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• Game software design

  - by L. De Leo

  I have been working on a simple implementation of a card game in object oriented Python/HTML/Javascript and building on the top of Django. At this point the game is in its final stage of development but, while spotting a big issue about how I was keeping the application state (basically using a global variable), I reached the point that I'm stuck. The thing is that ignoring the design flaw, in a single-threaded environment such as under the Django development server, the game works perfectly. While I tried to design classes cleanly and keep methods short I now have in front of me an issue that has been keeping me busy for the last 2 days and that countless print statements and visual debugging hasn't helped me spot. The reason I think has to do with some side-effects of functions and to solve it I've been wondering if maybe refactoring the code entirely with static classes that keep no state and just passing the state around might be a good option to keep side-effects under control. Or maybe trying to program it in a functional programming style (although I'm not sure Python allows for a purely functional style). I feel that now there's already too many layers that the software (which I plan to make incredibly more complex by adding non trivial features) has already become unmanageable. How would you suggest I re-take control of my code-base that (despite being still only at < 1000 LOC) seems to have taken a life of its own?

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• Procedural... house with rooms generator

  - by pek

  I've been looking at some algorithms and articles about procedurally generating a dungeon. The problem is, I'm trying to generate a house with rooms, and they don't seem to fit my requirements. For one, dungeons have corridors, where houses have halls. And while initially they might seem the same, a hall is nothing more than the area that isn't a room, whereas a corridor is specifically designed to connect one area to another. Another important difference with a house is that you have a specific width and height, and you have to fill the entire thing with rooms and halls, whereas with a dungeon, there is empty space. I think halls in a house is something in between a dungeon corridor (gets you to other rooms) and an empty space in the dungeon (it's not explicitly defined in code). More specifically, the requirements are: There is a set of predefined rooms I cannot create walls and doors on the fly. Rooms can be rotated but not resized Again, because I have a predefined set of rooms, I can only rotate them, not resize them. The house dimensions are set and has to be entirely filled with rooms (or halls) I.e. I want to fill a 14x20 house with the available rooms making sure there is no empty space. Here are some images to make this a little more clear: As you can see, in the house, the "empty space" is still walkable and it gets you from one room to another. So, having said all this, maybe a house is just a really really tightly packed dungeon with corridors. Or it's something easier than a dungeon. Maybe there is something out there and I haven't found it because I don't really know what to search for. This is where I'd like your help: could you give me pointers on how to design this algorithm? Any thoughts on what steps it will take? If you have created a dungeon generator, how would you modify it to fit my requirements? You can be as specific or as generic as you like. I'm looking to pick your brains, really.

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• Cannot FTP without simultaneous SSH connection?

  - by Lucas

  I'm trying to set up an old box as a backup server (running 10.04.4 LTS). I intend to use 3rd party software on my PC to periodically connect to my server via FTP(S) and to mirror certain files. For some reason, all FTP connection attempts fail UNLESS I'm simultaneously connected via SSH. For example, if I use putty to test the connection to port 21, the system hangs and times out. I get: 220 Connected to LeServer USER lucas 331 Please specify the password. PASS [password] <cursor> However, when I'm simultaneously logged in (in another session) everything works: 220 Connected to LeServer USER lucas 331 Please specify the password. PASS [password] 230 Login successful. Basically, this means that my software will never be able to connect on its own, as intended. I know that the correct port is open because it works (sometimes) and nmap gives me: Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2012-03-20 16:15 CDT Interesting ports on xx.xxx.xx.x: Not shown: 995 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 21/tcp open ftp 22/tcp open ssh 53/tcp open domain 139/tcp open netbios-ssn 445/tcp open microsoft-ds Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.15 seconds My only hypothesis is that this has something to do with iptables. Maybe it's allowing only established connections? I don't think that's how I set it up, but maybe? Here's my iptables rules for INPUT: lucas@rearden:~$ sudo iptables -L INPUT Chain INPUT (policy DROP) target prot opt source destination fail2ban-ssh tcp -- anywhere anywhere multiport dports ssh ufw-before-logging-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-before-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-after-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-after-logging-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-reject-input all -- anywhere anywhere ufw-track-input all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:ftp I'm using vsftpd. Any thoughts/resources on how I could fix this? L

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• Why are SW engineering interviews disproportionately difficult?

  - by stackoverflowuser2010

  First, some background on me. I have a PhD in CS and have had jobs both as a software engineer and as an R&D research scientist, both at Very Large Corporations You Know Very Well. I recently changed jobs and interviewed for both types of jobs (as I have done in the past). My observation: SW engineer job interviews are way, way disproportionately more difficult than CS researcher job interviews, but the researcher job is higher paying, more competitive, more rewarding, more interesting, and has a higher upside. Here's a typical interview loop for researcher: Phone interview to see if my research is in alignment with the lab's researcher In-person, give presentation on my recent research for one hour (which represents maybe 9 month's worth of work), answer questions In-person one-on-one interviews with about 5 researchers, where they ask me very reasonable questions on my work/publications/patents, including: technical questions, where my work fits into related work, and how I can extend my work to new areas Here's a typical interview loop for SW engineer: Phone interview where I'm asked algorithm questions and maybe do some coding. Pretty standard. In-person interviews at the whiteboard where they drill the F*** out of you on esoteric C++ minutia (e.g. how does a polymorphic virtual function call work), algorithms (make all-pairs-shortest-path algorithm work for 1B vertices), system design (design a database load balancer), etc. This goes on for six or seven interviews. Ridiculous. Why would anyone be willing to put up with this? What is the point of asking about C++ trivia or writing code to prove yourself? Why not make the SE interview more like the researcher interview where you give a talk about what you've done? How are technical job interviews for other fields, like physics, chemistry, civil engineering, mechanical engineering?

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• How do I prevent skype from starting another instance when it's already running?

  - by con-f-use

  Just a little unnecessary annoyance to fix here: Suppose you have Skype for Ubuntu running. You accidentally click on the launcher again. The way it is now, Skype starts a second instance, which promptly tells you it can't log in. There is another instance already running. To make things worse: On the next regular start of Skype it you will have to re-enter your saved password, due to the "Sign in failure". I thought this would be fixed soon but neither Canonical nor Microsoft care enough. The annoyance continues to exist for the last three updates at least. So in an approach to provide a workaround I will post what I've done to prevent this behaviour. Maybe it's useful for some of you. Maybe it will rise awareness and cause a fix. I'm happy for any better solution btw. and that's the real purpose of my question. Usually I don't answer them myself. So doesn anyone know of a better solution to fix dual instancing of Skype?

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• DDD Model Design and Repository Persistence Performance Considerations

  - by agarhy

  So I have been reading about DDD for some time and trying to figure out the best approach on several issues. I tend to agree that I should design my model in a persistent agnostic manner. And that repositories should load and persist my models in valid states. But are these approaches realistic practically? I mean its normal for a model to hold a reference to a collection of another type. Persisting that model should mean persist the entire collection. Fine. But do I really need to load the entire collection every time I load the model? Probably not. So I can have specialized repositories. Some that load maybe a subset of the object graph via DTOs and others that load the entire object graph. But when do I use which? If I have DTOs, what's stopping client code from directly calling them and completely bypassing the model? I can have mappers and factories to create my models from DTOs maybe? But depending on the design of my models that might not always work. Or it might not allow my models to be created in a valid state. What's the correct approach here?

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• What should be the architecture of an urban game system?

  - by pmichna

  I'm going to develop an urban game using a telco API for phone geolocation and sending/receiving messages. A player would pick up one of the scenarios, move around the city and when he hits a given location, he gets a message and possibly has to answer it. I'm wondering, what approach would be the best in my case. I came up with this general idea: Web application as a user interface (user registration, players ranking, scenarios editing) written in Ruby on Rails. Game server (hosting games, game logic like checking players location, sending and receiving messages) written in Ruby. Database (users, scores, scenarios etc.), probably MySQL or someother open source DB. I want to learn Ruby and RoR, that's why I chose these language and framework. Do you think it's a good choice for a game server? Another question: is this project division good? I mean, I have little experience with Ruby and Rails - that's why I'm asking. Maybe it's better to have web application merged with game server and somehow have the server hosting RoR application do the tasks like mobile phone pinging and message sending? How would that be performed? Maybe this is worth mentioning: the API is RESTful, most results are JSON, few are XML.

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• A better way to encourage contributions to OSS

  - by Daniel Cazzulino

  Currently in the .NET world, most OSS projects are available via a NuGet package. Users have a very easy path towards *using* the project right away. But let’s say they encounter some isssue (maybe a bug, maybe a potential improvement) with the library. At this point, going from user to contributor (of a fix, or a good bug repro or even a spike for a new feature) is a very steep and non trivial multi-step process of registering with some open source hosting site (codeplex, github, bitbucket, etc.), learning how to grab the latest sources, build the project, formulate a patch (or fork the code), learn the source control software they use (mercurial, git, svn, tfs), install whatever tools are needed for it, read about the contributors workflow for the project (do you fork &amp; send pull requests? do you just send a patch file? do you just send a snippet? a unit test? etc.), and on, and on, and on. Granted, you may be lucky and already know the source control system the project uses, but in really, I’d say the chances are pretty low. I believe most developers *using* OSS are far from familiar with them, much less with contributing back to various projects. We OSS devs like to be on the cutting edge all the time, ya’ know, always jumping on the new SCC system, the new hosting site, the new agile way of managing work items, bug tracking, code reviews, etc. etc. etc.. But most of our OSS users are largely the “... Read full article

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• Why doesn't Unity's OnCollisionEnter give me surface normals, and what's the most reliable way to get them?

  - by michael.bartnett

  Unity's on collision event gives you a Collision object that gives you some information about the collision that happened (including a list of ContactPoints with hit normals). But what you don't get is surface normals for the collider that you hit. Here's a screenshot to illustrate. The red line is from ContactPoint.normal and the blue line is from RaycastHit.normal. Is this an instance of Unity hiding information to provide a simplified API? Or do standard 3D realtime collision detection techniques just not collect this information? And for the second part of the question, what's a surefire and relatively efficient way to get a surface normal for a collision? I know that raycasting gives you surface normals, but it seems I need to do several raycasts to accomplish this for all scenarios (maybe a contact point/normal combination misses the collider on the first cast, or maybe you need to do some average of all the contact points' normals to get the best result). My current method: Back up the Collision.contacts[0].point along its hit normal Raycast down the negated hit normal for float.MaxValue, on Collision.collider If that fails, repeat steps 1 and 2 with the non-negated normal If that fails, try steps 1 to 3 with Collision.contacts[1] Repeat 4 until successful or until all contact points exhausted. Give up, return Vector3.zero. This seems to catch everything, but all those raycasts make me queasy, and I'm not sure how to test that this works for enough cases. Is there a better way?

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• How to work with Firefox nightly build [minefield]

  - by anirudha

  Most of developer love Firefox for their plugin who support for making development easier and faster. many of us use Firefox nightly build aka minefield who update daily. there is a little problem in minefield that there is less plugin on addons site of mozilla for Firefox nightly [minefield]. a solution for this problem is that you need to install the plugin who you want in nightly build from the developer site instead of add-ons site of Mozilla. the reason for that is all many of popular plugin in development for support Firefox 4. How to install follow the thing as mine : go to minefield > addons or toolbar  > addons you see a list of plugin who is not suitable for minefield now go to more link of plugin who you want to get work in Firefox 4. When you click their you go to plugin page on addons site of mozilla or maybe redirect you to developer site. if they show you plugin page then go to developer site by click on link more about developer. now you find that on the developer site they give you the same version or maybe new then you found on mozilla addons site. install the plugin and restart the minefield. you see that most of plugin now work.

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• On the frontier between work and home

  - by MPelletier

  I think we've all been there: You hear of someone say "hey, wouldn't it be nice if platform X had feature Y?" You look around (on SO!), the feature really doesn't exist, even though it probably would be useful in many contexts. So it's pretty generic. Your mind wanders for a bit. "How tough would it be? Well, it'd probably be just a snippet. And an ad-hoc function. And maybe a wrapper." And boom, before you know it, you've spent a dozen hours of your free time implementing a FooFeature that's really neat and generic. The kind of code you might not even have the time to spit and shine at work, that would be a bit rushed and not so documented. So now you wonder "wouldn't this be useful to others?" And you've got your blog, maybe a CodeProject account, and your colleague who asked if FooFeature exists might, haphazardly, come accross that blog entry, had it existed before they told you. On the otherhand, the NDA agreement. It's sort of vague and general. It doesn't forbid you from coding at home, but it's clear on sharing company code, that's a big NO. But this isn't company code. Or is it? Or will it be? So, what do you do with code (that's more than just a snippet) you wrote in your off time with universality in mind but an idea that came from work, and that will most likely be used at work? Can it be published?

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• What are the advantages of Maven when it comes to single man, educational projects

  - by Leron

  I've spend a few hours playing around with Maven + reading some stuff on the apache official site and also a few random googled articles. By this I mean that I really tried to find the answers myself - both by reading and by doing things on my own. Also maybe worth to mention that I installed the m2e plugin so most of the time I've tried things out from Eclipse and not using the command line too much. However aside from the generated project that for example prevent me from using the default package I didn't see that much of a difference with the standard way I've created my projects before try Maven. In fact I've almost decided to skip Maven for now and move on to the other technology I wanted to learn more in-depth - Hibernate, but when I start with opening the official page the first thing I've read was the recommendation to use Hibernate with Maven. That get me confused and made me taking a step back and trying once more to find what I'm obviously missing right now. As it's said in the maven.apache.. site, the true strength of Maven is shown when you work on large projects with other people, but I lack the option to see how Maven is really used in this scenario, still i think that there are maybe advantages even when it comes to working with small projects alone, but I really have difficulties to point them out. So what do you think are the advantages of Maven when it's used for small projects writing from a single person. What are the things that I should be aware of and try to exploit (I mean features offered by Maven) that can come in handy in this situations?

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• Semi Fixed-timestep ported to javascript

  - by abernier

  In Gaffer's "Fix Your Timestep!" article, the author explains how to free your physics' loop from the paint one. Here is the final code, written in C: double t = 0.0; const double dt = 0.01; double currentTime = hires_time_in_seconds(); double accumulator = 0.0; State previous; State current; while ( !quit ) { double newTime = time(); double frameTime = newTime - currentTime; if ( frameTime > 0.25 ) frameTime = 0.25; // note: max frame time to avoid spiral of death currentTime = newTime; accumulator += frameTime; while ( accumulator >= dt ) { previousState = currentState; integrate( currentState, t, dt ); t += dt; accumulator -= dt; } const double alpha = accumulator / dt; State state = currentState*alpha + previousState * ( 1.0 - alpha ); render( state ); } I'm trying to implement this in JavaScript but I'm quite confused about the second while loop... Here is what I have for now (simplified): ... (function animLoop(){ ... while (accumulator >= dt) { // While? In a requestAnimation loop? Maybe if? ... } ... // render requestAnimationFrame(animLoop); // stand for the 1st while loop [OK] }()) As you can see, I'm not sure about the while loop inside the requestAnimation one... I thought replacing it with a if but I'm not sure it will be equivalent... Maybe some can help me.

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• C#.NET (AForge) against Java (JavaCV, JMF) for video processing

  - by Leron

  I'm starting to get really confused looking deeper and deeper at video processing world and searching for optimal choices. This is the reason to post this and some other questions to try and navigate myself in the best possible way. I really like Java, working with Java, coding with Java, at the same time C# is not that different from Java and Visual Studio is maybe the best IDE I've been working with. So even though I really want to do my projects in Java so I can get better and better Java programmer at the same time I'm really attract to video processing and even though I'm still at the beginning of this journey I want to take the right path. So I'm really in doubt could Java be used in a production environment for serious video processing software. As the title says I already have been looking at maybe the two most used technologies for video processing in Java - JMF and JavaCV and I'm starting to think that even they are used and they provide some functionality, when it comes to real work and real project that's not the first thing that comes to once mind, I mean to someone that have a professional opinion about this. On the other hand I haven't got the time to investigate .NET (c# specificly) options but even AForge looks a lot more serious library then those provided for Java. So in general -either ways I'm gonna spend a lot of time learning some technology and trying to do something that make sense with it, but my plan is at the end the thing that I'll eventually come up to be my headline project. To represent my skills and eventually help me find a job in the field. So I really don't want to spend time learning something that will give me the programming result I want but at the same time is not something that is needed in the real world development. So what is your opinion, which language, technology is better for this specific issue. Which one worths more in terms that I specified above?

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• Focus follows mouse stops working when opening window from launcher and no click to focus

  - by user97600

  This is 12.04 default desktop (unity). I set it to focus follows mouse, and changed the menus to be on the window. This worked for a while, then some unknown even, maybe an upgrade maybe some other setting change caused it to stop working. There are many ways for this behavior to start but one reliable one is to bring a window to the foreground/focus with the launcher. Now the focus is stuck on that window and not just the window but the regions within the window so the close, maximize, minimize and menus do not work. I have to use mouse middle and then mouse right and then focus follows mouse is restored for a bit. The exact details of the mouse action aren't clear, sometimes it seems like just mouse middle helps, sometimes just right some times a desperate sequence of clicks :-( I have tried switching to the gnome desktop and it seems to occur less there but it is not eliminated. I have tried switching mice to an old wired USB mouse. I have tried creating a new account and that has not worked. I have observed "split focus" where to scroll button scrolls one one window but the input goes to another. I go trapped recently where my keyboard input went to libre office calc, but I was selecting the search term in the chrome address window. The selection "grayed" but the keyboard input for the search went to libre. Regions in windows have very confused focus. I have to work hard to get focus on for example the close gliph (X) or the minimize gliph (_).

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• How do you avoid jumping to a solution when under pressure? [closed]

  - by GlenPeterson

  When under a particularly strict programming deadline (like an hour), if I panic at all, my tendency is to jump into coding without a real plan and hope I figure it out as I go along. Given enough time, this can work, but in an interview it's been pretty unsuccessful, if not downright counter-productive. I'm not always comfortable sitting there thinking while the clock ticks away. Is there a checklist or are there techniques to recognize when you understand the problem well enough to start coding? Maybe don't touch the keyboard for the first 5-10 minutes of the problem? At what point do you give up and code a brute-force solution with the hope of reasoning out a better solution later? A related follow-up question might be, "How do you ensure that you are solving the right problem?" Or "When is it most productive to think and design more vs. code some experiments to and figure out the design later?" EDIT: One close vote already, but I'm not sure why. I wrote this in the first person, but I doubt I'm the only programmer to ever choke in an interview. Here is a list of techniques for taking a math test and another for taking an oral exam. Maybe I'm not expressing myself well, but I'm asking if there is a similar list of techniques for handling a programming problem under pressure?

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• Drawing particles as a smooth blob

  - by Nömmik

  I'm new to game/graphics development and I'm playing around with particles (in 2D). I want to draw particles close to each other as a blob, just as liquid/water. I do not want to draw big circles overlapping as the blob won't be smooth (and too big). I don't really know physics but I assume what I want is something looking similar to surface tension. I haven't been able to find anything on stackexchange or on Google (maybe I do not know the correct keywords?). So far I have found two possible solutions, but I am unable to find any concrete information about algorithms. One of them is to calculate the concave hull of particles I consider being a blob. I can calculate the blob by creating an equivalence class (on the relation "close to each other"). Strangely enough I haven't been able to find any algorithm explaining how to calculate the concave hull. Many posts (and among stackexchange) links to libraries or commercial products that do this (I need libraries to work in C#), but never any algorithm. Also this solution might have a problem with a circle of particles, which would not detect the empty space in the middle. While researching concave hull I stumbled upon something called alpha shapes. Which seems to be exactly what I want to do, however just as with concave hull I haven't found any source explaining how they actually work. I have found some presentation materials but not enough to go on. It's like a big secret everyone knows except me :-/ After calculating the concave hull or alpha shape I want to make it a Bézier curve to make it smooth and nice. Although I do find my approach a bit too complex, maybe I am trying to solve this the wrong way? If you can either suggest any other solution to my problem, or explain the pieces I am missing I would be very happy and grateful :-) Thanks.

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• Addicted to the MIX Buzz

  - by Dave Campbell

  Well it's the Friday before MIX10, and I'm officially of no use to anybody. I'll be driving up to 'Vegas Sunday ... hopefully rolling in mid-late afternoon, checking in at my $31.50/night (including WiFi) Motel, and getting registered then hanging out around registration to see who is there. First organized thing to do is 9PM, so I'm open to suggestions Sunday evening... maybe we can get a gang together for dinner ?? Monday is the Keynote ... I'm addicted to the buzz in the ballroom the first day, hope to be close to the front, trying to live blog. Then straight to Ballroom A and stake out the spot I'll be in for all 3 days, and you all know why :) I've tagged 40 sessions that I 'want' to see, and there's only 12 slots... damn... if I could, I'd try the Multiplicity thing, but I'm afraid I'd get the idiot first try -- or maybe got that one already :) ... but at least I tagged them to make it easy to find after the videos are up. Stuff going on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday night. I'm staying over for an event on Thursday, and driving back on Friday. I'm not sure how much blogging I'll be doing, but I'll try to hit some 'Cream high spots. I'm sure everyone #NotAtMIX is going to be tuned into the sessions online. I'll be wearing TShirts with WynApse.com and SilverlightCream.com printed on the back... so if you see some old curmudgeon with such a shirt, IT'S ME! I look forward to seeing all the people I only see once or twice a year, and meeting ones I haven't met yet What a week... Bring It On and Stay in the 'Light! Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 4    MIX10

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• Rendering large and high poly meshes

  - by Aurus

  Consider an huge terrain that has a lot polygons, to render this terrain I thought of following techniques: Using height-map instead of raw meshes: Yes, but I want to create a lot of caves and stuff that simply wont work with height-maps. Using voxels: Yes, but I think that this would be to much since I don't even want to support changing terrain.. Split into multiple chunks and do some sort of LOD with the mesh: Yes, but how would I do that? Tessellation usually creates more detail not less. Precompute the same mesh in lower poly version (like Mudbox does) and depending on the distance it renders one of these meshes: Graphic memory is limited and uploading only the chunks won't solve that problem since the traffic would be too high. IMO the last one sounds really good, but imagine the following process: Upload and render the chunks depending on the current player position. [No problem] Player will walk straight forward Now we maybe have to change on of the low poly chunk with the high poly one So, Remove the low poly chunk and load the high poly chunk [Already to much traffic here, I think] I am not very experienced in graphic programming and maybe the upper process is totally okay but somehow I think it is too much. And how about the disk space it would require.. I think 3 kind of levels would be fine but isn't that also too much? (I am using OpenGL but I don't think that this is important)

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• alot questings since i wanted to make a new SSB game or mario game(that use 3d models) [closed]

  - by user20465

  i have just started to study programming and i know already ppl will say why make a so big project like as a SSB game for a noob game development? cuz i always wanted a SSB engine like as Mugen is a fighter game engine but is not like as SSB´s gameplay + is not using 3d models too so i will call it SSBmugen(until i find a better title for it i got afew ideas for titles) also i wanted to make this game so it can use SSBbrawl files(models+animations mainly) the moveset+Stage coding files i wanted to redo cuz so anything can be possible like make a teleporter or a pipe teleporter(like as Super mario bros game) on a stag e or make some stuff there is impossible in SSBbrawl for moveset coding but is not in SSBmugen like make so a char. summon a Clone and the clone will do a attack and then is gone or some attacks/moves also i will make a moveset/stage Coding editor so it will be really easy to make moveset/stages coding for yours 3d models/animations moveset+stage Coding i mean: hitboxes/hurtboxes/moving Stuff/moving bones like cape or hair bones that is moving by wind effects or falling or other stuff like that/other stuff that needed to be coded i have planed to make a editor(for moveset/char. coding) or add the editor in brawlbox for my game so other ppl can easy make moveset/stages Coding to they´s models/animations so it will be easy so even kids can make a custom movesets/stages why using SSBbrawl files?: cuz ppl have made alot of models or textures/custom movesets/custom stages like goku/other anime/not brawl stuff for super smash bros brawl hacking(a.k.a modding) so ppl dont have to redo anything if they wanted to have the custom models or textures/custom movesets/custom stages from SSBbrawl to SSBmugen +there is the program named brawlbox that can open brawl files like model/animations and can edit models or animations and import models from 3ds max to be the right model format for SSBbrawl and i also wanted it so easy to add(a.k.a installer) Recolours or alt. models(like as oneslot doctor mario model over mario´s boneset) or textures/Movesets/new char. slots/new stages so easy so you only needing to download themplace them in right foldername them the right nameStart the gameRecolours or alt. models or textures/Movesets/new char. slots/new stages works an loading right so you wont needing to edit any files for add something so kids/not so smart ppl can easy use the mods other ppl is making/uploading for this game here is the file format i wanted to know if they can be readed/opened if making a game that use these files: .mld0(brawl model file) .chr0(model animation for moving/scale/rota the bones) .srt0(animations for texture like moving eyes or blinking) .vis0(Animations for get polygons to hide/show with visibilitybones on the model there is also some polygons there ) .brres(a file format where stuff like model files or textures or animations is inside) .pac(a file format where the .brres is inside to keep model+textures+model for the shadow in 1 file) .wav (for SoundFX effects or voices to char. or stages) i am sure that one is possible the .wav files is inside a other file format for brawl but that file can´t you add more .wav files inside only replace so i wanted the .wav files outside so its easy to add/replace/remove SoundFX effects or voices to char. or stages .brstm(brawl music file so the music is looped perfect so it loop in middel of the music and not start over again then the music is done) afew more file formats (mainly for the Graphics effects like fire/aura/hit effects if not needing to redo them)so only coding in the editor i will make is needed to be done for port a SSBB hack(a.k.a mod)(moveset/stage coding) to this game wanted the game to be able to load these files and load them right like if loading wait1.chr0(idle animation) it will also load at same time wait1.srt0/wait1.vis0 and all kinda of animations is inside the same .brres file i am needing since it to be able to load the file format i wanted cuz: -the animations can´t be converted to any other animation file format and i dont think ppl want to redo these animations(inc. me for Goku to SSBbrawl) -models can be converted but then they lose all the shader/materials stuff like a shine effect or lighting on the model -.brstm can be converted to .wav but then there will be no loop so i prefer it can load this file format too for the music to stage/menu -brawlbox is really easy to use for make animation for the char. and import models from 3ds max so even around "not too stupid" 10 year kids can make SSBB mods(not try to be rude but to say how easy it is) also i wanted the folder setup for characters/stages/moveset/other stuff to be like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2oolm5z5ri234tz/SSBmugen%20Folder%20setup.txt just uploaded a txt file since it is a wall of text and this post is already a wall of test so it easy to place stuff (if not i do a program for to that so it auto place the stuff on right place) not 100% sure what to use of game engine to make this possible but i got a dll file from that brawlbox program that can open/read/edit these file formats if that helps i also got open source of brawlbox i have kinda learned programming(since its kinda the same thing but still not 100% same) from Super smash bros modding/hacking like coding a moveset for the new animations/models + have readed alittle about it but i am soon starting for real to study it for ppl who is alittle confuse for what i am asking for here is the list: -what game engine should i use to make a SSB clone? but at same time to make all this stuff i just said possible so ppl can make they own mods and share them and use the already made mods from SSBbrawl? and easy to use aswell so noob programmors can use it? -where to learning programming on internet to be even more ready to make a game like this? and dont wanted to start in the small like making small boring 2d games that no one care about anyway ps. i am also planing a other project like as SSBmugen but it will be Super mario bros open (again tittle unsure but open means open source) i will make a Mario game engine that also use 3d models and can have 2d or 3d gameplay with any mario powerups/gameplay(from any mario platform games) there is ever made multiplayer like as in New super mario bros wii maybe multiplay over lan or online but for now over 1 PC also alittle planed for that to my SSBmugen a Level/world map editor for it too(easy to use so even kids can use it and make levels for it) so it just place the objects/enemies and options for them enemies since they are not 100% same AI in all mario game like to choose a goomba have AI from SM64 the Editor will be able to change the gameplay on a level while have a other gameplay on a other level like this: 1 level have Super mario bros 3 gameplay (then it will be a 3d model remake) a other level have super mario galaxy gameplay but in a Super mario 3d land level yet a other level have super mario 64 gameplay but with powerups from a other mario game like powerups from mario 3d land or can ride on Yoshi so you can easy remake your fav. level from a old mario game in this mario engine/editor or just make a custom one with yours fav. mario gameplay/powerups so it will be like turn off/on: walljump/triple jump/other kinda or jumps/2x punch and 1 kick+Air kick/SMG spin attack/Fludd/other stuff like that so you can make the gameplay from the first mario game to the newest or make custom gameplay on a level also the star(from 64/sunshine/galaxy) will be replaced with the flag from new super mario bros/mario 3d land since the game is not so much about getting stars its more about making/download the levels you wanted and share them to other ppl and play these level so after have killed like the boss from SM64 bomb omb field(if one have made that) you will get the flag instead of star since i wanted it to be simple to make levels in the editor to make the bosses/new enemies/new powerups/custom char. idk what to do to make that simple yet also thinking the mario game will use brawl files since it almost already got all needed animations/models for this since i dont wanted to redo animations/models and if needing more animations i can just make them easy in brawlbox since thats the program i am most used to make animations but that will be after my SSBmugen project if not this game will be easyer then SSBmugen to make since i am planing then 1 of them is done i use the that game as base to make the other (since both is kinda platfrom games and possible using same file format for both) also wanted to ask what is best to start with out of these 2 games? also will maybe make a DLC site(or ingame) for both of these games if they get done so it wont end up like as Mugen where you needing to look all over the internet to find the stuff you wanted but for my game all the mods for my game is on same place not sure about online mode for SSBmugen or super mario bros open but i can always add that then i get better at programming both games also need to have options on controls/if using joystick also that i have planed these game for a long time and got even more ideas for them but first i wanted to get them to work so i can add the other stuff later(like DLC or online mode or some other stuff later) right now i know 0,0001% to programming(in my option) maybe i know more then that since i have been study it alittle but i learning while making stuff like this that was also my plan for make these game learn while making them and get better to programming so again i say it i kinda dont want to hear dont do these projects cuz i already know it will be hard so dont wanted so much to heard stuff like: you can´t do it since you just started learning programming or this project will fail since somewhere i needing to get started with programming and this is where i want to start to make my dream games(possible other´s dream games too) and i dont think this project will fail if i work hard on it (as i possible will) and ppl will maybe help i think this was all my questing/ideas for now (sorry for it sounds more like ideas then questings) but i needing to say my ideas so you ppl can see what i needing to use for make this possible

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• Yahoo search: different results shown in two identical searches

  - by Marco Demaio

  Hello,simple question: searching on http://www.yahoo.it for villa matrimonio bologna I noticed Yahoo shows different results. You need to retry few times to get this done maybe exiting the browser and openeing it again, or maybe searching once and then clearing browser cookies and then search again (it's even easier to test if you use two different browsers at the same time to search for the same phrase). Anyway in order to reproduce this easily I write down here the query shown in the address bar after the search, so you can just click on these to see the results shown by entering these query: http://it.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AirvLYKvBMPP_6MpAmONN14brK5_?vc=&p=villa+matrimonio+bologna&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-709 http://it.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AirvLYKvBMPP_6MpAmONN14brK5_?vc=&p=villa+matrimonio+bologna&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp Note the last parameter fr is different, but it's Yahoo that set it (not me), I don't even know what it means. You can see in the search box that the searched phrase is IDENTICAL in both cases. So why Yahoo is giving out different results on same search phrase? I used the same browser and performed the test in few minutes by simply trying more than once. You may also notice that the number of results returned (written on the left side of the page) is different, for the 1st search it returns 274K results, for the 2nd one 5.38M results. Actually you might think that this is just an error on Yahoo, but it's almost 1 year that while looking once in a while at some websites to see how they are ranking on Yahoo and also Google, I noticed that two searches on the same phrase show up different results even on the same day after few minutes/hours. I couldn't reproduce this behaviour also on Google so I can not say for sure, but since it seems to me it happened sometimes I was wondering if anyone of you noticed it too. Do you know if this is the normal behaviour of search engines? Because if it's normal (and it's just me that noticed it only now) I wonder how do you understand how well a site is ranking on a search engine, you could even see one of your customer's website ranking differently compared to what your customer sees on his PC.

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• Why is it that software is still easily pirated today?

  - by mohabitar

  I've always been curious about this. Now I wouldn't call myself a programmer yet, but I'm learning, so maybe the answer to this is obvious. It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy then a "serial number/activation key". I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest. I guess my question is: can there exist a fool proof and hack proof method of protecting your software against piracy? If not realistically, how about theoretically possible? Or no matter what mechanisms these companies deploy, hackers can always find a way around it? EDIT: So apparently, the answer is no. There's pretty much no way. And so I'm sure these big companies have realized this as well. Should they adopt another sales model rather than charging a crapload for their software (I know its justified and they put a lot of hard work into their software, but its still a lot of money). Are there any alternative solutions that will benefit both the company and the user (i.e. if you purchase our product, we'll apply $X dollars to your account that will apply to future purchases from our company)?

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• What is the best way to "carve" a terrain created from a heightmap?

  - by tigrou

  I have a 3d landscape created from a heightmap. I'd like to "carve" some holes in that terrain. That will allow me to create bridges, caverns and tunnels inside it. That operation will be done in the game editor so it doesn't need to be realtime. In the end, rendering is done using traditional polygons. What would be the best/easiest way to do that ? I already think about several solutions : Solution 1 1) Create voxels from the heightmap (very easy). In other words, fill a 3D array like this : voxels[32][32][32] from the heightmap values. 2) Carve holes in the voxels as i want (easy too). 3) Convert voxels to polygons using some iso-surface extraction technique (like marching cubes). 4) Reduce (decimate) polygons created in 3). This technique seems to be the most promising for giving good results (untested). However the problem with marching cubes is that they tends to produce lots of polygons thus reducing them is mandatory. Implementing 4) also seems not trivial, i have read several papers on the web and it seems pretty complex. I was also unable to find an example, code snippet or something to start writing an algorithm for triangle mesh decimation. Maybe there is a special decimation algorithm (simpler) for meshes created from marching cubes ? Solution 2 1) Create some triangle mesh from the heighmap (easy). 2) Apply severals 3D boolean operation (eg: subtraction with a sphere) to carve the mesh. 3) apply some procedure to reduce polygons (optional). Operation 2) seems to be very complex and to be honest i have no idea how to do that. Also applying many boolean operation seems to be slow and will maybe degrade the triangle mesh every time a boolean operation is applied.

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• Avoiding the Anaemic Domain - How to decide what single responsibility a class has

  - by thecapsaicinkid

  Even after reading a bunch I'm still falling into the same trap. I have a class, usually an enity. I need to implement more than one, similar operations on this type. It feels wrong to (seemingly arbitrarily) choose one of these operations to belong inside the entity and push the others out to a separate class; I end up pushing all operations to service classes and am left with an anaemic domain. As a crude example, imagine the typical Employee class with numeric properties to hold how many paid days the employee is entitled to for both sickness and holiday and a collection of days taken for each. public class Employee { public int PaidHolidayAllowance { get; set; } public int PaidSicknessAllowance { get; set; } public IEnumerable<Holiday> Holidays { get; set; } public IEnumerable<SickDays> SickDays { get; set; } } I want two operations, one to calculate remaining holiday, another for remaining paid sick days. It seems strange to include say, CalculateRemaingHoliday() in the Employee class and bump CalculateRemainingPaidSick() to some PaidSicknessCalculator class. I would end up with a PaidSicknessCalculator and a RemainingHolidayCalculator and the anaemic Employee entity as seen above. The other alternative would be to put both operations in the Employee class and kick Single Responsibility to the curb. That doesn't make for particularly maintainable code. I suppose the Employee class should have some initialisation/validation logic (not accepting negative alowances etc.) So maybe I just stick to basic initialisation and validation in the entities themselves and be happy with my separate calculator classes. Or maybe I should be asking myself if Anaemic Domain is actually causing me some tangible problems with my code.

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• Why We Need UX Designers

  - by Tim Murphy

  Ok, so maybe this is really why I need UX designers.  While I have always had an interest in photography and can appreciate a well designed user interface putting one together is an entirely different endeavor.  Being color blind doesn’t help, but coming up with ideas is probably the biggest portion of the issue.  I can spot things that just don’t look like they work right, but what will? UX designers is an area that most companies do not spend much if any resources.  As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression and and a poorly designed site or application is a bad first impression.  Given that they you would think that companies would invest more in appearance and usability. One of two things need to be done to rectify this issue.  Either we need to start educating our developers on user experience and design or we need to start finding ways to subsidize putting full time designers on our project teams.  Maybe it should be a time share type of situation, but something needs to be done.  As architects we need to impress on our project stakeholders the importance of User Experience and why it should be part of the budget.  If they hear it often enough eventually they may present it to you as their own idea. del.icio.us Tags: User Experience,UX,Application Design

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