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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 there a simple isometric graphical game engine (using vectors?) that could be used for a (multiplayer) crafting/farming game? [closed]

  - by Renier Wijnen

  Possible Duplicate: Good, free isometric game engine? With little game development experience (albeit having graphical skills and some programming knowledge) a group currently working on a game used to explain permaculture through interaction would like to create a simple concept game. Is there a specific engine or set of tools we could used to achieve this? Being able to make it an (online) multiplayer game would be much preferred. Thank you in advance for your input.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 (C#) Software Architecture

  - by ryanzec

  I am starting on a relatively large and ambitious ASP.NET MVC 3 project and just thinking about the best way to organize my code. The project is basically going to be a general management system that will be capable of supporting any type management system whether it be a blogging system, cms, reservation system, wikis, forums, project management system, etc…, each of them being just a separate 'module'. You can read more about it on my blog posted here : http://www.ryanzec.com/index.php/blog/details/8 (forgive me, the style of the site kinda sucks). For those who don't want to read the long blog post the basic idea is that the core system itself is nothing more than a users system with an admin interface to manage the users system. Then you just add on module as you need them and the module I will be creating is a simple blog post to test it out before I move on to the big module which is a project management system. Now I am just trying to think of the best way to structure this so that it is easy for users to add in there own modules but easy for me to update to core system without worrying about the user modifying the core code. I think the ideal way would be to have a number of core projects that user is specifically told not to modify otherwise the system may become unstable and future updates would not work. When the user wants to add in there own modules, they would just add in a new project (or multiple projects). The thing is I am not sure that it is even possible to use multiple projects all with their own controllers, razor view template, css, javascript, etc... in one web application. Ideally each module would have some of it own razor view templates, css, javascript, image files and also need access to some of the core razor view templates, css, javascript, image files which would is in a separate project. It is possible to have 1 web application run off of controllers, razor view templates, css, javascript, image files that are store in multiple projects? Is there a better was to structure this to allow the user to easily add in module with having to modify the core code?

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• Service Layer - how broad should it be, and should it also be on the local application?

  - by BornToCode

  Background: I need to build a desktop application with some operations (CRUD and more) (=winforms), I need to make another application which will re-use some of the functions of the main application (=webforms). I understood that using service layer is the best approach here. If I understood correctly the service should be calling the function on the BL layer (correct me if I'm wrong) The dilemma: In my main winform UI - should I call the functions from the BL, or from the service? (please explain why) Should I create a service for every single function on the BL even if I need some of the functions only in one UI? for example - should I create services for all the CRUD operations, even though I need to re-use only update operation in the webform? YOUR HELP IS MUCH APPRECIATED

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• Best scripting language for project [on hold]

  - by Dave

  This is a subjective question, but I don't know where else to ask it. I'd appreciate it if someone could direct me to an appropriate scripting language for my project. I'm a little new at this so I'd appreciate any help. The project is a website that will display a list of photo subject groups (such as "nature" "people" "sports" etc) on the home page. The photos will all be in subdirectories of the main photo directory (photos) and each subject group will represent a subdirectory in photos. For example in directory photos there might be 3 subdirectories, "nature" "people" "sports" and in each of those subdirectories there will be the actual photos. The idea is that when the website owner wants to update/add/delete a subject group all he has to do is add, delete or update a subdirectory of the photos directory. This means, I think, that I need a scripting language that can read the directories and files in the website and then send a web page with the information in it. What is the simplest and easiest scripting language to do this in? Any ideas? Thanks

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• Help identify the pattern for reacting on updates

  - by Mike

  There's an entity that gets updated from external sources. Update events are at random intervals. And the entity has to be processed once updated. Multiple updates may be multiplexed. In other words there's a need for the most current state of entity to be processed. There's a point of no-return during processing where the current state (and the state is consistent i.e. no partial update is made) of entity is saved somewhere else and processing goes on independently of any arriving updates. Every consequent set of updates has to trigger processing i.e. system should not forget about updates. And for each entity there should be no more than one running processing (before the point of no-return) i.e. the entity state should not be processed more than once. So what I'm looking for is a pattern to cancel current processing before the point of no return or abandon processing results if an update arrives. The main challenge is to minimize race conditions and maintain integrity. The entity sits mainly in database with some files on disk. And the system is in .NET with web-services and message queues. What comes to my mind is a database queue-like table. An arriving update inserts row in that table and the processing is launched. The processing gathers necessary data before the point of no-return and once it reaches this barrier it looks into the queue table and checks whether there're more recent updates for the entity. If there are new updates the processing simply shuts down and its data is discarded. Otherwise the processing data is persisted and it goes beyond the point of no-return. Though it looks like a solution to me it is not quite elegant and I believe this scenario may be supported by some sort of middleware. If I would use message queues for this then there's a need to access the queue API in the point of no-return to check for the existence of new messages. And this approach also lacks elegance. Is there a name for this pattern and an existing solution?

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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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• How to store prices that have effective dates?

  - by lal00

  I have a list of products. Each of them is offered by N providers. Each providers quotes us a price for a specific date. That price is effective until that provider decides to set a new price. In that case, the provider will give the new price with a new date. The MySQL table header currently looks like: provider_id, product_id, price, date_price_effective Every other day, we compile a list of products/prices that are effective for the current day. For each product, the list contains a sorted list of the providers that have that particular product. In that way, we can order certain products from whoever happens to offer the best price. To get the effective prices, I have a SQL statement that returns all rows that have date_price_effective >= NOW(). That result set is processed with a ruby script that does the sorting and filtering necessary to obtain a file that looks like this: product_id_1,provider_1,provider_3,provider8,provider_10... product_id_2,provider_3,provider_2,provider1,provider_10... This works fine for our purposes, but I still have an itch that a SQL table is probably not the best way to store this kind of information. I have that feeling that this kind of problema has been solved previously in other more creative ways. Is there a better way to store this information other than in SQL? or, if using SQL, is there a better approach than the one I'm using?

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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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• Best Option for Creating A Small Church Website

  - by Jim

  I've been asked to create a website for a small church. Their prior site was hosted on geocities which is no longer. They are not looking for anything robust, just an informational site with a calendar and maybe a contact form. The church would also like to be able to administer the site with little technical know-how. Cost is also an issue. Given these requirements, something like sites.google.com seems like a good option. However, my main concern is that Sites will suffer the same fate as geocities. It is definitely not a flagship Google product. Are there other good alternatives that fit the requirements?

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• Whats a good structure to save and retrieve locations of images?

  - by Goot

  I got a java-ee application, where I collect informations about movies. Im my backend I provide data like the name, description, genre and a random uuid. I also got lots of related files, which are stored on a file server. Including some screenshots, the dvd or bluRay cover and video trailers. My current approach is: When saving the files to the fileserver, I retrieve the movies random uuid (which is the primary key btw.). I then rename the files screenshot_[UUID]_1, screenshot_[UUID]_2 ... etc. Now, there are lots of other ways to handle this, like saving all filenames in a database or creating a dir structure on the fileserver for every uuid and, e.g., return all images in the "[uuid]/screenshots" folder via REST. I expect about 30k requests a day, so the service has to be pretty performant. Whats the best way to solve this?

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• Interface extension

  - by user877329

  Suppose that I have an input stream interface, which defines a method for reading data. I also have a seekable interface which defines a method for seeking. A natural way of defining a input file is then to implement both input stream and seekable. I want to construct a data decoder from the input stream interface so I can read data from a file or from another stream. The problem is that I also want to implement seek functionality to the data decoder, since I want to be able to step individual records not raw bytes. This is not possible if I only provide an input stream, which does not have the bytewise seek method. Should I skip the seekable interface and add the seek method to input stream instead and force all streams to at least leave it as a nop.

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• Designing a simple snake A.I

  - by DillPixel

  I've looked at some stuff online regarding this specific topic, and a lot of the info that I read involved graphs and path finding. I really don't want to get involved in something too complex & out of my level, and also I don't need my snake to be that intelligent (it will be a large board with the snake not growing in size on every munch). How could you structure a simpler AI for the snake that gets the job done relatively well? I would be able to get the snake to move towards the food item correctly, but my issue is that I'm not sure how to deal with the snake colliding with itself. Say the snake has a look ahead, and it finds that its tail is in the way, it could change direction, but what happens next? Any ideas on how to tackle this? Should the snake build an instruction set from every square, or should it think on the go?

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• Could someone explain in detail simplex /or perlin noise?

  - by Ryan Szemplinski

  I am really interested in perlin/simplex noise but I am having a difficult time understanding it. I am not very good at math but I am willing to learn because it interests me greatly. If someone is willing to dedicate there time into this I would be immensely appreciative of this. To be more concise, an explanation of functions and some calculation inside the functions would be nice to understand. Thanks in advance!

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• How to name setter that does data conversion?

  - by IAdapter

  I'm struggling with how to name this method, I don't like the "set" prefix, because I feel it should be reserved for normal "dumb" setters and some tools might not like it (i did not check it in checkstyle, pmd, etc., but I got a feeling they won't like it.) for example (in java, but I feel its language agnostic) public void setActionListenerClicked(boolean actionListenerClicked) { this.actionListenerClicked = actionListenerClicked ? "1" : "0"; } The only purpose of this method is ONLY to set, this method is needed and cannot be joined with any other (because of framework used). P.S. I DO know that question is similar to How to name multi-setter?, but I feel its not the same question.

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• Layout Columns - Equal Height

  - by Kyle

  I remember first starting out using tables for layouts and learned that I should not be doing that. I am working on a new site and can not seem to do equal height columns without using tables. Here is an example of the attempt with div tags. <div class="row"> <div class="column">column1</div> <div class="column">column2</div> <div class="column">column3</div> <div style="clear:both"></div> </div> Now what I tried with that was doing making columns float left and setting their widths to 33% which works fine, I use the clear:both div so that the row would be the size of the biggest column, but the columns will be different sizes based on how much content they have. I have found many fixes which mostly involve css hacks and just making it look like its right but that's not what I want. I thought of just doing it in javascript but then it would look different for those who choose to disable their javascript. The only true way of doing it that I can think of is using tables since the cells all have equal heights in the same row. But I know its bad to use tables. After searching forever I than came across this: http://intangiblestyle.com/lab/equal-height-columns-with-css/ What it seems to do is exactly the same as tables since its just setting its display exactly like tables. Would using that be just as bad as using tables? I honestly can't find anything else that I could do. edit @Su' I have looked into "faux columns" and do not think that is what I want. I think I would be able to implement better designs for my site using the display:table method. I posted this question because I just wasn't sure if I should since I have always heard its bad using tables in website layouts.

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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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• 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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• Managing accounts on a private website for a real-life community

  - by Smudge

  I'm looking at setting-up a walled-in website for a real-life community of people, and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with managing member accounts for this kind of thing. Some conditions that must be met: This community has a set list of real-life members, each of whom would be eligible for one account on the website. We don't expect or require that they all sign-up. It is purely opt-in, but we anticipate that many of them would be interested in the services we are setting up. Some of the community members emails are known, but some of them have fallen off the grid over the years, so ideally there would be a way for them to get back in touch with us through the public-facing side of the site. (And we'd want to manually verify the identity of anyone who does so). Their names are known, and for similar projects in the past we have assigned usernames derived from their real-life names. This time, however, we are open to other approaches, such as letting them specify their own username or getting rid of usernames entirely. The specific web technology we will use (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, etc) is not really our concern right now -- I am more interested in how this can be approached in the abstract. Our database already includes the full member roster, so we can email many of them generated links to a page where they can create an account. (And internally we can require that these accounts be paired with a known member). Should we have them specify their own usernames, or are we fine letting them use their registered email address to log-in? Are there any paradigms for walled-in community portals that help address security issues if, for example, one of their email accounts is compromised? We don't anticipate attempted break-ins being much of a threat, because nothing about this community is high-profile, but we do want to address security concerns. In addition, we want to make the sign-up process as painless for the members as possible, especially given the fact that we can't just make sign-ups open to anyone. I'm interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions! Thanks!

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• How should I write new code when the old codebase and the environment uses lots of globals in PHP

  - by Nicola Peluchetti

  I'm working in the Wordpress environment which itself heavily relies on globals and the codebase I'm maintaining introduces some more. I want this to change and so I'm trying to think how should I handle this. For the globals our code has introduced I think I will set them as dependencies in the constructor or in getter / setter so that I don't rely on them being globals and then refactor the old codebase little by little so that we have no globals. With Wordpress globals I was thinking to wrap all WP globals inside a Wrapper class and hide them in there. Like this class WpGlobals { public static function getDb() { global $wpdb; return $wpdb; } } Would this be of any help? The idea is that I centralize all globals in one class and do not scatter them through the code, so that if Wordpress kills one of them I need to modify code only in one place. What would you do?

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• Ranking players depending on decision making during a game

  - by tabchas

  How would I go about a ranking system for players that play a game? Basically, looking at video games, players throughout the game make critical decisions that ultimately impact the end game result. Is there a way or how would I go about a way to translate some of those factors (leveling up certain skills, purchasing certain items, etc.) into something like a curve that can be plotted on a graph? This game that I would like to implement this is League of Legends. Example: Player is Level 1 in the beginning. Gets a kill very early in the game (he gets gold because of the kill and it increases his "power curve"), and purchases attack damage (gives him more damage which also increases his "power curve". However, the player that he killed (Player 2), buys armor (counters attack damage). This slightly increases Player 2's own power curve, and reduces Player 1's power curve. There's many factors I would like to take into account. These relative factors (example: BECAUSE Player 2 built armor, and I am mainly attack damage, it lowers my OWN power curve) seem the hardest to implement. My question is this: Is there a certain way to approach this task? Are there similar theoretical concepts behind ranking systems that I should read up on? I've seen the ELO system, but it doesn't seem what I want since it simply takes into account wins and losses.

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• Should I extract specific functionality into a function and why?

  - by john smith optional

  I have a large method which does 3 tasks, each of them can be extracted into a separate function. If I'll make an additional functions for each of that tasks, will it make my code better or worse and why? Edit: Obviously, it'll make less lines of code in the main function, but there'll be additional function declarations, so my class will have additional methods, which I believe isn't good, because it'll make the class more complex. Edit2: Should I do that before I wrote all the code or should I leave it until everything is done and then extract functions?

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• State Pattern - should a state know about its context?

  - by Extrakun

  I am referring to the state pattern as described in this link. In the example class diagram, a context has numerous states. However, it does not show how does a state communicates with a context (perhaps an input in a state has impact on a setting in the context). The two examples on the page shows either passing the context to the state via a function, or storing a reference to the context. Are those advisable? Are there other ways for a state to communicate with a context? Update to an edit: For instance, I am doing a remote control which can have several states. Say, the context has a setting for Volume, and I am in one of the states which allow me to tweak the volume. How should the state communicates with the context that the volume is being changed?

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• Preferred lambda syntax?

  - by Roger Alsing

  I'm playing around a bit with my own C like DSL grammar and would like some oppinions. I've reserved the use of "(...)" for invocations. eg: foo(1,2); My grammar supports "trailing closures" , pretty much like Ruby's blocks that can be passed as the last argument of an invocation. Currently my grammar support trailing closures like this: foo(1,2) { //parameterless closure passed as the last argument to foo } or foo(1,2) [x] { //closure with one argument (x) passed as the last argument to foo print (x); } The reason why I use [args] instead of (args) is that (args) is ambigious: foo(1,2) (x) { } There is no way in this case to tell if foo expects 3 arguments (int,int,closure(x)) or if foo expects 2 arguments and returns a closure with one argument(int,int) - closure(x) So thats pretty much the reason why I use [] as for now. I could change this to something like: foo(1,2) : (x) { } or foo(1,2) (x) -> { } So the actual question is, what do you think looks best? [...] is somewhat wrist unfriendly. let x = [a,b] { } Ideas?

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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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