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• AJAX vs ActiveX/Flash for browser-based game

  - by iconiK

  I have been following the usage of JavaScript for the past few years, and with the release of extremely fast scripting engines (V8, SquirrelFish Extrene, TraceMonkey, etc.) the possibilities of JavaScript have increased dramatically. However, the usage share of Internet Explorer coupled with it's total lack of support for recent standards makes me want to drop a bomb on Microsoft's HQ, as it creates a huge amount of problems for any website. The game will need to be pretty dynamic client-side, with animations and other eye-candy things, but not a full-blown game like those that run directly in the OS using DirectX or OpenGL. However, this might be a little stretch for JavaScript and will certainly feel extremely slow in Internet Explorer (given that the current IE engine can be hundreds of times slower than SFX; gotta see what IE9 will bring), would it be better to just do the whole thing in Flash? I know this means requiring the plug-in AND I have no experience whatsoever with Flash (other than browsing YouTube :P). It also means I can't just output directly from PHP, I would have to use XML or some other format to pass data to it (JSON is directly integrated in JS and PHP can deal with it easily). Another idea would be to provide an alternative interface just for IE, though I don't know how (ActiveX maybe? or with Flash, then why not just provide it to all browsers) or totally not supporting it and requiring the use of other browsers, although this is plain stupid from a business perspective. So here am I, wondering what approach to take and thus asking for your advice. How should I build the client-side? AJAX in all browsers, Flash in all browsers or a mix (AJAX for "modern" browsers and something else for the "grandpa": IE).

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• Is there a fast alternative to creating a Texture2D from a Bitmap object in XNA?

  - by Matthew Bowen

  I've looked around a lot and the only methods I've found for creating a Texture2D from a Bitmap are: using (MemoryStream s = new MemoryStream()) { bmp.Save(s, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png); s.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); Texture2D tx = Texture2D.FromFile(device, s); } and Texture2D tx = new Texture2D(device, bmp.Width, bmp.Height, 0, TextureUsage.None, SurfaceFormat.Color); tx.SetData<byte>(rgbValues, 0, rgbValues.Length, SetDataOptions.NoOverwrite); Where rgbValues is a byte array containing the bitmap's pixel data in 32-bit ARGB format. My question is, are there any faster approaches that I can try? I am writing a map editor which has to read in custom-format images (map tiles) and convert them into Texture2D textures to display. The previous version of the editor, which was a C++ implementation, converted the images first into bitmaps and then into textures to be drawn using DirectX. I have attempted the same approach here, however both of the above approaches are significantly too slow. To load into memory all of the textures required for a map takes for the first approach ~250 seconds and for the second approach ~110 seconds on a reasonable spec computer. If there is a method to edit the data of a texture directly (such as with the Bitmap class's LockBits method) then I would be able to convert the custom-format images straight into a Texture2D and hopefully save processing time. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks

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• I can't figure out why this fps counter is inaccurate.

  - by rmetzger

  I'm trying to track frames per second in my game. I don't want the fps to show as an average. I want to see how the frame rate is affected when I push keys and add models etc. So I am using a variable to store the current time and previous time, and when they differ by 1 second, then I update the fps. My problem is that it is showing around 33fps but when I move the mouse around really fast, the fps jumps up to 49fps. Other times, if I change a simple line of code elsewhere not related to the frame counter, or close the project and open it later, the fps will be around 60. Vsync is on so I can't tell if the mouse is still effecting the fps. Here is my code which is in an update function that happens every frame: FrameCount++; currentTime = timeGetTime (); static unsigned long prevTime = currentTime; TimeDelta = (currentTime - prevTime) / 1000; if (TimeDelta > 1.0f) { fps = FrameCount / TimeDelta; prevTime = currentTime; FrameCount = 0; TimeDelta = 0; } Here are the variable declarations: int FrameCount; double fps, currentTime, prevTime, TimeDelta, TimeElapsed; Please let me know what is wrong here and how to fix it, or if you have a better way to count fps. Thanks!!!!!! I am using DirectX 9 btw but I doubt that is relevant, and I am using PeekMessage. Should I be using an if else statement instead? Here is my message processing loop: MSG msg; ZeroMemory (&msg, sizeof (MSG)); while (msg.message != WM_QUIT) { if (PeekMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE)) { TranslateMessage (&msg); DispatchMessage (&msg); } Update (); RenderFrame (); }

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• Collision detections and how efficient they are

  - by Shadow

  How exactly do you implement collision detection? What are the costs involved? Do different platforms(c/c++, java, cocoa/iphone, flash, directX) have different optimizations for calculating collisions. And lastly are there libraries available to do this for me, or some that I can just interpret for my platform of choice? As I understand it you would need to loop through the collision map and find the area in question and then compair the input thing(e.g. a sprite) to the type of pixel that is in the questioned area. I understand the very basic idea, but I don't understand the underlying implementation or even a higher level one for that matter. It would seem that this type of detection, or any for that matter, is very costly. Tile map? Bit array? How are these created from an image(I would guess looping and doing stuff)? The reason I ask this question is to get a better understanding of the efficiency behind the scenes and to understand exactly what is going on. Links, references, or examples would be very helpful. I know this question is a bit longwinded so any help or references would be very welcome. Thanks SO!

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• VB6 Game Development

  - by CVS-2600Hertz-wordpress-com

  Hi All, I am developing a game in VB6 (plz don't ask me why :) ). The storyboard is ready and a rough implementation is underway. I am following a "pure-software-rendering" approach. (i.e. no DirectX, no openGL etc.) Amongst many others, the following "serious" problems exist: 2D alpha transparency reqd. to implement overlays. Parallax implementation to give depth-of-field illusion. Capturing mouse-scroll events globally (as in FPS-es; mapping them to changing weapon). Async sound play with absolute "near-zero-lag". Any ideas anyone. Please suggest any well documented library/ocx or sample-code. Plz do suggest solutions with good performance and as little overhead as possible. Also, anyone who has developed any games, and would be open to sharing her/his code would be highly appreciated. (any well-acknowledged VB games whose source-code i can study??) UPDATE: Here is a screen shot of GearHead Garage. This picture ought to describe what i was attempting in words above... :) Thank You

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• Which Stroustrup book should I use?

  - by Chris Simmons

  I'm a C# programmer that is looking to branch out. I'm bored of writing business software and want to start getting into graphics programming and games/simulators. So I figured, although writing that stuff isn't impossible in managed code, the "right" way to do that would be to look to C++, of course focussing on the language first, then getting into OpenGL or DirectX (or whatever). Way way back ('98? '99?) I had tried and failed to really grasp Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language. I know that this book is often not recommended for the beginner. Anyway, I picked it back up (in a much more recent printing) and I'm actually getting it and enjoying it. I also have a copy of his textbook, Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, which, as I understand it, is really geared toward teaching programming, not necessarily C++. I'm certainly not arrogant enough to claim I don't have anything more to learn about programming, data structures, algoriths, etc., however I'm not a novice there either. So my question is, with the goal of gaining the broader and more real-world-useful understanding of C++ and given my background, on which should I focus? The denser (as I perceive it) TCPPPL or the gentler Programming? EDIT: I thank everyone for the responses. However, I've got a personal choice here to make between these two books. Granted there are other very good books out there, but I'm already a good length into both of the books I mention and I'd like to finish one. So, can anyone respond on which would be the better and why? Time is not an issue; I'm not looking (at this point) at an "accelerated" read.

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• about c# OBJECTS and the Possibilties it has.

  - by user527825

  As a novice programmer and i always wonder about c# capabilities.i know it is still early to judge that but all i want to know is can c# do complex stuffs or something outside windows OS. 1- I think c# is a proprietary language (i don't know if i said that right) meaning you can't do it outside visual studio or windows. 2-also you cant create your own controller(called object right?) like you are forced to use these available in toolbox and their properties and methods. 3-can c# be used with openGL API or DirectX API . 4-Finally it always bothers me when i think i start doing things in visual studio, i know it sounds arrogant to say but sometimes i feel that i don't like to be forced to use something even if its helpful, like i feel (do i have the right to feel?) that i want to do all things by myself? don't laugh i just feel that this will give me a better understanding. 5- is visual c# is like using MaxScript inside 3ds max in that c# is exclusive to do windows and forms and components that are windows related and maxscript is only for 3d editing and manipulation for various things in the software. If it is too difficult for a beginner i hope you don't answer the fourth question as i don't have enough motivation and i want to keep the little i have. thank you for your time. Note: 1-sorry for my English, i am self taught and never used the language with native speakers so expect so errors. 2-i have a lot of questions regarding many things, what is the daily ratio you think for asking (number of questions) that would not bother the admins of the site and the members here. thank you for your time.

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• How to best launch C++ application from web page

  - by JB

  I guess there are two parts to this question, one technical and one best practice for security and doing things "right". I'm working on a little game using C++ / directx but I would like to be able to launch it from a web page by someone clicking on a link on that page. Ideally I would like the first time they clicked for it to launch an installer downloads and installs the game on their machine, and then the next time to launch an application which updates the game from a web site if it's old and then launches it. I have no problems with the expected security popups and questions the first time it runs. I want people to be certain what they are installing and understand what they are doing. But it would be nice if once it is installed they could run it with the minimum of fuss. My question then is what technologies I could use to do this? I'm thinking that it would need a browser plugin and an activex control so that first time you'd install that, and subsequently the control/plugin would be able to launch the game. I'm not sure that under newer browser secuity models that a plugin would have the permissions to be able to run an installer though or silently invoke applications on the client machine even if they are already installed. Is there a more sensible way to achive what I want to achieve? And I'm worried about the security aspects too. I want this to be convenient for users but I of course want to do it "right". I know this can be done as I've seen several mmorpg type games that launch in this way from the browser now but it's not entirely clear to me how they've done it.

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• Visual Studio and .NET programming

  - by Vit

  Hi, I just want to ask wheather I am right or not about .NET. So, .NET is new framework that enables you to easily implement new and old windows functions. It is similiar to java in the way that its also compiled into "bytecode", but its name is Common Language Infrastructure, or CLI. This language is interpreted by .NET Framework, so code generated by programming using .NET cannot be executed directly by CPU. Now, few languages can be compiled to CLI. First, it was Microsoft-developed C#, than J#, C++ others. I suspect that this is in general right, at least I hope I understand it right. But, what I am still missing is, can you write to machine code compiled code in C#? And, if using Visual Studio 2005, when I select Win32 project, it is compiled into machine code, so only thing you need to run this apps are windows dynamic-link libraries, since static libraries code is implemented into app durink linking phase. And those dynamic-link libraries are implemented in every windows installation, or provided by DirectX installations. But when I select CLR in Visual Studio 2005, than app is compiled into CLI code, and it first executes .NET framework, and than .NET framework executes that program, since its not in machine code. So, I am right? I ask becouse you can read these infos on the internet, but I have noone to tell me wheather I understand it right or not. Thanks.

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• Are game engines developed in the USA?

  - by numerical25

  I just finished talking to a Flashpoint Academy recruiter about their curriculum. I told him that after I graduate, I would like to go more in-depth with learning game engines and how to make games. So I asked him did their school teach anything in regards to learning any graphics API such as DirectX. He asked me to elaborate a little more as if he was not sure what I was talking about. So I asked did their school teach on how to build game engines. He said "no we only teach with the tools at hand, such as XNA, or the Unreal engine". He further said "most jobs that deal with building game engines go overseas and most of creative work is done in the United States." To be honest, I really had no intentions of going to this school. I just wanted to learn more about the school in case I had second thoughts somewhere down the line. To me I thought it was a bunch of BS, but my question is to you guys, "is it" ??

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• What technology should I use to write my game?

  - by Alon

  I have a great idea for a 3D network game, and I've concluded that it is possible to write it in Java as an applet which will live under the web browser, just like a full software in C++. And it will look and feel the same. The main advantage of Java on C++ is that with Java you can play without downloading any software. I have already thought about the download of the graphics, sound, etc but I found a solution for it. RuneScape just proves that it is possible. So my first question is, should my game live on a web browser or on the operating system? I think that in a web browser it is much more portable, although you need install Java and stuff. But the fact is, that most MMO games are currently not in the web. If you suggest in a software so please suggest a language either - C++ or something more productive like Python or C#? So after choosing a language, I need a graphics solution. Should I write directly with OpenGL/DirectX or use a game engine? What game engine should I use? Ogre? jMonkeyEngine? What's your opinion? Thank you! P.S: Please don't use answers like "Use what you know".

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• Move camera to fit 3D scene

  - by Burre

  Hi there. I'm looking for an algorithm to fit a bounding box inside a viewport (in my case a DirectX scene). I know about algorithms for centering a bounding sphere in a orthographic camera but would need the same for a bounding box and a perspective camera. I have most of the data: I have the up-vector for the camera I have the center point of the bounding box I have the look-at vector (direction and distance) from the camera point to the box center I have projected the points on a plane perpendicular to the camera and retrieved the coefficients describing how much the max/min X and Y coords are within or outside the viewing plane. Problems I have: Center of the bounding box isn't necessarily in the center of the viewport (that is, it's bounding rectangle after projection). Since the field of view "skew" the projection (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective-foreshortening.svg) I cannot simply use the coefficients as a scale factor to move the camera because it will overshoot/undershoot the desired camera position How do I find the camera position so that it fills the viewport as pixel perfect as possible (exception being if the aspect ratio is far from 1.0, it only needs to fill one of the screen axis)? I've tried some other things: Using a bounding sphere and Tangent to find a scale factor to move the camera. This doesn't work well, because, it doesn't take into account the perspective projection, and secondly spheres are bad bounding volumes for my use because I have a lot of flat and long geometries. Iterating calls to the function to get a smaller and smaller error in the camera position. This has worked somewhat, but I can sometimes run into weird edge cases where the camera position overshoots too much and the error factor increases. Also, when doing this I didn't recenter the model based on the position of the bounding rectangle. I couldn't find a solid, robust way to do that reliably. Help please!

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• WPF - Transparency - Stream Desktop Content

  - by Niels Willems

  Greetings I'm in the process of making a Scoreboard for a game (Starcraft II). This scoreboard is being made as a WPF Application with a C# code-behind. I already have a version which works for 90% in WinForms but I lacked the support to easily make it look a lot nicer which are available in WPF. The point of this application will be to form a kind of overlay on top of a running game. This game is in Fulscreen(Windowed Mode) so when in WinForms I coded it so that it should always be on top. It would do so and that was no problem. Since the main look of the app in WPF is based on an image with a transparent background I have set most Background values to Transparent. However when I do this the entire application does not get registered by streaming software. For example it just shows my Desktop or the game I'm playing but not my application even though it IS there. I can see it with my own eyes but the audience on the stream cannot. Does anyone have any experience with this matter because it's really doing my head in. My entire application will be useless if it is not visible on streams. If I have to put the background on a color rather than transparent the UI will be completely demolished as well in terms of looks. I'm basically trying to make a game-overlay in C# & WPF. I have read you can do this on different ways as well but I have little to no knowledge of C++ nor do I know anything about DirectX Thank you for your time reading and your possible insights. Edit: The best solution would be an overlay similar to that one of Steam/Xfire/Dolby Axon. Edit 2: I've had no luck with all the suggestions so I basically made the transparent bits of my image non transparent and let the user decide which one to use depending on what streaming software they would be using.

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• VB6 Game Development : Don't ask me why :-)

  - by CVS-2600Hertz-wordpress-com

  Hi All, I am developing a game in VB6 (plz don't ask me why :) ). The storyboard is ready and a rough implementation is underway. I am following a "pure-software-rendering" approach. (i.e. no DirectX, no openGL etc.) Amongst many others, the following "serious" problems exist: 2D alpha transparency reqd. to implement overlays. Parallax implementation to give depth-of-field illusion. Capturing mouse-scroll events globally (as in FPS-es; mapping them to changing weapon). Async sound play with absolute "zero-lag". Any ideas anyone. Please suggest any well documented library/ocx or sample-code. Plz do provide solutions with max performance and with as little overhead as possible. Also, anyone who has developed any games, and would be open to sharing her/his code would be highly appreciated. (any well-acknowledged VB games whose source-code i can study??) Thank You

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• Is it possible to anti alias using Copy swap effect?

  - by Nor

  I'm developing an application in VB.Net using Managed DirectX that runs in windowed mode and renders onto a picture box that is smaller than the form. Whenever I resize the form, the back buffer is streched to fit the picture box. This is not what I would like. The backbuffer size is the same as screen size, however, I only want to render a part of the back buffer, whose size is controlled by the size of the picture box into which I'm rendering. Resetting the device with new presentation parameters is something I would like to avoid. I'm aware that I can use an overload of Device.Present if I set the swap effect to copy, but this doesn't allow me to use Multi Sample Anti Alias (which requires the Discard swap effect). It seems to me that the overload Device.Present is not usable with any other swap effect than copy, and throws an exception. An other alternative I considered is the PresentFlags.DeviceClip, however it seems that it works only for Windows XP. I'm using Windows 7 and it doesn't seem to be doing anything. So, is it even possible that I use anti-aliasing in this situation?

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• Performance issue between builds

  - by DeadMG

  I've been developing a small indie game in my spare time and have run across an inexplicable issue. Some builds of the game will randomly run several hundred frames per second slower than other builds. For example, when rendering some text and no 3D scene, I can achieve 1800FPS on my own hardware. Add one 3D sphere (10k verts, pixel shaded), achieve 1700 FPS. Add two more spheres, achieve 800 FPS. Remove all spheres, achieve 1100FPS- even though the code now renders the same scene as I previously achieved at 1800FPS, which is just the FPS counter being rendered. I've tried rebuilding and cleaning the project and rebooting the compiler. This is in Release mode and I turned on all the optimizations I could find. Any suggestions as to the cause? I ran a quick profile, and Visual Studio seems to think that over 90% of my time was spent in D3D9_43.dll, suggesting that it's not a bug in my app, which doesn't explain why it manifests in only some builds. I rebooted my machine and it's back up to 1800FPS. I think it's a bug in the DirectX SDK tools (amongst many others). Going to delete this question.

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• SharpDX: best practice for multiple RenderForms?

  - by Rob Jellinghaus

  I have an XNA app, but I really need to add multiple render windows, which XNA doesn't do. I'm looking at SharpDX (both for multi-window support and for DX11 / Metro / many other reasons). I decided to hack up the SharpDX DX11 MultiCubeTexture sample to see if I could make it work. My changes are pretty trivial. The original sample had: [STAThread] private static void Main() { var form = new RenderForm("SharpDX - MiniCubeTexture Direct3D11 Sample"); ... I changed this to: struct RenderFormWithActions { internal readonly RenderForm Form; // should just be Action but it's not in System namespace?! internal readonly Action RenderAction; internal readonly Action DisposeAction; internal RenderFormWithActions(RenderForm form, Action renderAction, Action disposeAction) { Form = form; RenderAction = renderAction; DisposeAction = disposeAction; } } [STAThread] private static void Main() { // hackity hack new Thread(new ThreadStart(() = { RenderFormWithActions form1 = CreateRenderForm(); RenderLoop.Run(form1.Form, () = form1.RenderAction(0)); form1.DisposeAction(0); })).Start(); new Thread(new ThreadStart(() = { RenderFormWithActions form2 = CreateRenderForm(); RenderLoop.Run(form2.Form, () = form2.RenderAction(0)); form2.DisposeAction(0); })).Start(); } private static RenderFormWithActions CreateRenderForm() { var form = new RenderForm("SharpDX - MiniCubeTexture Direct3D11 Sample"); ... Basically, I split out all the Main() code into a separate method which creates a RenderForm and two delegates (a render delegate, and a dispose delegate), and bundles them all together into a struct. I call this method twice, each time from a separate, new thread. Then I just have one RenderLoop on each new thread. I was thinking this wouldn't work because of the [STAThread] declaration -- I thought I would need to create the RenderForm on the main (STA) thread, and run only a single RenderLoop on that thread. Fortunately, it seems I was wrong. This works quite well -- if you drag one of the forms around, it stops rendering while being dragged, but starts again when you drop it; and the other form keeps chugging away. My questions are pretty basic: Is this a reasonable approach, or is there some lurking threading issue that might make trouble? My code simply duplicates all the setup code -- it makes a duplicate SwapChain, Device, Texture2D, vertex buffer, everything. I don't have a problem with this level of duplication -- my app is not intensive enough to suffer resource issues -- but nonetheless, is there a better practice? Is there any good reference for which DirectX structures can safely be shared, and which can't? It appears that RenderLoop.Run calls the render delegate in a tight loop. Is there any standard way to limit the frame rate of RenderLoop.Run, if you don't want a 400FPS app eating 100% of your CPU? Should I just Thread.Sleep(30) in the render delegate? (I asked on the sharpdx.org forums as well, but Alexandre is on vacation for two weeks, and my sister wants me to do a performance with my app at her wedding in three and a half weeks, so I'm mighty incented here! http://robjsoftware.org for details of what I'm building....)

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• Upgrade Office 2003 to 2010 on XP or Run them Side by Side

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you’re still running XP, currently have Office 2003 installed on your machine, and skipped Office 2007, you might want to upgrade to Office 2010. In this guide we will show you the upgrade process or how to run them side by side. In this example we are upgrading from Office 2003 Standard to Office Professional Plus 2010 RTM (Final) on XP Professional. System Requirements To run Office 2010 on your XP machine you have to make sure you have Service Pack 3 and Microsoft Silverlight installed (links below). Or you can just install them through Windows Update. Recommended Hardware 1GHZ CPU or higher 512 MB of RAM or higher 1024×768 Resolution or higher DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card with 64 MB of memory or higher Installing Office 2010 Simply kick off the Office Professional Plus 2010 installation. Enter in your product key… Agree to the EULA…   Select the Customize button… Setup will detect Office 2003 and allow you to remove all applications, keep them, or select only the ones you want to keep. In this example we’re going to remove Excel and PowerPoint, and keep Outlook and Word 2003. Next, click the Installation Options tab and select Office programs you want to install. Since we’re keeping Outlook 2003 and don’t want to use Outlook 2010, we’re making sure not to install Outlook 2010. However, we want to run Word 2003 and 2010 on the same machine. After you’ve made your selections click the Upgrade button. The installation begins and you’re shown the progress. The amount of time it takes to install will vary between systems. Installation is complete and you can close out of the installer. Now when you go into the Start menu under Microsoft Office, you’ll see both versions of the Office apps available. Here is a shot of Word 2003 and 2010 running together on our XP machine.   Conclusion If you’re moving from Office 2003 to 2010, this allows you to install both versions side by side. It gives you a chance to learn 2010 features, and still work in the familiar 2003 environment when you need to get things done quickly. If you’re having problems installing Office 2010 make sure to check out our article on how to fix problems upgrading Office 2010 beta to RTM (Final) release. Also, if you were using Office 2007 and are currently using the 2010 beta, we have a guide on how to switch back to Office 2007 after the 2010 beta ends. Links XP Service Pack 3 Microsoft Silverlight Details on Office 2010 System Requirements Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Word/Excel 97-2003 Documents Back to the "New" Context Menu After Installing Office 2007Make Word 2007 Always Save in Word 2003 FormatMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatRemove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007How to Find Office 2003 Commands in Office 2010 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes Twelve must-have Google Chrome plugins Cool Looking Skins for Windows Media Player 12 Move the Mouse Pointer With Your Face Movement Using eViacam

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• Educational, well-written FOSS projects to read, study or discuss

  - by Godot

  Before you say it: yes, this "question" has been asked other times. However, I could not fine many of such questions and not that easily, and those I found had similar results. What I'm trying to say that there are no comprehensive lists of well written Open Source projects, so I decided to set some requirements for the entries (one or possibly more): Idiomatic use of the language in which they are written The project should be lightweight. Not as in "a few kbs", as in "clean" and possibly following the UNIX philosophy, making an efficient use of resources and performing its duty and nothing more. No code bloat, most importantly. Projects like Firefox and GNOME wouldn't qualify, for example. Minimal reliance on external, non-standard libraries, with exceptions for some common FOSS libraries (curses, Xlib, OpenGL and possibly "usual suspects" like gtk+, webkit and Boost). Reliance on well-written libraries is welcome. No reliance on proprietary software - for obvious reasons (programs that rely on XNA, DirectX, Cocoa and similar, for example). Well-documented code is welcome. Include link to web interfaces to their repositories if possible. Here are some sample projects that often pop up in these threads: Operating Systems Plan 9 from Bell Labs: More or less, the official "sequel" to UNIX. Written in C by the same people who invented C! NetBSD: The most portable BSD implementation, written in C and also a good example of portable and organized code. Network and Databases Sqlite: Extremely lightweight and extremely efficient, one of the best pieces of C software I've seen. Count the lines yourself! Lighttpd: A small but pretty reliable web server written in C. Programming languages and VMs Lua: extremely lightweight multi-paradigm programming language. Written in C. Tiny C Compiler: Really tiny C compiler. Not really comparable to GCC or Clang but does its job. PyPy: A Python implementation written in Python. Pharo: OK, I admit it, I'm not really a Smalltalk expert but Pharo is a fork of Squeak and looked rather interesting. Stackless Python - An implementation of Python that doesn't rely on the C call stack - written in C (with some parts in Python) Games and 3D: Angband: One of the most accessible roguelike codebases around here, written in C. Ogre3D: Cross-platform 3D engine. Gets bloated if you don't skip the platform-specific implementation code, otherwise is a pretty solid example of good C++ OO. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection: Title says it all. Other - dwm: Lightweight window manager. Written in C. Emulation and Reverse Engineering - Bochs: x86 emulator, written in C++ and tiny enough. - MAME: If you want to see C at one of its lowest levels, MAME is for you. May not be as clean as the other projects but it can teach you A LOT. Before you ask: I didn't mention Linux because it has become quite bloated in the last few years, Linus has also confirmed it. Nonetheless, it'd be a great educational read the same, even if for other reasons. Same for GCC. Feel free to edit or wikify my post. I hope you won't lock my question, I'm only trying to organize a little community effort for the good of all those people who want to enhance their coding skills.

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• Tessellation Texture Coordinates

  - by Stuart Martin

  Firstly some info - I'm using DirectX 11 , C++ and I'm a fairly good programmer but new to tessellation and not a master graphics programmer. I'm currently implementing a tessellation system for a terrain model, but i have reached a snag. My current system produces a terrain model from a height map complete with multiple texture coordinates, normals, binormals and tangents for rendering. Now when i was using a simple vertex and pixel shader combination everything worked perfectly but since moving to include a hull and domain shader I'm slightly confused and getting strange results. My terrain is a high detail model but the textured results are very large patches of solid colour. My current setup passes the model data into the vertex shader then through the hull into the domain and then finally into the pixel shader for use in rendering. My only thought is that in my hull shader i pass the information into the domain shader per patch and this is producing the large areas of solid colour because each patch has identical information. Lighting and normal data are also slightly off but not as visibly as texturing. Below is a copy of my hull shader that does not work correctly because i think the way that i am passing the data through is incorrect. If anyone can help me out but suggesting an alternative way to get the required data into the pixel shader? or by showing me the correct way to handle the data in the hull shader id be very thankful! cbuffer TessellationBuffer { float tessellationAmount; float3 padding; }; struct HullInputType { float3 position : POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; float3 binormal : BINORMAL; float2 tex2 : TEXCOORD1; }; struct ConstantOutputType { float edges[3] : SV_TessFactor; float inside : SV_InsideTessFactor; }; struct HullOutputType { float3 position : POSITION; float2 tex : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; float3 binormal : BINORMAL; float2 tex2 : TEXCOORD1; float4 depthPosition : TEXCOORD2; }; ConstantOutputType ColorPatchConstantFunction(InputPatch<HullInputType, 3> inputPatch, uint patchId : SV_PrimitiveID) { ConstantOutputType output; output.edges[0] = tessellationAmount; output.edges[1] = tessellationAmount; output.edges[2] = tessellationAmount; output.inside = tessellationAmount; return output; } [domain("tri")] [partitioning("integer")] [outputtopology("triangle_cw")] [outputcontrolpoints(3)] [patchconstantfunc("ColorPatchConstantFunction")] HullOutputType ColorHullShader(InputPatch<HullInputType, 3> patch, uint pointId : SV_OutputControlPointID, uint patchId : SV_PrimitiveID) { HullOutputType output; output.position = patch[pointId].position; output.tex = patch[pointId].tex; output.tex2 = patch[pointId].tex2; output.normal = patch[pointId].normal; output.tangent = patch[pointId].tangent; output.binormal = patch[pointId].binormal; return output; } Edited to include the domain shader:- [domain("tri")] PixelInputType ColorDomainShader(ConstantOutputType input, float3 uvwCoord : SV_DomainLocation, const OutputPatch<HullOutputType, 3> patch) { float3 vertexPosition; PixelInputType output; // Determine the position of the new vertex. vertexPosition = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; output.position = mul(float4(vertexPosition, 1.0f), worldMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, viewMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, projectionMatrix); output.depthPosition = output.position; output.tex = patch[0].tex; output.tex2 = patch[0].tex2; output.normal = patch[0].normal; output.tangent = patch[0].tangent; output.binormal = patch[0].binormal; return output; }

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• Gaming on Cloud

  - by technomad

  Sometimes I wonder the pundits of cloud computing are way to consumed with the enterprise applications. With all the CAPEX / OPEX, ROI-talk taking the center stage, an opportunity to affect masses directly is getting overlooked. I am a self proclaimed die hard gamer. I come from the generation of gamers who started their journey in DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D and Allan Border Cricket (the latter is still a favorite pastime). In the late 90s, a revolution called accelerated graphics started in DirectX and OpenGL. Games got more advanced. Likes of Quake III and Unreal Tournament became the crown jewels of the industry. But with all these advancements, there started a race. A race of GFX giants ATI and NVIDIA to beat each other for better frame and image quality. Revisions to the graphics chipsets became frequent. Games became eye candies but at the cost of more GPU power / memory. Every eagerly awaited title started demanding more muscle power in graphics and PC hardware. Latest games and all the liquid smooth frame rates became the territory of the once with deep pockets who could spend lavishly on latest hardware. Enthusiasts like yours truly, who couldn’t afford this route, started exploring over-clocking, optimized hardware cooling... etc. to pursue the passion. Ever rising cost of hardware requirements lead to rampant piracy of PC games. Gamers were willing to spend on the latest titles, but the ones with tight budget prefer hardware upgrades against a legal copy of the game. It was also fueled by emergence of the P2P file sharing networks. Then came the era of Xbox and PS3s. It solved the major issue of hardware standardization and provided an alternative to ever increasing hardware costs. I have always admired these consoles, but being born and brought up in a keyboard/mouse environment, I still find it difficult to play first person shooters with a gamepad. I leave the topic of PC v/s Consol gaming for another day, but the bottom line is… PC gamers deserve an equally democratized solution. This is where I think Cloud Computing can come to rescue. It can minimize hardware requirements. Virtually end the software piracy and rationalize costs for gamers. Subscription based models like pay-as-you-play. In game rewards, like extended subscription credits for exceptional gamers (oh yes, I have beaten Xaero on nightmare in Quake III, time and again!) Easy deployment for patches and fixes. Better game AI. The list goes on and on… Fortunately, companies like OnLive are thinking in the same direction. Their gaming service is all set to launch on 17th June 2010 in E3 2010 expo in L.A. I wish them all the luck. I hope they will start a trend which will bring the smiles back on the face of budget gamers with the help of cloud computing.

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• Getting the number of fragments which passed the depth test

  - by Etan

  In "modern" environments, the "NV Occlusion Query" extension provides a method to get the number of fragments which passed the depth test. However, on the iPad / iPhone using OpenGL ES, the extension is not available. What is the most performant approach to implement a similar behaviour in the fragment shader? Some of my ideas: Render the object completely in white, then count all the colors together using a two-pass shader where first a vertical line is rendered and for each fragment the shader computes the sum over the whole row. Then, a single vertex is rendered whose fragment sums all the partial sums of the first pass. Doesn't seem to be very efficient. Render the object completely in white over a black background. Downsample recursively, abusing the hardware linear interpolation between textures until being at a reasonably small resolution. This leads to fragments which have a greyscale level depending on the number of white pixels where in their corresponding region. Is this even accurate enough? Use mipmaps and simply read the pixel on the 1x1 level. Again the question of accuracy and if it is even possible using non-power-of-two textures. The problem wit these approaches is, that the pipeline gets stalled which results in major performance issues. Therefore, I'm looking for a more performant way to accomplish my goal. Using the EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN extension Apple introduced EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN in iOS 5.0 for iPad 2. "4.1.6 Occlusion Queries Occlusion queries use query objects to track the number of fragments or samples that pass the depth test. An occlusion query can be started and finished by calling BeginQueryEXT and EndQueryEXT, respectively, with a target of ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT or ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT. When an occlusion query is started with the target ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT, the samples-boolean state maintained by the GL is set to FALSE. While that occlusion query is active, the samples-boolean state is set to TRUE if any fragment or sample passes the depth test. When the occlusion query finishes, the samples-boolean state of FALSE or TRUE is written to the corresponding query object as the query result value, and the query result for that object is marked as available. If the target of the query is ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT, an implementation may choose to use a less precise version of the test which can additionally set the samples-boolean state to TRUE in some other implementation dependent cases." The first sentence hints on a behavior which is exactly what I'm looking for: getting the number of pixels which passed the depth test in an asynchronous manner without much performance loss. However, the rest of the document describes only how to get boolean results. Is it possible to exploit this extension to get the pixel count? Does the hardware support it so that there may be hidden API to get access to the pixel count? Other extensions which could be exploitable would be debugging features like the number of times the fragment shader was invoked (PSInvocations in DirectX - not sure if something simila is available in OpenGL ES). However, this would also result in a pipeline stall.

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• Low framerate on background apps

  - by user1698923

  My problem is that when a game is running in the foreground, in Full Screen mode, any applications on my second monitor (such as youtube videos, videos, not app specific) drop their frame-rate to about 2-3 FPS. It seems like some sort of power management option that I can't track down. As far as I can tell, it's not due to the GPU not being able to keep up. For instance, my PC can play League of Legends at about 280FPS when the framerate is uncapped. If i cap it at 60FPS using the in-game option, it has no affect on the performance of the background app. Summary Operating System Windows 8 Pro 64-bit CPU Intel Core i7 3820 @ 3.60GHz 42 °C Sandy Bridge-E 32nm Technology RAM 12.0GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 533MHz (7-7-7-20) Motherboard Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. X79-UD3 (SOCKET 0) 37 °C Graphics DELL U2713HM (2560x1440@59Hz) DELL U2713HM (2560x1440@59Hz) 1280MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 (Gigabyte) 58 °C Hard Drives 212GB Volume0 (RAID) 1863GB Western Digital WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 (SATA) 36 °C 1863GB Western Digital WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 (SATA) 34 °C Optical Drives No optical disk drives detected Audio ASUS Xonar Essence STX Audio Device Operating System Windows 8 Pro 64-bit Computer type: Desktop Graphics Monitor 1 Name DELL U2713HM on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Current Resolution 2560x1440 pixels Work Resolution 2560x1400 pixels State Enabled, Output devices support Multiple displays Extended, Secondary, Enabled Monitor Width 2560 Monitor Height 1440 Monitor BPP 32 bits per pixel Monitor Frequency 59 Hz Device \\.\DISPLAY4\Monitor0 Monitor 2 Name DELL U2713HM on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Current Resolution 2560x1440 pixels Work Resolution 2560x1400 pixels State Enabled, Output devices support Multiple displays Extended, Primary, Enabled Monitor Width 2560 Monitor Height 1440 Monitor BPP 32 bits per pixel Monitor Frequency 59 Hz Device \\.\DISPLAY5\Monitor0 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Manufacturer NVIDIA Model GeForce GTX 570 GPU GF110 Device ID 10DE-1086 Revision A2 Subvendor Gigabyte (1458) Series GeForce GTX 500 Current Performance Level Level 3 Current GPU Clock 845 MHz Current Memory Clock 1900 MHz Current Shader Clock 1690 MHz Voltage 0.988 V Technology 40 nm Die Size 520 mm² Release Date Dec 07, 2010 DirectX Support 11.0 OpenGL Support 5.0 Bus Interface PCI Express x16 Temperature 57 °C Driver version 9.18.13.2018 BIOS Version 70.10.55.00.01 ROPs 40 Shaders 512 unified Memory Type GDDR5 Memory 1280 MB Bus Width 64x5 (320 bit) Filtering Modes 16x Anisotropic Noise Level Moderate Max Power Draw 219 Watts Count of performance levels : 3 Level 1 - "Default" GPU Clock 50 MHz Memory Clock 135 MHz Shader Clock 101 MHz Level 2 - "2D Desktop" GPU Clock 405 MHz Memory Clock 324 MHz Shader Clock 810 MHz Level 3 - "3D Applications" GPU Clock 845 MHz Memory Clock 1900 MHz Shader Clock 1690 MHz Things I've tried: 1) Updating the graphics driver 2) Setting windows power mode to High Performance 3) Reset Nvidia Global Performance settings to default

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• How should I convert a physical drive to a VHD for use with VirtualPC?

  - by RBerteig

  I have the hard disks from a PC that was happily running Windows Me until is it suffered an unknown hardware failure. The drives are intact, and can be mounted and read on other PCs. We have data backups, but there is licensed software installed that may not be possible to migrate to newer versions running on a more modern platform making the idea of just booting a virtual image attractive. Is it possible to make VHDs from the drives such that I can boot them in VirtualPC? If not VirtualPC, would it be possible in any other virtualization tool? Edit: Some more details.... The system was running Windows Me, but upgraded from Windows 95 (or possibly 98). It can't have been more than a Pentium II, but I will have to look at the motherboard to confirm that. There were no "exotic" devices installed, and nothing beyond the usual legacy stuff that would need to survive into a virtual machine. The licensed software did not have a dongle, so I won't need to worry about virtualizing a physical dongle of some kind. Licenses were probably died to the disk serial number. There were two HDs, both IDE. The boot disk is about 6GB, and the spare data disk is 12GB, but nearly empty. I have a small bias in favor of VirtualPC just because its free and I've used it successfully in the past. But this is a good excuse to revisit the state of the art. I do know from direct experience that it is possible to install and boot DOS 5.0 and Win95 in VirtualPC, but the VM extensions weren't available so the experience isn't as seamless as I would have liked. A very old DirectX game that failed miserably under XP SP2 runs really nicely on that VM, and actually plays better in a lot of ways than it did on period hardware, so that gives me hope that this is possible. Edit 2: Well, I'm closer than I was when I asked... so thanks to all for helpful suggestions and hints to what I should be trying. I used WinImage to copy the disks, and VirtualPC 2007 to attempt to boot. So far, I have it booting in safe mode, but hanging with a black screen otherwise. I strongly suspect that the copy of Artisoft Lantastic 8.0 (anyone else remember them?) that is still installed for networking with even older PCs that mostly don't exist any more is the culprit there. In my infinite free time, I will try to resolve the differences between a Safe Mode boot and a normal boot, and feel that it is likely to yield to pressure. I'd accept more than one answer if I could... this isn't as black and white a question as the one accepted answer convention assumes.

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• An issue with tessellation a model with DirectX11

  - by Paul Ske

  I took the hardware tessellation tutorial from Rastertek and implemended texturing instead of color. This is great, so I wanted to implemended the same techique to a model inside my game editor and I noticed it doesn't draw anything. I compared the detailed tessellation from DirectX SDK sample. Inside the shader file - if I replace the HullInputType with PixelInputType it draws. So, I think because when I compiled the shaders inside the program it compiles VertexShader, PixelShader, HullShader then DomainShader. Isn't it suppose to be VertexShader, HullSHader, DomainShader then PixelShader or does it really not matter? I am just curious why wouldn't the model even be drawn when HullInputType but renders fine with PixelInputType. Shader Code: [code] cbuffer ConstantBuffer { float4x4 WVP; float4x4 World; // the rotation matrix float3 lightvec; // the light's vector float4 lightcol; // the light's color float4 ambientcol; // the ambient light's color bool isSelected; } cbuffer cameraBuffer { float3 cameraDirection; float padding; } cbuffer TessellationBuffer { float tessellationAmount; float3 padding2; } struct ConstantOutputType { float edges[3] : SV_TessFactor; float inside : SV_InsideTessFactor; }; Texture2D Texture; Texture2D NormalTexture; SamplerState ss { MinLOD = 5.0f; MipLODBias = 0.0f; }; struct HullOutputType { float3 position : POSITION; float2 texcoord : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; }; struct HullInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float2 texcoord : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; }; struct VertexInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float2 texcoord : TEXCOORD; float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; uint uVertexID : SV_VERTEXID; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float2 texcoord : TEXCOORD0; // texture coordinates float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; float4 color : COLOR; float3 viewDirection : TEXCOORD1; float4 depthBuffer : TEXTURE0; }; HullInputType VShader(VertexInputType input) { HullInputType output; output.position.w = 1.0f; output.position = mul(input.position,WVP); output.texcoord = input.texcoord; output.normal = input.normal; output.tangent = input.tangent; //output.normal = mul(normal,World); //output.tangent = mul(tangent,World); //output.color = output.color; //output.texcoord = texcoord; // set the texture coordinates, unmodified return output; } ConstantOutputType TexturePatchConstantFunction(InputPatch inputPatch,uint patchID : SV_PrimitiveID) { ConstantOutputType output; output.edges[0] = tessellationAmount; output.edges[1] = tessellationAmount; output.edges[2] = tessellationAmount; output.inside = tessellationAmount; return output; } [domain("tri")] [partitioning("integer")] [outputtopology("triangle_cw")] [outputcontrolpoints(3)] [patchconstantfunc("TexturePatchConstantFunction")] HullOutputType HShader(InputPatch patch, uint pointId : SV_OutputControlPointID, uint patchId : SV_PrimitiveID) { HullOutputType output; // Set the position for this control point as the output position. output.position = patch[pointId].position; // Set the input color as the output color. output.texcoord = patch[pointId].texcoord; output.normal = patch[pointId].normal; output.tangent = patch[pointId].tangent; return output; } [domain("tri")] PixelInputType DShader(ConstantOutputType input, float3 uvwCoord : SV_DomainLocation, const OutputPatch patch) { float3 vertexPosition; float2 uvPosition; float4 worldposition; PixelInputType output; // Interpolate world space position with barycentric coordinates float3 vWorldPos = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; // Determine the position of the new vertex. vertexPosition = vWorldPos; // Calculate the position of the new vertex against the world, view, and projection matrices. output.position = mul(float4(vertexPosition, 1.0f),WVP); // Send the input color into the pixel shader. output.texcoord = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; output.normal = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; output.tangent = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; //output.depthBuffer = output.position; //output.depthBuffer.w = 1.0f; //worldposition = mul(output.position,WVP); //output.viewDirection = cameraDirection.xyz - worldposition.xyz; //output.viewDirection = normalize(output.viewDirection); return output; } [/code] Somethings are commented out but will be in place when fixed. I'm probably not connecting something correctly.

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