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  • What is the best way to exploit multicores when making multithread games?

    - by Keeper
    Many people suggest to write a program, and then start optimizing it. But I think that when it's coming to multithreading with multicore, a little think ahead is required. I've read about using threads, and experienced it myself during some courses at the university (still a student). The big question is simple, but a bit abstract: What thread related steps in game design do I need to take, before implementation? Now trying to be more specific. Let's say, as an example, that I'm making a small board game (like Monopoly) that I want to be multithreaded. My goal Is that this multithreaded game will exploit the best of the multicore system, lets say 4-6 cores (like in i7 processors). My answer to this question at the moment is, one thread for each of these four basic components: GUI User Input / Output AI (computer rival) Other game related calculations (like shortest path from A to B, or level up status change) I'm not an expert (yet!), and I'm sure there are better answers out there. Any suggestion, answer, different approach will be helpful. Some thoughts: Maybe splitting the main database is a good way.. (or total disaster.. )

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  • Does it make sense to write build scripts in C++?

    - by Klaim
    I'm using CMake to generate my projects IDE/makefiles, but I still need to call custom "scripts" to manipulate my compiled files or even generate code. In previous projects I've been using Python and it was OK, but now I'm having serious trouble managing a lot of dependencies in two very big projects I'm working on so I want to minimize the dependencies everywhere. Someone suggested to me to use C++ to write my build scripts instead of adding a language dependency just for that. The projects themeselves already use C++ so there are several advantages that I can see: to build the whole project, only a C++ compiler and CMake would be necessary, nothing else (all the other dependencies are C or C++); C++ type safety (when using modern C++) makes everything easier to get "correct"; it's also the language I know the better so I'm more at ease with it even if I'm able to write some good Python code; potential gain in execution speed (but i don't think it will really be perceptible); However, I think there might be some drawbacks and I'm not sure of the real impact as I didn't try yet: might be longer to write the code (that said I'm not sure because I'm efficient enough in C++ to write something that work quickly, so maybe for this system it wouldn't be so long to write) (compilation time shouldn't be a problem for this case); I must assume that all the text files I'll read as input are in UTF-8, I'm not sure it can be easilly checked at runtime in C++ and the language will not check it for you; libraries in C++ are harder to manage than in scripting languages; I lack experience and forsight so maybe I'm missing advantages and drawbacks. So the question is: does it make sense to use C++ for this? do you have experiences to report and do you see advantages and disadvantages that might be important?

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  • Does it make sense to write tests for legacy code when there is no time for a complete refactoring?

    - by is4
    I usually try to follow the advice of the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code. I break dependencies, move parts of the code to @VisibleForTesting public static methods and to new classes to make the code (or at least some part of it) testable. And I write tests to make sure that I don't break anything when I'm modifying or adding new functions. A colleague says that I shouldn't do this. His reasoning: The original code might not work properly in the first place. And writing tests for it makes future fixes and modifications harder since devs have to understand and modify the tests too. If it's GUI code with some logic (~12 lines, 2-3 if/else block, for example), a test isn't worth the trouble since the code is too trivial to begin with. Similar bad patterns could exist in other parts of the codebase, too (which I haven't seen yet, I'm rather new); it will be easier to clean them all up in one big refactoring. Extracting out logic could undermine this future possibility. Should I avoid extracting out testable parts and writing tests if we don't have time for complete refactoring? Is there any disadvantage to this that I should consider?

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  • At the end of my rope

    - by hvgotcodes
    I am a contractor to a big company. Currently, there are three developers on the project, myself included. The problem is the other 2 developers don't really get it. By "it" i mean the following: They don't understand the best practices for the technology we are using. After 6 months of me and others giving them examples there are terrible anti-patterns being used. They are "copy and paste" programmers that produce primarily spaghetti code. They constantly break things, implementing changes but not doing a basic smoke test to see if all is good They refuse/rarely to ask for code-reviews. They refuse/rarely even do basic things like formatting code. No documentation on any classes (jsdocs) Afraid to delete code that doesn't do anything Leave commented code blocks everywhere even though we have version control. I find myself getting more and more frustrated as I format others code, fix bugs, discover functionality that is broken, and create abstractions to remove the spaghetti. I really don't know what to do. I try not to get to frustrated, but it's just a mess. I like these people as people, but I feel like the coding situation is so bad that I could move faster if they simply browsed the web all day. Would it be out of line to ask our manager to review the others svn commit access; commits can only be done after a review by someone who is knowledgeable in what we are doing? As a contractor, I'm not sure if that's the best move. Is there a subtle/not so subtle way of making it clear how many things I am fixing?

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  • Need efficient way to keep enemy from getting hit multiple times by same source

    - by TenFour04
    My game's a simple 2D one, but this probably applies to many types of scenarios. Suppose my player has a sword, or a gun that shoots a projectile that can pass through and hit multiple enemies. While the sword is swinging, there is a duration where I am checking for the sword making contact with any enemy on every frame. But once an enemy is hit by that sword, I don't want him to continue getting hit over and over as the sword follows through. (I do want the sword to continue checking whether it is hitting other enemies.) I've thought of a couple different approaches (below), but they don't seem like good ones to me. I'm looking for a way that doesn't force cross-referencing (I don't want the enemy to have to send a message back to the sword/projectile). And I'd like to avoid generating/resetting multiple array lists with every attack. Each time the sword swings it generates a unique id (maybe by just incrementing a global static long). Every enemy keeps a list of id's of swipes or projectiles that have already hit them, so the enemy knows not to get hurt by something multiple times. Downside is that every enemy may have a big list to compare to. So projectiles and sword swipes would have to broadcast their end-of-life to all enemies and cause a search and remove on every enemy's array list. Seems kind of slow. Each sword swipe or projectile keeps its own list of enemies that it has already hit so it knows not to apply damage. Downsides: Have to generate a new list (probably pull from a pool and clear one) every time a sword is swung or a projectile shot. Also, this breaks down modularity, because now the sword has to send a message to the enemy, and the enemy has to send a message back to the sword. Seems to me that two-way streets like this are a great way to create very difficult-to-find bugs.

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  • Why does Android make good coding so difficult?

    - by metacircle
    my daily work is writing tools in C#/WPF. After over more than 1 year on the job now, I came to love MVVM, IoC Containers, XAML (and more). It's pure fun to write code, since simple, maintainable and extendable code just comes naturally when you follow a few basic patterns. In my free time I really want to write some apps, mainly for my own personal use. I want to write apps for fun and not to make money or anything, that being said, paying an annual fee to be allowed to use my own apps on my own device is a total no-go for me. So I am not able to code for Windows Phone and am also not able to use Xamarin on Android (which is sad since Visual Studio + Resharper is programmers heaven). So I am stuck with Android "classic" Java development. Everytime I sit down at home to create an app, or improve some of the code I have already written I get annoyed very quick because getting good, decoupled code is just so hard to accomplish. It feels like everything you have to do in Android to create a good architecture is a workaround instead of being the way things are meant to be. Writing the UI in xml is fine, but everything else is one big code mess. Even all the tutorials do all their coding in the code behind. For 'hello world' this is fine, but for anything bigger this gets messy very very quick. This is where the fun for me ends. It's just no fun anymore because I just spend 90% of my time refactoring and thinking of workarounds how to make my code more maintainable with all the restrictions Android puts on me. Am I missing a crucial part or is this just the way Android is meant to be? Do you have any suggestions how to learn 'the fun way' of Android programming.

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  • Have Windows Automatically Login Without Entering Your Password

    - by deadlydog
    If you are like me and don't want to have to enter your password each time Windows loads, you can have Windows start up without prompting you to enter a user name or password.  The simple (and BAD) way to do this is to simply not have a password on your user account, but that’s a big security risk and will allow people to easily remote desktop into your computer. So, first set a password on your windows account if you don’t already have one.  Then select Run... from the start menu (or use Windows Key + R to open the Run window) and type control userpasswords2, which will open the user accounts application.   On the Users tab, clear the box for Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer, and click on OK. An Automatically Log On dialog box will appear; enter the user name and password for the account you want to use to automatically log into Windows.  That's it.    You may also want to make sure your screen saver is not set to prompt you for a password when it exits either. Now your computer is secure without getting in your way.

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  • Managing many draw calls for dynamic objects

    - by codetiger
    We are developing a game (cross-platform) using Irrlicht. The game has many (around 200 - 500) dynamic objects flying around during the game. Most of these objects are static mesh and build from 20 - 50 unique Meshes. We created seperate scenenodes for each object and referring its mesh instance. But the output was very much unexpected. Menu screen: (150 tris - Just to show you the full speed rendering performance of 2 test computers) a) NVidia Quadro FX 3800 with 1GB: 1600 FPS DirectX and 2600 FPS on OpenGL b) Mac Mini with Geforce 9400M 256mb: 260 FPS in OpenGL Now inside the game in a test level: (160 dynamic objects counting around 10K tris): a) NVidia Quadro FX 3800 with 1GB: 45 FPS DirectX and 50 FPS on OpenGL b) Mac Mini with Geforce 9400M 256mb: 45 FPS in OpenGL Obviously we don't have the option of mesh batch rendering as most of the objects are dynamic. And the one big static terrain is already in single mesh buffer. To add more information, we use one 2048 png for texture for most of the dynamic objects. And our collision detection hardly and other calculations hardly make any impact on FPS. So we understood its the draw calls we make that eats up all FPS. Is there a way we can optimize the rendering, or are we missing something?

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  • Bootable dvd installs ubuntu in one computer but not in other...Why? [closed]

    - by SAM
    Possible Duplicate: My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it? I have 2 computers, Windows 7 Intel. On one computer Ubuntu boot-able DVD (AMD 64) works properly. But on other computer the same DVD boots OK but when clicked on "Install Ubuntu" a blank screen with blinking cursor(_) appears and it continues just blinking forever. What problem can be there in computer 2? Can it be DVD reader's problem? (Both computers have LG DVD RW) Can there be any problem in DVD? Computer 1 specs: Pentium D 3 GHz Windows 7 32-bit not a 64bit-capable processor still Ubuntu 64bit trial/installer runs... Computer 2 specs: Core i7 2700k Windows 7 32-bit nvidia gtx 560 graphicsCard ...BIG BOSS... still can't run the setup/trial/disk-check/memory-test ?!?!? Is it the problem of graphics card ?!? I also tried burning other dvd which has the same behavour.... AND yes the dvd name is: ubuntu-12.04.1-dvd-amd64.iso Any help is appreciated.

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  • Dim (NEARLY blank) laptop screen, secondary screen works - why?

    - by LIttle Ancient Forest Kami
    My laptop screen is (almost) black while my secondary screen is fine. I believe it to be backlight / brightness related. Problem description it starts when I start the laptop system loads and works fine, just screen has problems I can see the screen though very faintly / dimly - it's hard to see anything which ain't very white e.g. starting screen has big Thinkpad logo in white, large font - I can see it, though very dimly second screen works very well Official backligtht debugging: using acpi setting as prescribed there for Thinkpads didn't help I can see an entry in /sys/class/backlight/ and it changes when I press hotkeys for brightness (current backlight power for instance goes up or down) acpi-off didn't helpm neither did acpi_backlight=vendor Hardware data Laptop is Thinkpad Edge with glossy screen. 4 processors, 2 cores, exemplary CPU data from cat /proc/cpuinfo reports Genuine Intel i5 (M 480 @ 2.67GHz). OS is Ubuntu Lucid, 10.04 LTS, 64-bit, with Linux generic kernel (2.6.32-44) and GNOME 2.32.2 (though I doubt there lies the problem). $ lspci | grep VGA 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series] $ lshw -C display *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series] vendor: ATI Technologies Inc physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=radeon latency=0 resources: irq:33 memory:c0000000-dfffffff(prefetchable) ioport:2000(size=256) memory:f0300000-f030ffff memory:f0320000-f033ffff(prefetchable) Driver I was NOT running any proprietary drivers, just checked with "Hardware drivers". There is one for ATI that is suggested there, though I didn't need it so far. UPDATE: changing the driver to proprietary one (ATI/AMD FGLRX) didn't help. Tried and failed Resetting / running on power or battery / charging / getting rid of static electricity / warming up *doesn't help* This is NOT a blank-screen problem, at least it isn't following official Ubuntu black-screen diagnostics - I can see my screen, though barely. What I will try next: - check last updates I've made - IIRC I am running on nomodeset already, but will verify this Any ideas how to proceed best? What is most probable cause?

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  • c# vocabulary

    - by foxjazz
    I have probably seen and used the word Encapsulation 4 times in my 20 years of programming.I now know what it is again, after an interview for a c# job. Even though I have used the public, private, and protected key words in classes for as long as c# was invented. I can sill remember coming across the string.IndexOf function and thinking, why didn't they call it IndexAt.Now with all the new items like Lambda and Rx, Linq, map and pmap etc, etc. I think the more choices there is to do 1 or 2 things 10 or 15 differing ways, the more programmers think to stay with what works and try and leverage the new stuff only when it really becomes beneficial.For many, the new stuff is harder to read, because programmers aren't use to seeing declarative notation.I mean I have probably used yield break, twice in my project where it may have been possible to use it many more times. Or the using statement ( not the declaration of namespace references) but inline using. I never really saw a big advantage to this, other than confusion. It is another form of local encapsulation (oh there 5 times used in my programming career) but who's counting?  THE COMPUTERS ARE COUNTING!In business logic most programming is about displaying lists, selecting items in a list, and sending those choices to some other system or database to keep track of those selections. What makes this difficult is how these items relate to one, each other, and two externally listed items.Well I probably need to go back to school and learn c# certification so I can say I am an expert in c#. Apparently using all aspects of c# (even unsafe code) in my programming life, doesn't make me certified, just certifiable.This is a good time to sign off:Fox-jazzy

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  • Is there any kind of established architecture for browser based MMO games?

    - by black_puppydog
    I am beginning the development of a broser based game in which players take certain actions at any point in time. Big parts of gameplay will be happening in real life and just have to be entered into the system. I believe a good kind of comparison might be a platform for managing fantasy football, although I have virtually no experience playing that, so please correct me if I am mistaken here. The point is that some events happen in the program (i.e. on the server, out of reach for the players) like pulling new results from some datasource, starting of a new round by a game master and such. Other events happen in real life (two players closing a deal on the transfer of some team member or whatnot - again: have never played fantasy football) and have to be entered into the system. The first part is pretty easy since the game masters will be "staff" and thus can be trusted to a certain degree to not mess with the system. But the second part bothers me quite a lot, especially since the actions may involve multiple steps and interactions with different players, like registering a deal with the system that then has to be approved by the other party or denied and passed on to a game master to decide. I would of course like to separate the game logic as far as possible from the presentation and basic form validation but am unsure how to do this in a clean fashion. Of course I could (and will) put some effort into making my own architectural decisions and prototype different ideas. But I am bound to make some stupid mistakes at some point, so I would like to avoid some of that by getting a little "book smart" beforehand. So the question is: Is there any kind of architectural works that I can read up on? Papers, blogs, maybe design documents or even source code? Writing this down this seems more like a business application with business rules, workflows and such... Any good entry points for that?

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  • My first blog post…

    - by steveh99999
    I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a while now, (OK, for several years…..) - finally now, here it begins First post, something really simple but, a wise-man once told me about the best way to improve SQL server performance. Store Less Data. That's it.. that's all there is to it... Over the years, I've seen the following :- -  a 200Gb database which held 3 days data. Once business requirements changed, we were able to hold only 1 days data in this database. -  a table developed by DBAs to hold application table cardinality information - that information was collected at 2 hour intervals every day for 7 years ! After 7 years the DBA space-info table had become the largest table in the database - 60 million rows !  It was a simple change to remove alot of the historical intra-day data and change the schedule to run only once per evening. Suddenly that table held 6 million rows instead of 60 million.... - lots of backup and restore history held in msdb. See this post by Brent Ozar for more details on this issue. Imagine how much faster the backups, DBCC Checks and reindexes ran when the above 3 changes were implemented ?   How often do you review your big databases \ tables to see if you’re actually holding only data that is really required by the business ?

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  • Complex shading using one single (small) texture

    - by teodron
    Recently I stumbled upon a demo reel in UDK about how one can attain beautiful results using just one (rather tiny) texture that's being sent to the shader pipeline. The famous link is this one. Basically, the author states that they've used just one texture and give a snapshot of the technique here. I see that every RGBA channel contains different grayscale information.. and that info could be used to inside a shader to obtain a colour blended output. The problem is that the reel displays a fairly complex scene. To top that, the author even makes use of a normal map. How did they manage to fit a normal map in an already cluttered texture? It makes sense to have a half-space normal map by using only RG from an RGB texture, but what about the rest of the information? Since it was proven to be possible, could someone please explain how it was done (the big picture, not the dirty details!)!? Here's the texture being used. Click to see in full size.

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  • Is Version control with GIT useful to work in small projects fon an individual developer? [closed]

    - by chefnelone
    I work as website developer. I develop with Drupal CSM. I have a drupal base installation which has some settings which are sort of default for all my proyects. This drupal installation is my drupal-base folder Every time I start a new project I just duplicate the `drupal-base- folder and start coding the new features I need for the new proyect. The problem is that sometimes I work in more than one projects at the same time and I get a new feature in one of the project that I'd like to commit to my drupal base installation and also to the other projects. Then keeping the sync of all this is nightmare. I thought that Version Control with GIT could help me with this and I went into a tutorial about it. But now I'm not sure if this will be usefull for me. Then my question is: I think that GIT is just usefull for big projects where a team is working all together in the same files. But it is not usefull to work in small and individual projects. Am I right?

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  • Printer Canon MP540 succesfully added finally but doesn't print? (Attached Debug log)

    - by NES
    i tried to setup my printer in Ubuntu 10.10. I had to use special guide to install because Canon used libcupsys2 in its packages and ubuntu expects libscupsys i followed this guide in reference to this advice. The first problem was this one (the ubuntu "add printer dialog asked for root credentials". The suggested workarout in Launchpad to create a root password worked. Now i added the printer. It's available for printing. Then i got an error message "cups insecure filter" which prevented me from printing. That could be solved by setting the need root rights in the /usr/lib/cups/filter/ directory. The error message disappeared after restarting cups service. Now it should work but it doesn't. The main problem is now, the printer seems to be proper setup but when i try to print a document, the printer icon appears for short time in gnomepanel. There's a printing job in Queue which got completed, but the printer doesn't print. I attached the Debuglog provided by printer error control, had to upload to another site, since it was to big in the question body here. Perhaps someone can identify the problem with it? Note: i know that it once worked fine with an older release of Ubuntu, but not sure which version this was.

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  • Implementing my Entity System. Questions about some problems I have found.

    - by Notbad
    Hi!, Well during this week I have deciding about implementation of my entity system. It is a big topic so it has been difficult to take one option from the whole. This has been my decision: 1) I don't have an entity class it is just an id. 2) I have systems that contain a list of components (the list is homegenous, I mean, RenderSystem will just have RenderComponents). 3) Compones will be just data. 4) There would be some kind of "entity prototypes" in a manager or something from we will create entity instances.Ideally they will define the type of components it has and initialization data. 5) Prototype code to create an entity (this is from the top of my head): int id=World::getInstance()->createEntity("entity template"); 6) This will notify all systems that a new entity has been created, and if the entity needs a component that the system handles it will add it to the entity. Ok, this are the ideas. Let's see if some can help with the problems: 1) The main problem is this templates that are sent to the systems in creation process to populate the entity with needed components. What would you use, an OR(ed) int?, a list of strings?. 2) How to do initialization for components when the entity has been created? How to store this in the template? I have thought about having a function in the template that is virtual and after entity is created an populated, gets the components and sets initialization values. 3) Don't you think this is a lot of work for just an entity creation?. Sorry for the long post, I have tried to expose my ideas and finding in order other could have a start beside exposing my problems. Thanks in advance, Notbad.

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  • As a programmer, what's the most valuable non-English (human) language to learn?

    - by Andrew M
    I was thinking that with my developer skills, learning new languages like French, German etc. might be easier for me now. I could setup the verbs as objects in Python and use dir(verb) to find its methods, tenses and stuff ;-) But seriously, if you're a professional developer, in my case in the UK, what's the best foreign language to learn from an employment perspective? I'm thinking, like Hindi - if all our programming jobs are getting outsourced to India, might as well position yourself to be the on-site, go-between guy. Mandarin - if the Chinese become the pre-eminent economy, the new USA, in ten or twenty years, then speaking their language would open up a huge market to you. Russian - maybe another major up-and-comer, but already closer to Western standards. More IT-sector growth here than anywhere else in the coming years? Japanese - drivers of global technology, being able to speak their language could give you a big competitive advantage over other Westerners But I'm just guessing/musing with all these points. If you have an opinion, or even better, some evidence, I'd like to hear it. If the programming things falls through then at least it'll make for more interesting holidays.

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  • a flexible data structure for geometries

    - by AkiRoss
    What data structure would you use to represent meshes that are to be altered (e.g. adding or removing new faces, vertices and edges), and that have to be "studied" in different ways (e.g. finding all the triangles intersecting a certain ray, or finding all the triangles "visible" from a given point in the space)? I need to consider multiple aspects of the mesh: their geometry, their topology and spatial information. The meshes are rather big, say 500k triangles, so I am going to use the GPU when computations are heavy. I tried using arrays with vertices and arrays with indices, but I do not love adding and removing vertices from them. Also, using arrays totally ignore spatial and topological information, which I may need studying the mesh. So, I thought about using custom double-linked list data structures, but I believe doing so will require me to copy the data to array buffers before going on the GPU. I also thought about using BST, but not sure it fits. Any help is appreciated. If I have been too fuzzy and you require other information feel free to ask.

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  • Dynamic quadrees

    - by paul424
    recently I come out writing Quadtree for creatures culling in Opendungeons game. Thing is those are moving points and bounding hierarchy will quickly get lost if the quadtree is not rebuild very often. I have several variants, first is to upgrade the leaf position , every time creature move is requested. ( note if I would need collision detection anyway, so this might be necessery anyway). Second would be making leafs enough large , that the creature would sure stay inside it's bounding box ( due to its speed limit). The partition of a plane in quadtree is always fixed ( modulo the hierarchical unions of some parts) . For creatures close to the center of the plane , there would be no way of keeping it but inside one big leaf, besides this brokes the invariant that each point can be put into any small area as desired. So on the second thought could I use several quadrees ? Each would have its "coordinate axis XY" somwhere shifted ? Before I start playing with this maybe some other space diving structure would suit me better, unfortunetly wiki does not compare it's execution time : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_%28spatial_index%29#See_also

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  • How to Create a Grid for a 2D Game?

    - by SoulBeaver
    So I'm currently writing the engine for my videogame. I've almost integrated Tiled (I think) so I should have a map-creator here soon. My question is, how do I actually make the grid? I'm really confused here. If I create a large map with, say, 20x20 grids the size of 32x32 (screen size 640x640), then what do I do with it? Let's say I have the code for creating a window, and then place a player sprite that I can move with input, that's fine. If I use one map that's as big as the screen, then every pixel on the map is also a pixel on the game screen. The mapping is exact. Now what happens if I have a 2000x2000 map, for example? My character would have to keep moving and move the map around (or rather the camera focused on the player moves). Then I can no longer say that the screen maps exactly to the pixel position of the map. I tried making a Grid class that maps out the screen area to 32x32 tiles, but I'm not sure if that makes any sense. Once the map moves each tile would have to update its information, or something. I'm just really confused here. How do I actually make the tiles and a grid and map them to the data I get from tiled, or that I make myself? Are there any good examples of source code that I could look at?

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  • Dealing with numerous, simultaneous sounds in unity

    - by luxchar
    I've written a custom class that creates a fixed number of audio sources. When a new sound is played, it goes through the class, which creates a queue of sounds that will be played during that frame. The sounds that are closer to the camera are given preference. If new sounds arrive in the next frame, I have a complex set of rules that determines how to replace the old ones. Ideally, "big" or "important" sounds should not be replaced by small ones. Sound replacement is necessary since the game can be fast-paced at times, and should try to play new sounds by replacing old ones. Otherwise, there can be "silent" moments when an old sound is about to stop playing and isn't replaced right away by a new sound. The drawback of replacing old sounds right away is that there is a harsh transition from the old sound clip to the new one. But I wonder if I could just remove that management logic altogether, and create audio sources on the fly for new sounds. I could give "important" sounds more priority (closer to 0 in the corresponding property) as opposed to less important ones, and let Unity take care of culling out sound effects that exceed the channel limit. The only drawback is that it requires many heap allocations. I wonder what strategy people use here?

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  • Using a random string to authenticate HMAC?

    - by mrwooster
    I am designing a simple webservice and want to use HMAC for authentication to the service. For the purpose of this question we have: a web service at example.com a secret key shared between a user and the server [K] a consumer ID which is known to the user and the server (but is not necessarily secret) [D] a message which we wish to send to the server [M] The standard HMAC implementation would involve using the secret key [K] and the message [M] to create the hash [H], but I am running into issues with this. The message [M] can be quite long and tends to be read from a file. I have found its very difficult to produce a correct hash consistently across multiple operating systems and programming languages because of hidden characters which make it into various file formats. This is of course bad implementation on the client side (100%), but I would like this webservice to be easily accessible and not have trouble with different file formats. I was thinking of an alternative, which would allow the use a short (5-10 char) random string [R] rather than the message for autentication, e.g. H = HMAC(K,R) The user then passes the random string to the server and the server checks the HMAC server side (using random string + shared secret). As far as I can see, this produces the following issues: There is no message integrity - this is ok message integrity is not important for this service A user could re-use the hash with a different message - I can see 2 ways around this Combine the random string with a timestamp so the hash is only valid for a set period of time Only allow each random string to be used once Since the client is in control of the random string, it is easier to look for collisions I should point out that the principle reason for authentication is to implement rate limiting on the API service. There is zero need for message integrity, and its not a big deal if someone can forge a single request (but it is if they can forge a very large number very quickly). I know that the correct answer is to make sure the message [M] is the same on all platforms/languages before hashing it. But, taking that out of the equation, is the above proposal an acceptable 2nd best?

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  • PASS Summit Preconference and Sessions

    - by Davide Mauri
    I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be delivering a Pre-Conference at PASS Summit 2012. I’ll speak about Business Intelligence again (as I did in 2010) but this time I’ll focus only on Data Warehouse, since it’s big topic even alone. I’ll discuss not only what is a Data Warehouse, how it can be modeled and built, but also how it’s development can be approached using and Agile approach, bringing the experience I gathered in this field. Building the Agile Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012 http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Sessions/SessionDetails.aspx?sid=2821 I’m sure you’ll like it, especially if you’re starting to create a BI Solution and you’re wondering what is a Data Warehouse, if it is still useful nowadays that everyone talks about Self-Service BI and In-Memory databases, and what’s the correct path to follow in order to have a successful project up and running. Beside this Preconference, I’ll also deliver a regular session, this time related to database administration, monitoring and tuning: DMVs: Power in Your Hands http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Sessions/SessionDetails.aspx?sid=3204 Here we’ll dive into the most useful DMVs, so that you’ll see how that can help in everyday management in order to discover, understand and optimze you SQL Server installation, from the server itself to the single query. See you there!!!!!

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  • android shut-down errors / thread problems

    - by iQue
    Im starting to deal with some stuff in my game that I thought were "minor problems" and one of these are that I get an error every time I shut down my game that looks like this: 09-05 21:40:58.320: E/AndroidRuntime(30401): FATAL EXCEPTION: Thread-4898 09-05 21:40:58.320: E/AndroidRuntime(30401): java.lang.NullPointerException 09-05 21:40:58.320: E/AndroidRuntime(30401): at nielsen.happy.shooter.MainGamePanel.render(MainGamePanel.java:94) 09-05 21:40:58.320: E/AndroidRuntime(30401): at nielsen.happy.shooter.MainThread.run(MainThread.java:101) on these lines is my GameViews rendering-method and the line in my Thread that calls my GameViews rendering-method. Im guessing Something in my surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) is wrong, or maybe Im not ending the tread in the right place. My surfaceDestroyed-method: public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) { Log.d(TAG, "Surface is being destroyed"); boolean retry = true; ((MainThread)thread).setRunning(false); while (retry) { try { ((MainThread)thread).join(); retry = false; } catch (InterruptedException e) { } } Log.d(TAG, "Thread was shut down cleanly"); } Also, In my activity for this View my onPaus, onDestoy and onStop are empty, do I maybe need to add something there? The crash occurs when I press my home-button on the phone, or any other button that makes the game stop. But as I understand it the onPaus is called when you press the Home-button.. This is really new territory for me so Im sorry if im missing something obvious or something really big. adding my surfaceCreated method asweel since that is where I start this thread: public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) { controls = new GameControls(this); setOnTouchListener(controls); timer1.schedule(new Task(this), 0, delay1); thread.setRunning(true); thread.start(); } and aslong as this is running, my game is rendering and updating.

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