocity and angle (because he knows the position of each paddle and is authoritative), the ball could be in a very different position because of the different angles after bouncing (because the clients receive the server data after 100ms). How is it possible to interpolate such a huge difference? I posted this question some days ago at stackoverflow, but got no answer yet. Maybe this is the better place for this question.

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• Should sanity be a property of a programmer or a program?

  - by toplel32

  I design and implement languages, that can range from object notations to markup languages. In many cases I have considered restrictions in favor of sanity (common knowledge), like in the case of control characters in identifiers. There are two consequences to consider before doing this: It takes extra computation It narrows liberty I'm interested to learn how developers think of decisions like this. As you may know Microsoft C# is very open on the contrary. If you really want to prefix your integer as Long with 'l' instead of 'L' and so risk other developers of confusing '1' and 'l', no problem. If you want to name your variables in non-latin script so they will contrast with C#'s latin keywords, no problem. Or if you want to distribute a string over multiple lines and so break a series of indentation, no problem. It is cheap to ensure consistency with restrictions and this makes it tempting to implement. But in the case of disallowing non-latin characters (concerning the second example), it means a discredit to Unicode, because one would not take full advantage of its capacity.

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• On Handling Dates in SQL

  The calendar is inherently complex by the very nature of the astronomy that underlies the year, and the conflicting historical conventions. The handling of dates in TSQL is even more complex because, when SQL Server was Sybase, it was forced by the lack of prevailing standards in SQL to create its own ways of processing and formatting dates and times. Joe Celko looks forward to a future when it is possible to write standard SQL date-processing code with SQL Server.

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• Help with a formula for Google Adwords [closed]

  - by XaviEsteve

  Hi guys, This question is more about maths and algorythms in Google Adwords but guess it's the most appropriate community in SE to ask this. I am creating a spreadsheet to calculate Adword formulas and I am stuck in how to calculate the Monthly Net Income for each keyword. I have created a formula which calculates it but can't figure out how to limit the Monthly Budget. The formula I've created is this one: Monthly Net Income = ( DailyClicks x ConversionRate x SaleProfit) - ( CPC x DailyClicks ) There is an example of the formula in the file which is a Google Spreadsheet publicly available here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AnQMyM9XJ0EidDB6TUF0OTdaZ2dFb2ZGNmhQeE5lb0E&hl=en_GB#gid=2 (you can create your own copy going to File Make a copy...) I am releasing this set of tools as Public Domain so feel free to use it :) Any help is much appreciated!

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• How should game objects be aware of each other?

  - by Jefffrey

  I find it hard to find a way to organize game objects so that they are polymorphic but at the same time not polymorphic. Here's an example: assuming that we want all our objects to update() and draw(). In order to do that we need to define a base class GameObject which have those two virtual pure methods and let polymorphism kicks in: class World { private: std::vector<GameObject*> objects; public: // ... update() { for (auto& o : objects) o->update(); for (auto& o : objects) o->draw(window); } }; The update method is supposed to take care of whatever state the specific class object needs to update. The fact is that each objects needs to know about the world around them. For example: A mine needs to know if someone is colliding with it A soldier should know if another team's soldier is in proximity A zombie should know where the closest brain, within a radius, is For passive interactions (like the first one) I was thinking that the collision detection could delegate what to do in specific cases of collisions to the object itself with a on_collide(GameObject*). Most of the the other informations (like the other two examples) could just be queried by the game world passed to the update method. Now the world does not distinguish objects based on their type (it stores all object in a single polymorphic container), so what in fact it will return with an ideal world.entities_in(center, radius) is a container of GameObject*. But of course the soldier does not want to attack other soldiers from his team and a zombie doesn't case about other zombies. So we need to distinguish the behavior. A solution could be the following: void TeamASoldier::update(const World& world) { auto list = world.entities_in(position, eye_sight); for (const auto& e : list) if (auto enemy = dynamic_cast<TeamBSoldier*>(e)) // shoot towards enemy } void Zombie::update(const World& world) { auto list = world.entities_in(position, eye_sight); for (const auto& e : list) if (auto enemy = dynamic_cast<Human*>(e)) // go and eat brain } but of course the number of dynamic_cast<> per frame could be horribly high, and we all know how slow dynamic_cast can be. The same problem also applies to the on_collide(GameObject*) delegate that we discussed earlier. So what it the ideal way to organize the code so that objects can be aware of other objects and be able to ignore them or take actions based on their type?

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• How much does game development mathematics change over time?

  - by FlightOfGrey

  This question is mainly aimed at this book, Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications, Second Edition which I have seen highly recommended all around the internet, so I'm sure there are people on here who own a copy. What I want to know specifically is if any of the information would be out dated since the book was released on June 2, 2008? Also interested to see how the mathematics behind game development has changed over time.

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• Could a singleton type replace static methods and classes?

  - by MKO

  In C# Static methods has long served a purpose allowing us to call them without instantiating classes. Only in later year have we became more aware of the problems of using static methods and classes. They can’t use interfaces They can’t use inheritance They are hard to test because you can’t make mocks and stubs Is there a better way ? Obviously we need to be able to access library methods without instantiated classes all the time otherwise our code would become pretty cluttered One possibly solution is to use a new keyword for an old concept: the singleton. Singleton’s are global instances of a class, since they are instances we can use them as we would normal classes. In order to make their use nice and practical we'd need some syntactic sugar however Say that the Math class would be of type singleton instead of an actual class. The actual class containing all the default methods for the Math singleton is DefaultMath, which implements the interface IMath. The singleton would be declared as singleton Math : IMath { public Math { this = new DefaultMath(); } } If we wanted to substitute our own class for all math operations we could make a new class MyMath that inherits DefaultMath, or we could just inherit from the interface IMath and create a whole new Class. To make our class the active Math class, you'd do a simple assignment Math = new MyMath(); and voilá! the next time we call Math.Floor it will call your method. Note that for a normal singleton we'd have to write something like Math.Instance.Floor but the compiler eliminates the need for the Instance property Another idea would be to be able to define a singletons as Lazy so they get instantiated only when they're first called, like lazy singleton Math : IMath What do you think, would it have been a better solution that static methods and classes? Is there any problems with this approach?

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• Expected time for lazy evaluation with nested functions?

  - by Matt_JD

  A colleague and I are doing a free R course, although I believe this is a more general lazy evaluation issue, and have found a scenario that we have discussed briefly and I'd like to find out the answer from a wider community. The scenario is as follows (pseudo code): wrapper => function(thing) { print => function() { write(thing) } } v = createThing(1, 2, 3) w = wrapper(v) v = createThing(4, 5, 6) w.print() // Will print 4, 5, 6 thing. v = create(7, 8, 9) w.print() // Will print 4, 5, 6 because "thing" has now been evaluated. Another similar situation is as follows: // Using the same function as above v = createThing(1, 2, 3) v = wrapper(v) w.print() // The wrapper function incestuously includes itself. Now I understand why this happens but where my colleague and I differ is on what should happen. My colleague's view is that this is a bug and the evaluation of the passed in argument should be forced at the point it is passed in so that the returned "w" function is fixed. My view is that I would prefer his option myself, but that I realise that the situation we are encountering is down to lazy evaluation and this is just how it works and is more a quirk than a bug. I am not actually sure of what would be expected, hence the reason I am asking this question. I think that function comments could express what will happen, or leave it to be very lazy, and if the coder using the function wants the argument evaluated then they can force it before passing it in. So, when working with lazy evaulation, what is the practice for the time to evaluate an argument passed, and stored, inside a function?

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• I can't see how a mature agile team requires any *management*?

  - by ashy_32bit

  After a recent heated debate over Scrum, I realized my problem is that I think of management as a quite unnecessary and redundant activity in a fully agile team. I believe a mature Agile team does not require management or any non-technical decision making process of whatsoever. To my (apparently erring) eyes it is more than obvious that the only one suitable and capable of managing a mature development team is their coach (and that being the most technically competent colleague with proper communication skills). I can't imagine how a Scrum master can contribute to such a team. I am having a great difficulty realizing and understanding the value of such things as Scrum and manager as someone who is not a veteran developer but is well skilled in planning the production cycles when a coach exists in the team. What does that even mean? How on earth someone with no edge-skills of development can manage a highly technical team? Perhaps management here means something else? I see management as a total waste of time and a by-product of immaturity. In my understanding a mature team is fully self-managing. Apparently I'm mistaken since many great people say the contrary but I can't convince myself.

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• strlen returns incorrect value when called in gdb

  - by alesplin

  So I'm noticing some severely incorrect behavior from calls to standard library functions inside GDB. I have the following program to illustrate: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { char *s1 = "test"; char *s2 = calloc(strlen("test")+1,sizeof(char)); snprintf(s2,strlen("test")+1,"test"); printf("string constant: %lu\n", strlen(s1)); printf("allocated string: %lu\n", strlen(s2)); free(s2); return 0; } When run from the command-line, this program outputs just what you'd expect: string constant: 4 allocated string: 4 However, in GDB, I get the following, incorrect output from calls to strlen(): (gdb) p strlen(s1) $1 = -938856896 (gdb) p strlen(s2) $2 = -938856896 I'm pretty sure this is a problem with glibc shipped with Ubuntu (I'm using 10.10), but this is a serious problem for those of us who spend lots of time in GDB. Is anyone else experiencing this kind of error? What's the best way to fix it? Build glibc from source? (I'm already running a version of GDB built from source)

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• Data Access Objects old fashioned? [on hold]

  - by Bono

  A couple of weeks ago I delivered some work for a university project. After a code review with some teachers I got some snarky remarks about the fact that I was (still) using Data Access Objects. The teacher in question who said this mentions the use of DAO's in his classes and always says something along the lines of "Back then we always used DAO's". He's a big fan of Object Relational Mapping, which I also think is a great tool. When I was talking about this with some of my fellow students, they also mentioned that they prefer the use of ORM, which I can understand. It did make me wonder though, is using DAO's really so old fashioned? I know that at my work DAO's are still being used, but this is due to the fact that some of the code is rather old and therefor can't be coupled with ORM. We also do use ORM at my work. Trying to find some more information on Google or Stack Exchange sites didn't really enlighten me. Should I step away from the use of DAO's and only start implementing ORM? I just feel that ORM's can be a bit overkill for some simple projects. I'd love to hear your opinions (or facts) about this.

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• Dynamic Fields/Columns

  - by DanMark

  What is the best way to allow for dynamic fields/database columns? For example, let's say we have a payroll system that allows a user to create unique salary structures for each employee. How could/should one handle this scenario? I thought of using a "salary" table that hold the salary component fields and joining these columns to a "salary_values" table that hold the actual values. Does this make sense? Example Salary Structures: Notice how the components of the salary can be shared or unique. -- Jon's Salary -- Basic 100 Annual Bonus 25 Tel. Allowances 15 -- Jane's Salary -- Basic 100 Travel Allowances 10 Bi-annual Bonus 30

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• Is there a good reason I shouldn't use a java applet for a game?

  - by ryeguy

  I want to make a multiplayer browser-based game. The nice thing about using an applet is that I can make the client and the server in the same language (java/closure/scala/etc). I know there's html5 and javascript, but server side javascript isn't as mature as the jvm platform and browser support is still kind of flaky. Applets don't seem to be widely used (except for Runescape), but is there a reason they're unsuitable or is it just because of the bad reputation they developed in their infancy?

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• Advice on what to learn? [closed]

  - by ICTech

  Currently I work as a .NET C# programmer, quite fresh faced at that (only been working professionally for 8 months) I'm enjoying what I'm doing, but I'm now thinking ahead for other languages to learn. I've heard from quite a few seasoned developers that they reckon it's worth getting in to HTML5. Before I asked this question I read a few of the other questions similar to this, but most were dated back a few years. I'm wondering what your advice would be to an aspiring programmer, what I should avoid going for (i.e. as I understand it Flash is essentially going to be phased out due to HTML5) I was looking in to WPF and the more updated .NET technologies, but someone advised me that WPF stuff will probably be redundant in the future. Thanks for your advice and opinions :)

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• Using "public" vars or attributes in class calls, functional approach

  - by marw

  I was always wondering about two things I tend to do in my little projects. Sometimes I will have this design: class FooClass ... self.foo = "it's a bar" self._do_some_stuff(self) def _do_some_stuff(self): print(self.foo) And sometimes this one: class FooClass2 ... self.do_some_stuff(foo="it's a bar") def do_some_stuff(self, foo): print(foo) Although I roughly understand the differences between functional and class approaches, I struggle with the design. For example, in FooClass the self.foo is always accessible as an attribute. If there are numerous calls to it, is that faster than making foo a local variable that is passed from method to method (like in FooClass2)? What happens in memory in both cases? If FooClass2 is preferred (ie. I don't need to access foo) and other attributes inside do not change their states (the class is executed once only and returns the result), should the code then be written as a series of functions in a module?

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• State Transition Constraints

  Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. A commercial world is full of complex rules for sequences of procedures, of fixed or variable lifespans, Warranties, commercial offers and bids. All this requires considerable subtlety to prevent bad data getting in, and if it does, locating and fixing the problem. Joe Celko shows how useful a State transition graph can be, and how essential it can become with the time aspect added.

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• Attaching Events to Document Better Than Attaching Them to Elements?

  - by Todd

  While bouncing around StackOverflow, I've noticed a number of people attaching events (notably click events) to the document as opposed to the elements themselves. Example: Given this: <button id="myButton">CLICK ME</button> Instead of writing this (using jQuery just for brevity): $('#myButton').on('click', function() { ... }); They do this: $(document).on('click', function() { ... }); And then presumably use event.target to drill down to the element that was actually clicked. Are there any gains/advantages in capturing events at the document level instead of at the element level?

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• Collaborative Filtering Techniques

  - by user95261

  Good Day! I am in need of help about collaborative filtering techniques implementation in predicting psychopathy of twitter users. I have two data set, training set and test set. Training set users have already scores in psychopathy, I need any collaborative filtering techniques to predict scores of test set users. Collaborative Filtering such as Item/User-Based CF, Bayesian Belief Nets, Clustering, Latent Semantic, etc. Please help me. :( I am very confused on how to implement any of these. Thank you!

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• The need for source control software - Team Foundation Server? or something different?

  - by l0Ft

  Recently, Here at the company, more than one programmer was appointed in charge for a LightSwitch(C#) software development project and immediately there was a need of some sort of source control/sync. We have never used Team Foundation Server but we'd gladly use it if it's worth it. Is it the right tool to use for synchronising code between programmers? Does it have the needed features? Do you have any other tool in mind? (I have used TortoiseSVN but it was too simple and 'texty' if you know what I mean, we need a professional tool) What other features does Team Foundation has that we can use? (if you did not understand any of the above please ask me to clarify further)

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• Human powered document processing

  - by Denivic

  I want to create a "Human powered document processing" website in a formed as a gaming mechanic that will prompt volunteers to weed out text missed by OCR (optical character reader) The challenge is that the OCR output often contains errors and omissions, which hampers searches. Manual corrections is needed to weed out these mistakes, so that the text become machine readable.. I want to accomplish these task by splitting dull repetitive task into tiny microtasks and distributing then to register contributors on my site. I want to digitalized pedigree books into an online database. I want to recreate recaptcha and http://www.digitalkoot.fi/en/splash all roll into one.. Help!!!! What programing languages is best needed to create a recapctch type website and is there any open source project similar to this I can use? I need a some directions to begin this project, so all and any help will be great.

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• Why does there seem to be a lot of fear in choosing the "wrong" language to learn?

  - by Shewbox

  Perhaps its just me, but as a current CS student I have already come across many questions on this site and elsewhere about not just "Which language should I use for x?" but also "Does anyone still use language Y?" My first CS class was taught in Scheme, which, if I'm not mistaken, isn't used widely (at least in comparison to languages like Java, PHP, Python, etc). Many of my classmates balked at the idea of having to learn a language they would never have to use again, but I don't quite understand where so much of this fear of learning less popular languages comes from. No, I may not use Scheme in any job I get, but I certainly don't regret having learned to use it (albeit in a very beginner, not very in-depth manner in that one semester). I am taking a search engines class this semester, which is done in Perl and again I am seeing classmates complaining about the language choice. I can understand having a favorite language and disliking others but why do some get worked up over learning it in the first place? Can you really learn the "wrong" language? Isn't learning something like Scheme or Haskell good mental exercise if nothing else, and useful at least to exposure to different ways of solving problems?

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• How can I optimize my development machine's files and directories? [closed]

  - by LuxuryMode

  Like any programmer, I've got a lot of stuff on my machine. Some of that stuff is projects of my own, some are projects I'm working on for my employer, others are open-source tools and projects, etc. Currently, I have my files organized as follows: /Code --/development (things I'm sort of hacking on plus maybe libraries used in other projects) --/scala (organized by language...why? I don't know!) --/android --/ruby --/employer_name -- /mobile --/android --/ios --/open-source (basically my forks that I'm pushing commits back upstream from) --/some-awesome-oss-project --/another-awesome-one --/tools random IDE settings sprinkled in here plus some other apps As you can see, things are kind of a mess here. How can I keep things organized in some sort of coherent fashion?

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• Guidelines for creating referentially transparent callables

  - by max

  In some cases, I want to use referentially transparent callables while coding in Python. My goals are to help with handling concurrency, memoization, unit testing, and verification of code correctness. I want to write down clear rules for myself and other developers to follow that would ensure referential transparency. I don't mind that Python won't enforce any rules - we trust ourselves to follow them. Note that we never modify functions or methods in place (i.e., by hacking into the bytecode). Would the following make sense? A callable object c of class C will be referentially transparent if: Whenever the returned value of c(...) depends on any instance attributes, global variables, or disk files, such attributes, variables, and files must not change for the duration of the program execution; the only exception is that instance attributes may be changed during instance initialization. When c(...) is executed, no modifications to the program state occur that may affect the behavior of any object accessed through its "public interface" (as defined by us). If we don't put any restrictions on what "public interface" includes, then rule #2 becomes: When c(...) is executed, no objects are modified that are visible outside the scope of c.__call__. Note: I unsuccessfully tried to ask this question on SO, but I'm hoping it's more appropriate to this site.

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• Bridging the gap between learning language fundamentals and actually making useful software?

  - by Anonymous -

  I'm learning C# via the "Essential C#" Lynda.com video tutorials and plan to read a couple of books that cover things in more depth afterwards. My question is where I should head to learn more after that? I've done things like project Euler in the past, but I find they don't really help me learn anything other than basic program control flow and features. I've looked at many open-source projects but pretty much everything still looks overwhelmingly complicated at this stage. What would you recommend I look at to help me build useful applications that are a bit beyond the millions of console applications I must've written thus-far? Should I be looking at books specifically on learning/working with the .NET framework, or just biting my lip and continue working through open source projects until they start to make sense?

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• Do first-class methods exist?

  - by gdhoward

  Okay, I know first-class functions are cool, closures even better, etc. But is there any language with first-class methods? In my mind, I see a first-class method as an "object" that has both a function pointer and a pointer to a specific instance of the class/object, but the implementation doesn't matter. I just want to know if there is any language that uses them. And as a bonus, how were they implemented?

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