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• Google Programmers

  - by seth

  As a soon-to-be software engineer, I have studied some languages during my time in college. I can name C, C++, Java, Scheme, Ruby, PHP, for example. However, one of the main principles in my college (recognized by many as the best in my country) is to teach us how to learn for ourselves and how to search the web when we have a doubt. This leads to a proactive attitude, when I need something, I go get it and this has worked so far for me. Recently, I started wondering though, how much development would I be able to do without internet access. The answer bugged me quite a bit. I know the concept of the languages, mostly I know what to do, but I was amazed by how "slow" things were without having the google to help in the development. The problem was mostly related to specific syntax but it was not without some effort that i solved some of the SPOJ problems in C++. Is this normal? Should I be worried and try to change something in my programming behaviour? UPDATE: I'll give a concrete example. Reading and writing to a file in java. I have done this about a dozen times in my life, yet every time I need to do it, I end up googling "read file java" and refreshing my memory. I completely understand the code, i fully understand what it does. But I am sure, that without google, it would take me a few tries to read and write correctly (if I had to sit in front of the screen with a blank page and write this without consulting any source whatsoever).

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• Creating a newspaper that effects the game's economy?

  - by zardon

  I am writing a game in Objective C/cocos2d where a newspaper is a central part of what controls or rather effects the game's world economy as well as what a city might do (such as increase X, reduce Y) The newspaper is a bit like a "Chance card" in Monopoly, it has an effect on something. My question is, what is the best way to do write a newspaper that has both a random and specific effect within the game. Would the best strategy be to write out all the things a newspaper can affect, a PLIST of headlines (with placeholders). I think Tiny Tower uses a PLIST of events and it randomly picks an event, but I'm not sure how it actually parses it because certain events do different things. But then how do I parse all the scenarios that a newspaper can deliver? A big switch statement seems very long and complicated to do. I am wondering if there is a simpler way to handle this kind of thing. Related to this is that there might be no news that day and I'm not sure what the newspaper should display, should it just display the last headline? So, in summary. 1) A newspaper generates a headline, it affects different things, such as the world economy, prices, how city reacts 2) I need the newspaper to generate headlines (although there may be days when there are no headlines at all), but I am not sure how to parse it without using a big-ass switch statement. Thanks in advance.

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• Does this BSD-like license achieve what I want it to?

  - by Joseph Szymborski

  I was wondering if this license is: self defeating just a clone of an existing, better established license practical any more "corporate-friendly" than the GPL too vague/open ended and finally, if there is a better license that achieves a similar effect? I wanted a license that would (in simple terms) be as flexible/simple as the "Simplified BSD" license (which is essentially the MIT license) allow anyone to make modifications as long as I'm attributed require that I get a notification that such a derived work exists require that I have access to the source code and be given license to use the code not oblige the author of the derivative work to have to release the source code to the general public not oblige the author of the derivative work to license the derivative work under a specific license Here is the proposed license, which is just the simplified BSD with a couple of additional clauses (all of which are bolded). Copyright (c) (year), (author) (email) All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. The copyright holder(s) must be notified of any redistributions of source code. The copyright holder(s) must be notified of any redistributions in binary form The copyright holder(s) must be granted access to the source code and/or the binary form of any redistribution upon the copyright holder's request. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

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• Using XSLT for messaging instead of marshalling/unmarshalling Java message objects

  - by Joost van Stuijvenberg

  So far I have been using either handmade or generated (e.g. JAXB) Java objects as 'carriers' for messages in message processing software such as protocol converters. This often leads to tedious programming, such as copying/converting data from one system's message object to an instance of another's system message object. And it sure brings in lots of Java code with getters and setters for each message attribute, validation code, etc. I was wondering whether it would be a good idea to convert one system's XML message into another system's format - or even convert requests into responses from the same system - using XSLT. This would mean I would no longer have to unmarshall XML streams to Java objects, copy/convert data using Java and marshall the resulting message object to another XML stream. Since each message may actually have a purpose I would 'link' the message (and the payload it contains in its properties or XML elements/attributes) to EXSLT functions. This would change my design approach from an imperative to a declarative style. Has anyone done this before and, if so, what are your experiences? Does the reduced amount of Java 'boiler plate' code weigh up to the increased complexity of (E)XSLT?

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• Actually utilizing relational databases for entity systems

  - by Marc Müller

  Recently I was researching several entity systems and obviously I came across T=Machine's fantastic articles on the subject. In Part 5 of the series the author uses a relational schema to explain how an entity system is built and works. Since reading this, I have been wondering whether or not actually using a compact SQL library would be fast enough for real-time usage in video games. Performance seems to be the main issue with a full blown SQL database for management of all entities and components. However, as mentioned in T=Machine's post, basically all access to data inside the SQLDB is done sequentlially by each system over each component. Additionally, using a library like SQLite, one could easily improve performance by storing the entity data exclusively in RAM to increase access speeds. Disregarding possible performance issues, using a SQL database, in my opinion, would allow for a very intuitive implementation of entity systems and bring a long certain other benefits like easy de/serialization of game states and consistency checks like the uniqueness of entity IDs. Edit for clarification: The main question was whether using a SQL database for the actual entity management (not just storing the game state on the disk) in a real-time game would still yield a framerate appropriate for a game or even if someone is aware of projects that demonstrate SQL in a video game.

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• What to include in metadata?

  - by shyam

  I'm wondering if there are any general guidelines or best practices regarding when to split data into a metadata format, as oppose to directly embedding it within the data. (Specific example below). My understanding of metadata is that it describes data (without the need to actually look at the data), allowing for data to be quickly search/filtered for easy access. Let's take for example a simple 3D model format. The actual data file itself is a binary file containing vertices and colors. Things like creation date, modified data and author name would be things that describe the binary data, so I would say these belong as metadata (outside of the binary file). But what if the application had no need to search or filter by these fields? Would it be acceptable to embed these fields directly into the binary data itself? Could they be duplicated in both the binary data and the meta data, or would this be considered bad practice? What about more ambiguous fields such as the model name, which could be considered part of the data itself, but also as data describing the binary data?... How do you decide which data to embed in the actual binary file, as opposed to separating into a more flexible metadata format? Thanks!

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• How do I use depth testing and texture transparency together in my 2.5D world?

  - by nbolton

  Note: I've already found an answer (which I will post after this question) - I was just wondering if I was doing it right, or if there is a better way. I'm making a "2.5D" isometric game using OpenGL ES (JOGL). By "2.5D", I mean that the world is 3D, but it is rendered using 2D isometric tiles. The original problem I had to solve was that my textures had to be rendered in order (from back to front), so that the tiles overlapped properly to create the proper effect. After some reading, I quickly realised that this is the "old hat" 2D approach. This became difficult to do efficiently, since the 3D world can be modified by the player (so stuff can appear anywhere in 3D space) - so it seemed logical that I take advantage of the depth buffer. This meant that I didn't have to worry about rendering stuff in the correct order. However, I faced a problem. If you use GL_DEPTH_TEST and GL_BLEND together, it creates an effect where objects are blended with the background before they are "sorted" by z order (meaning that you get a weird kind of overlap where the transparency should be). Here's some pseudo code that should illustrate the problem (incidentally, I'm using libgdx for Android). create() { // ... // some other code here // ... Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_DEPTH_TEST); Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_BLEND); } render() { Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); Gdx.gl.glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); // ... // bind texture and create vertices // ... } So the question is: How do I solve the transparency overlap problem?

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• Why maven so slow compared to automake?

  - by ???'Lenik

  I have a Maven project consists of around 100 modules. I have reason to decompose the project to so many modules, and I don't think I should merge them in order to speed up the build process. I have read a lot of projects by other people, e.g., the Maven project itself, and Apache Archiva, and Hudson project, they all consists of a lot of modules, nearly 100 maybe, more or less. The problem is, to build them all need so much time, 3 hours for the first time build (this is acceptable because a lot of artifacts to download), and 15 minutes for the second build (this is not acceptable). For automake, things are similarly, the first time you need to configure the project, to prepare the magical config.h file, it's far more complex then what maven does. But it's still fast, maybe 10 seconds on my Debian box. After then, make install requires maybe 10 minutes for the first time build. However, when everything get prepared, the .o object files are generated, they don't have to be rebuild at all for the second time build. (In Maven, everything rebuild at everytime.) I'm very wondering, how guys working for Maven projects can bare this long time for each build, I'm just can't sit down calmly during each time Maven build, it took too long time, really.

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• Is there a process-oriented IDE ?

  - by Raveline

  My problem is simple : when I'm programming in an OO paradigm, I'm often having part of a main business process divided in many classes. Which means, if I want to examine the whole functional chain that leads to the output, for debugging or for optimization research, it can be a bit painful. So I was wondering : is there an IDE that let you put a "process tag" on functions coming from different objects, and give you a view of all those functions having the same tag ? edit : To give an example (that I'm making up completely, sorry if it doesn't sound very realistic). Let's say we have the following business process for a HR application : receive a holiday-request by an employee, check the validity of the request, then give an alert to his boss ("one of those lazy programmer wants another day off"); at the same time, let's say the boss will want to have a table of all employee's timetable during the time the employee wants his vacations; then handle the answer of the boss, send a nice little mail to the employee ("No way, lazy bones"). Even if we get rid of everything not purely business-related (mail sending process, db handling to get the useful info, GUI functionalities, and so on), we still have something that doesn't really fit in "one class". I'd like to have an IDE that would give me the opportunity to embrace quickly, at the very least : The function handling the validation of the request by the employee; The function preparing the "timetable" for the boss; The function handling the validation of the request by the boss; I wouldn't put all those functions in the same class (but perhaps that's my mistake ?). This is where my dreamed IDE could be helpful.

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• Which approach would lead to an API that is easier to use?

  - by Clem

  I'm writing a JavaScript API and for a particular case, I'm wondering which approach is the sexiest. Let's take an example: writing a VideoPlayer, I add a getCurrentTime method which gives the elapsed time since the start. The first approach simply declares getCurrentTime as follows: getCurrentTime():number where number is the native number type. This approach includes a CURRENT_TIME_CHANGED event so that API users can add callbacks to be aware of time changes. Listening to this event would look like the following: myVideoPlayer.addEventListener(CURRENT_TIME_CHANGED, function(evt){ console.log ("current time = "+evt.getDispatcher().getCurrentTime()); }); The second approach declares getCurrentTime differently: getCurrentTime():CustomNumber where CustomNumber is a custom number object, not the native one. This custom object dispatches a VALUE_CHANGED event when its value changes, so there is no need for the CURRENT_TIME_CHANGED event! Just listen to the returned object for value changes! Listening to this event would look like the following: myVideoPlayer.getCurrentTime().addEventListener(VALUE_CHANGED, function(evt){ console.log ("current time = "+evt.getDispatcher().valueOf()); }); Note that CustomNumber has a valueOf method which returns a native number that lets the returned CustomNumber object being used as a number, so: var result = myVideoPlayer.getCurrentTime()+5; will work! So in the first approach, we listen to an object for a change in its property's value. In the second one we directly listen to the property for a change on its value. There are multiple pros and cons for each approach, I just want to know which one the developers would prefer to use!

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• Be liberal in what you accept... or not?

  - by Matthieu M.

  [Disclaimer: this question is subjective, but I would prefer getting answers backed by facts and/or reflexions] I think everyone knows about the Robustness Principle, usually summed up by Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept. I would agree that for the design of a widespread communication protocol this may make sense (with the goal of allowing easy extension), however I have always thought that its application to HTML / CSS was a total failure, each browser implementing its own silent tweak detection / behavior, making it near impossible to obtain a consistent rendering across multiple browsers. I do notice though that there the RFC of the TCP protocol deems "Silent Failure" acceptable unless otherwise specified... which is an interesting behavior, to say the least. There are other examples of the application of this principle throughout the software trade that regularly pop up because they have bitten developpers, from the top off my head: Javascript semi-colon insertion C (silent) builtin conversions (which would not be so bad if it did not truncated...) and there are tools to help implement "smart" behavior: name matching phonetic algorithms (Double Metaphone) string distances algorithms (Levenshtein distance) However I find that this approach, while it may be helpful when dealing with non-technical users or to help users in the process of error recovery, has some drawbacks when applied to the design of library/classes interface: it is somewhat subjective whether the algorithm guesses "right", and thus it may go against the Principle of Least Astonishment it makes the implementation more difficult, thus more chances to introduce bugs (violation of YAGNI ?) it makes the behavior more susceptible to change, as any modification of the "guess" routine may break old programs, nearly excluding refactoring possibilities... from the start! And this is what led me to the following question: When designing an interface (library, class, message), do you lean toward the robustness principle or not ? I myself tend to be quite strict, using extensive input validation on my interfaces, and I was wondering if I was perhaps too strict.

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• How to handle wildly varying rendering hardware / getting baseline

  - by edA-qa mort-ora-y

  I've recently started with mobile programming (cross-platform, also with desktop) and am encountering wildly differing hardware performance, in particular with OpenGL and the GPU. I know I'll basically have to adjust my rendering code but I'm uncertain of how to detect performance and what reasonable default settings are. I notice that certain shader functions are basically free in a desktop implemenation but can be unusable in a mobile device. The problem is I have no way of knowing what features will cause what performance issues on all the devices. So my first issue is that even if I allow configuring options I'm uncertain of which options I have to make configurable. I'm wondering also wheher one just writes one very configurable pipeline, or whether I should have 2 distinct options (high/low). I'm also unsure of where to set the default. If I set to the poorest performer the graphics will be so minimal that any user with a modern device would dismiss the game. If I set them even at some moderate point, the low end devices will basically become a slide-show. I was thinking perhaps that I just run some benchmarks when the user first installs and randomly guess what works, but I've not see a game do this before.

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• 2D animations frames vs 3D animation for small indie project: timing considerations

  - by mm24

  pretty lame question but was wondering.. I am developing a 2D game using Cocos2D for iOS. The art work till now is all 2D (is a shooter game) but some of the characters would benefit of complex animations (eg. 20 frames). I feel a bit stupid because I came across only now that there is the chance to do 3D to 2D frames exporting and then to use them in Cocos2D. The thing that put me off on 3D gaming at first was that it takes more than one person in a team to do so properly (Illustrator, 3D modeller, 3D animator and programmer). Now I feel a bit stupid because having a 3D model I could do and modify the poses whenever I wanted (I should ask to the 3D animator which I guess would be time expensive). Instead now is me and two illustrators (as I require many frames per character). Is my impression that it would have been much longer right or not? Are there any other project management considerations that can be done on this? Sorry if for some this might be trivial but is my first "indie game developer experience".

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• Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

  - by mgibsonbr

  A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

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• Microkernel architectural pattern and applicability for business applications

  - by Pangea

  We are in the business of building customizable web applications. We have the core team that provides what we call as the core platform (provides services like security, billing etc.) on top of which core products are built. These core products are industry specific solutions like telecom, utility etc. These core products are later used by other teams to build customer specific solutions in a particular industry. Until now we have a loose separation between platform and core product. The customer specific solutions are build by customizing 20-40% of the core offering and re-packaging. The core-platform and core products are released together as monolithic apps (ear). I am looking to improvise the current situation so that there is a cleaner separation on these 3. This allows us to have evolve each of these 3 separately etc. I've read through the Mircokernel architecture and kind of felt that I can take apply the principles in my context. But most of my reading about this pattern is always in the context of operating systems or application servers etc. I am wondering if there are any examples on how that pattern was used for architecting business applications. Or you could provide some insight on how to apply that pattern to my problem.

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• Convience of mySQL over xml

  - by Bonechilla

  Currently I use XML to store specific information to correctly load a few things such as a list of specfied characters, scenes and music, Once more I use JAXB in combination with standard compression/decompression(ZIP) functionality to store a list of extrenous data. This data is called to add functionality to the character, somewhat like Skills in an RPG. Each skill is seperated into its own XML file with a grandlist which contains the names of each file with their extensions omitted and zipped in folder that gets encrypted. At first using xml was working fine however as the skill list grow i worry about its stability. I was wondering if I should begin storing the data in mySQL. Originally I planned to simply convert everything to JSON over xml but i think possibly mySQL would be a better move. Can anyone inform me of the key difference and pros and cons of each I guess i'm looking for the best way to store the data more conviently and would be easier to operate on. The data is mostly primatives and strings and the only arraylist of values i have i can just concat into a single field and parse later

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• Just started a job with Scrum. Something seems to be missing. I am new to Scrum

  - by punkouter

  The code is a complete mess of a combination of classic ASP/ASP.NET. The scrum consist of us patching up the big mess or making additions to it. We are all too busy doing that to start a rewrite so I am wondering.. Where is the part in Scrum where the developers can have the power to say that enough is enough and demand that they are given time to start the big rewrite ? We seem in an endless loop of just patching old code with 'Stories'. So things are being run by the non-technical people who seem to have no desire to push for a rewrite because they don't understand how bad the code base has gotten.. So who is in charge of making this big rewrite change happen ? The devs? The scrum master? The current strategy is just find time and do it ourselves without the higher ups involved.. since they are mostly to blame for the current mess we are in.. <-insert rant about non-tech people telling tech people what to do here-

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• Is there a way to legally create a game mod?

  - by Rodrigo Guedes

  Some questions about it: If I create a funny version of a copyrighted game and sell it (crediting the original developers) would it be considered a parody or would I need to pay royalties? If I create a game mod for my own personal use would it be legal? What if I gave it for free to a friend? Is there a general rule about it or it depends on the developer will? P.S.: I'm not talking about cloning games like this question. It's all about a game clearly based on another. Something like "GTA Gotham City" ;) EDIT: This picture that I found over the internet illustrate what I'm talking about: Just in case I was not clear: I never created a mod game. I was just wondering if it would be legally possible before trying to do it. I'm not apologizing piracy. I pay dearly for my games (you guys have no idea how expensive games are in Brazil due to taxes). Once more I say that the question is not about cloning. Cloning is copy something and try to make your version look like a brand new product. Mods are intended to make reference to one or more of its source. I'm not sure if it can be done legally (if I knew I wasn't asking) but I'm sure this question is not a duplicate. Even so, I trust in the moderators and if they close my question I will not be offended - at least I had an opportunity to explain myself and got 1 good answer (by the time I write this, maybe some more will be given later).

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• Is there a search engine that indexes source code of a web-page?

  - by Dexter

  I need to search the web for sites that are in our industry that use the same Adwords management company, to ensure that the said company is not violating our contract, as they have been accused of doing. They use a tracking code in the template of every page which has a certain domain in the URL, and I'm wondering if it's possible "Google" the source code using some bot that crawls the code rather than the content? For example, I bought an unlimited license for an image gallery, and I was asked to type the license number in a comment just before the script. I thought it was just so a human could look at the source and find out if someone paid, but it turned out that it was actually that they had a crawler looking for their source code and that comment. If it ran across the code on your site, it would look for the comment, and if it found one, it would check to see if it was an existing one. If not, it would first notify you of your noncompliance, and then notify the owner of the script. Edit: I'm looking to index HTML and JavaScript only, not the server-side languages or Java.

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• OOP for unit testing : The good, the bad and the ugly

  - by Jeff

  I have recently read Miško Hevery's pdf guide to writing testable code in which its stated that you should limit your classes instanciations in your constructors. I understand that its what you should do because it allow you to easily mock you objects that are send as parameters to your class. But when it comes to writing actual code, i often end up with things like that (exemple is in PHP using Zend Framework but I think it's self explanatory) : class Some_class { private $_data; private $_options; private $_locale; public function __construct($data, $options = null) { $this->_data = $data; if ($options != null) { $this->_options = $options; } $this->_init(); } private function _init() { if(isset($this->_options['locale'])) { $locale = $this->_options['locale']; if ($locale instanceof Zend_Locale) { $this->_locale = $locale; } elseif (Zend_Locale::isLocale($locale)) { $this->_locale = new Zend_Locale($locale); } else { $this->_locale = new Zend_Locale(); } } } } Acording to my understanding of Miško Hevery's guide, i shouldn't instanciate the Zend_Local in my class but push it through the constructor (Which can be done through the options array in my example). I am wondering what would be the best practice to get the most flexibility for unittesing this code and aswell, if I want to move away from Zend Framework. Thanks in advance

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• Reusable skill class structure

  - by Martino Wullems

  Hello, Pretty new to the whole game development scene, but I have experience in other branches of programming. Anyway, I was wondering what methods are used to implement a skill structure. I imagine a skill in itself would a class. I'm using actionscript 3 for this project btw. public class Skill { public var power:int; public var delay:int; public var cooldown:int; public function Attack(user:Mob, target:Mob) { } } } Each skill would extend the Skill class and add it's own functionality. public class Tackle extends Skill { public function Tackle(user:Mob, target:Mob) { super(user, target); executeAttack(); } private function executeAttack():void { //multiply user.strength with power etc //play attack animation } } } This where I get stuck. How do I termine which mobs has which skills? And which skill will they later be able to retrieve (by reaching a certain level etc). How does the player actually execute the skill and how is it determine if it hits. It's all very new to me so I have no idea where to begin. Any links would also be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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• App to make a video from photos?

  - by chtfn

  I was wondering what could be a good app (with a GUI ;) ) for making a video from a bunch of photos or images, to create a time-lapse video, or a stop-motion animation, or even a video like this one. The idea is to set a really small time between each photo, but also to be able to change this time every so often, or add some effects, to make the succession smoother in particular. What would be perfect is a function that allows automatic cropping of the photos as well as exposure adjustment so they all have the same background and so the time-lapse video looks smoother. I know about the slide show app "Imagination" but the interval can not go under one second. Cheers! Edit: here is my progress, also thanks to the first answer: I tried Luciole, it is really simple and promessing, but pretty buggy, and I only could export an average video in .dv format (mpg2 and avi don't work). Apparently, it has difficulties when changing the fps. I also tried StopMotion: also pretty buggy, I had to go into preferences and modify the encoding commands to get a result, but it's the best result I got so far. But none of those has effects to make transitions smoother... I tried several diaporama apps: Imagination doesn't handle more than 1 image per second; PhotoFilmStrip (repo version and latest version from website): same problem even though you can go down to 0.1 second per image, it still behaves wierdly (going back to 1 second automatically); Videoporama: doesn't start at all on 12.04. Any other idea, folks?

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• Thread safe GUI programming

  - by James

  I have been programming Java with swing for a couple of years now, and always accepted that GUI interactions had to happen on the Event Dispatch Thread. I recently started to use GTK+ for C applications and was unsurprised to find that GUI interactions had to be called on gtk_main. Similarly, I looked at SWT to see in what ways it was different to Swing and to see if it was worth using, and again found the UI thread idea, and I am sure that these 3 are not the only toolkits to use this model. I was wondering if there is a reason for this design i.e. what is the reason for keeping UI modifications isolated to a single thread. I can see why some modifications may cause issues (like modifying a list while it is being drawn), but I do not see why these concerns pass on to the user of the API. Is there a limit imposed by an operating system? Is there a good reason these concerns are not 'hidden' (i.e. some form of synchronization that is invisible to the user)? Is there any (even purely conceptual) way of creating a thread safe graphics library, or is such a thing actually impossible? I found this http://blogs.operationaldynamics.com/andrew/software/gnome-desktop/gtk-thread-awareness which seems to describe GTK differently to how I understood it (although my understanding was the same as many people's) How does this differ to other toolkits? Is it possible to implement this in Swing (as the EDT model does not actually prevent access from other threads, it just often leads to Exceptions)

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• Socket.io v.9 with Actionscript

  - by funseiki

  I'm attempting to develop an online multiplayer game using Node.js for the server and Flash to display the client. I've been reading up a bit and have found quite a few recommendations for the socket.io library. I've also found a github project which exposes code to help facilitate communication between an Actionscript 3.0 client and a server using socket.io. The project I mentioned is a bit dated and doesn't seem to have support for the latest version of socket.io, so I was wondering if leveraging this framework (socket.io, that is) would be the most ideal way to go. I have found a simple project that uses the standard 'net' module for node.js, but because there a few options available, I'm a little lost as to which one to go with. I'm currently leaning towards just using the regular 'net' module as it is already familiar to me. Since much of the client is already coded up, I'd really like to not switch over to using the HTML5 canvas just yet (but using socket.io would make a transition in the future more friendly, I think?). Any advice/direction on this matter would be much appreciated, though I do realize that there may be no one right answer. Edit: To be more specific, are there any client-side socket.io frameworks available that allow for communication between an Actionscript 3.0 client and a socket.io server and are robust enough to support current/future versions of socket.io? If not, what are the alternatives?

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• How to simulate pressure with particles?

  - by BeachRunnerJoe

  I'm trying to simulate pressure with a collection of spherical particles in a Unity game I'm building. A couple notes about the problem: The goal is to fill a constantly changing 2d space/void with small, frictionless spheres. The game is trying to simulate the ever-growing pressure of more objects being shoved into this space. The level itself is constantly scrolling from left to right, meaning if the space's dimensions are not changed by the user it will automatically get smaller (the leftmost part of the space will continually scroll off-screen). I'm wondering what some approaches are that I can take to tackling these problems... Knowing when to detect when there is space to fill and then add spheres to the space. Removing spheres from the space when it is shrinking. Strategies to simulate pressure on the spheres such that they "explode outwards" when more space is created. The current approach I am contemplating is using a constantly moving wall, that is off screen and moves with the screen, as this image illustrates: . This moving wall will push and trap the spheres into the space. As for adding new spheres, I was going to have either (1) spheres replicate themselves upon detecting free space, OR (2) spawn them at the left side of the space (where the wall is) - pushing the rest of the spheres to fill the space. I foresee problems with idea #1 because this likely wouldn't really create/simulate pressure; idea #2 seems more promising, but raises the question of how to provide a location for these new sphere particles to spawn (and the ramifications of spawning them when there IS no space). Thanks so much in advance for your wisdom!

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