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  • How to begin serious game development (in C++) [closed]

    - by Rondogiannis Aristophanes
    I would like to start developing games. I have tried before Game Maker 8, which was a very easy way to start creating games, if you were new in game development. Then, I tried Unity 3D, which was a much more serious and complete tool to create computer-games, and required some experience. And now, I would like to start creating games, and don't use any special environment or developer, but just code (in C++ preferably). So, here is my question: from where should I begin, if I would like to start programming games? Thanks in advance. Note: I work in ubuntu 10.04, I can also use windows 7, but I prefer ubuntu.

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  • In some games, we just let the main() loop be the Player object or Table object?

    - by ????
    I was thinking that let's say if there is a game of Blackjack or MasterMind, then we should have a class called Dealer or ComputerPal, which is how the computer interact with us (as a dealer for Blackjack or as the person giving hints for MasterMind). And then there should be a Player object, and the way to play one game is aPlayer.playGame but I noticed that a book was just using the main() loop to act as the player (or as the Controller of the game), calling the Dealer methods to dealer the cards, ask for player's action, etc... 1) Is this just a lazy way to model all the proper objects? 2) If more objects are to be added, who should call the aDealer.dealCards and then ask for aPlayer.askForAction? (because it is strange to let the Player handle all the logical steps). Should there be a Table object that handle all these logic and then to play one round of game, use aTable.playGame? What is a good object design for such game?

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  • C# - How to make a custom installer for games, etc?

    - by Dodi300
    Hello. Can anyone tell me how to create a custom installer to 'install' games. I say custom meaning I don't want the user to have the option where the game is installed. I want it to be a straight forward process, maybe with just one loading bar. The program I'm developing is a 'center' for game playing, which includes a community and other features, such as a timer that records how long a game is played for. I just thought that installing each game in one place, with a simple installer would make the program easier to use. It also will allow me to do other features as the games will all be installed in one place. No need for the user to specify where the game is installed. Would this be possible? Thanks.

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  • How to make a custom installer for games, etc?

    - by Dodi300
    Hello. Can anyone tell me how to create a custom installer to 'install' games. I say custom meaning I don't want the user to have the option where the game is installed. I want it to be a straight forward process, maybe with just one loading bar. The program I'm developing is a 'center' for game playing, which includes a community and other features, such as a timer that records how long a game is played for. I just thought that installing each game in one place, with a simple installer would make the program easier to use. It also will allow me to do other features as the games will all be installed in one place. No need for the user to specify where the game is installed. Would this be possible?

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  • How do I disable other monitors while running games in Wine?

    - by Michael Cheng
    My current setup is: * Dual GTS 250 video cards * 3 Monitors * Used nvidia-settings to run each monitor as a separate x session * This is all running on Linux Mint Debian Edition When running games (Starcraft II) in Wine via PlayOnLinux, I've found that the mouse does not get locked. I already tried various solutions littered across the web and none work so I'd rather just disable my other two monitors while playing. Does anyone know of a method where I can turn off my other two monitors (not my primary monitor) while running Wine and then turn then back on afterwards? I don't mind having to manually run a script before and after gaming. Thanks.

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  • What makes a game a game vs something else like a puzzle or a toy?

    - by Shannon John Clark
    Famously the Sims and similar games have been described by some designers as Toys and not "really" games. I'm curious if there is a good answer to what makes something a game. For example many companies sell Sudoku games - EA has an iPhone one, IronSudoku offers a great web based one, and there are countless others on most platforms. Many newspapers publish Sudoku puzzles in their print editions and often online. What differentiates a game from a puzzle? (or are all Sudoku "games" misnamed?) I'm not convinced there is a simple or easy answer - but I'd love to be proven wrong. I've seen some definitions and emphasize "rules" as core to something being a game (vs. "real life") but puzzles have rules as well - as do many other things. I'm open to answers that either focus only on computer games (on any platform) or which expand to include games and gameplay across many platforms. Here to I'm not fully convinced the lines are clear - is a "game" of D&D played over a virtual tabletop with computer dice rollers, video & audio chat a computer game or something else? (I'd lean towards something else - but where do you draw that line?)

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  • Fight for your rights as a video gamer.

    - by Chris Williams
    Soon, the U.S. Supreme Court may decide whether to hear a case that could have a lasting impact on computer and video games. The case before the Court involves a law passed by the state of California attempting to criminalize the sale of certain computer and video games. Two previous courts rejected the California law as unconstitutional, but soon the Supreme Court could have the final say. Whatever the Court's ruling, we must be prepared to continue defending our rights now and in the future. To do so, we need a large, powerful movement of gamers to speak with one voice and show that we won't sit back while lawmakers try to score political points by scapegoating video games and treating them differently than books, movies, and music. If the Court decides to hear the case, we're going to need thousands of activists like you who can help defend computer and video games by writing letters to editors, calling into talk radio stations, and educating Americans about our passion for and appreciation of computer and video games. You can help build this movement right now by inviting all your friends and fellow gamers to join the Video Game Voters Network. Use our simple tool to send an email to everyone you know asking them to stand up for gaming rights: http://videogamevoters.org/movement You can also help spread the word through Facebook and Twitter, or you can simply forward this email to everyone you know and ask them to sign up at videogamevoters.org. Time after time, courts continue to reject politicians' efforts to restrict the sale of computer and video games. But that doesn't mean the politicians will stop trying anytime soon -- in fact, it means they're likely to ramp up their efforts even more. To stop them, we must make it clear that gamers will continue to stand up for free speech -- and that the numbers are on our side. Help make sure we're ready and able to keep fighting for our gaming rights. Spread the word about the Video Game Voters Network right now: http://videogamevoters.org/movement Thank you. -- Video Game Voters Network

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  • Distributing an Android game with plugins via the market

    - by Peter Serwylo
    I'm new to Android development, and was wondering how the following could be achieved within the confines of the Android market as a distribution channel: One main application, which handles the main menu, networking, high scores, etc. Several games which can be launched from the main menu, which all work within the same eco system. The main application is not just a pseudo launcher for other games, these different games will share high scores and other achievements/preferences. In a traditional package management system such as apt, pacman or yum, this could be handled quite happily through dependencies. This does not appear to be possible via the Android market. The closest I've seen is when apps scan to check if the required app is installed, and if not, launches the market and asks the user to download the app. This sounds like a very messy solution. It also begs the question, would they download the game (plugin) first, which then downloads the main shell application? Or would they download the main shell application, and when they navigate to a menu item which says "Play game", then it scans for any installed games, and if none exist, redirects to the market? Also, I'm not even sure if it is possible to dig up the package from another application on the device, and start invoking classes from within (e.g. when you want to launch the game (plugin)) A final option is just to have a 3rd component which is a .jar that each game includes, which effectively contains the entire shell application. Then each game would appear to have the same menu, but it would become a nightmare as soon as you want to update the menu component and have to re-release each game. It would be especially worse if other people released games (plugins) based on the same framework and didn't update them. Is there any other options which I haven't thought of? Has anyone else solved this or seen a solution in any apps they've installed (doesn't have to be games)? cheers.

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  • What do you upgrade to make games load faster? [on hold]

    - by Superbest
    Let's say you have a relatively modern game like Shogun 2. The loading screens take several minutes. This bothers you and you'd like to improve it. What is actually going on when loading screens are up? I'm guessing assets are being loaded into memory from disk, and possibly being decompressed first. However, what is actually causing the slow down? The memory? Mainboard? CPU? HDD? If you had $100 to spend on upgrades and your only goal is to speed up loading screens without reducing other performance, what component of the computer does it make sense to upgrade for maximum benefit? If your answer is "it depends on the existing setup", what sort of benchmarks would you run to determine what is causing the bottleneck? What if you had $500 instead? I give the two budgets for context. I am not asking for actual recommendations about which component to buy (nor are the numbers supposed to be rigid limits), but what features are important when shopping for components with small and large budgets (a large budget could allow buying multiple components which are not so good on their own, but work particularly well together). I mention Shogun 2 as an example, but I'm asking about reducing overall loading times, across all games, not just one game. Therefore, "put it on a solid state disk" probably won't be good solution, because putting every game on your SDD will quickly fill it up.

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  • Optimal video resolution and encoding for recording games for YouTube?

    - by Rookie
    I want to record video from games, therefore I cannot use very large video resolution, but I still want to make the large video view to look as sharp as the original encoded video before upload. I tried to use YouTube's recommended 854x640 resolution, but it wasn't possible with h264 and the encoding software I used (Handbrake) converted it to a width of the nearest multiple of 4, which I think is a limitation of the h264 format. The video I encoded was sharp and fine quality, but when I uploaded it to YouTube, it lost a lot of quality and the preferred large video view looks almost as bad as a 320p video. I tried to wait a few days but it never got sharper (in case it didn't process it completely yet). So, which resolution and encoding options I should use, if I want the large video player to have the sharpest possible video, retaining the original video quality as good as possible? I noticed that recording with 640x480, the video was sharper than with 1280x720, so I'm not sure what im doing wrong here; both were h264. Is it anyhow possible to prevent YouTube from re-encoding the videos? I just wonder how people can make so sharp videos, while mine are all blurry after upload, but before upload they looked fine. I also tried YouTube's suggested bitrates with h264, but it didn't work any better.

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  • I want to learn to program in SDL C++where do i start? I want to learn only what i need to to start making 2d games [on hold]

    - by user2644399
    Lazyfoo of Lazyfoo.net of the SDL 2d tutorial wrote that in order for me to start game programming in SDL, I need to know these concepts well; Operators, Controls, Loops, Functions, Structures, Arrays, References, Pointers, Classes, Objects how to use a template and Bitwise and/or. I want to know the fastest way to learn as much as I need of basic c++ that would allow me to make 2d games. Thanks in advance.

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  • PC monitors shut off and system hangs while playing 3D games, but sound continues - Diagnosis?

    - by Jon Schneider
    Two days ago, I started running into a problem with my Windows PC: The PC's two connected monitors simultaneously lose signal and go black (as though the PC had been powered off). The keyboard's Numlock, Capslock, and Scroll Lights will become "stuck" in their current positions, as though the PC is hung. (For example, the Numlock light on the keyboard remains lit regardless of me pressing the Numlock key repeatedly.) No keyboard input does anything. (Ctrl+Alt+Del, Ctrl+Shift+Esc, Ctrl+C, etc.) However -- Whatever sound/music the PC was playing continues to play, and the PC's fans continue running, so the PC hasn't powered itself off or rebooted itself. Opening up the case, the graphics card is pretty hot to the touch. I had this happen 3 times in one evening. In all cases, I was playing a game with 3D graphics when the problem occurred (Torchlight, Minecraft, Magic: The Gathering 2012, Avadon: The Black Fortress demo). I have yet to have the problem happen when I'm not playing a game. This system has been running stable for about 2.5 years prior to this. I didn't make any changes to the system prior to the problem starting to occur. System specs: OS: Windows 7 64-bit Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Wolfdale 2.53GHz Video Card: XFX GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB Motherboard: Foxconn P45A-S LGA 775 Intel ATX RAM: Corsair 4 GB (2x 2GB) DDR2-800 (PC2 6400) Full specs: New PC 2008 Troubleshooting tried so far (the problem occurred again after taking each of these steps, one at a time): Updated the video drivers with the latest drivers from NVidia's site. Opened up the case and cleaned out the video card and processor fans (both were pretty dirty). Installed and ran temperature monitor software. The processor idles at about 50 degrees C, and goes up to about 63 degrees C while playing a game (seems on the warm side, but not excessively so?). The software wasn't able to report the temperature of the GPU -- not sure this particular GPU supports software temperature readout? My initial diagnosis is that maybe the GPU is on its last legs (given that it seems to be running pretty hot, and the problem only occurs while playing 3D games). Does this seem likely? Or is it likely that this problem is caused by the processor, RAM, or motherboard? Or could this be a software issue of some kind? Thanks for any advice!

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  • my Search method is coming up with all nulls

    - by Epic.Distortion
    Let me give a quick explanation. I took a 5 week course through a company on Java in July. They covered basic stuff, like console app, crud operations, mysql, and n-tier architecture. Since the course ended I didn't use it much because I went back to work, and other medical reasons surfaced....blah blah. I was told by the company to make a simple program to reflect what I learned. Turns out I retained very little. I decided to make a video game starage program. It would be used to stare your video games so you wouldn't have to search your bookcase(or how ever you store your games.) It is a basic console app using the crud operations with MYSQL. I can't get my search function to actually work. I have 2 layers a Presentation layer and a Logic layer. The search method allows them to search for a game by the title. when i bring run the program and use Search it only displays the title and the rest is null. here is my Presentation layer: private static Games SearchForGame() { Logic aref = new Logic(); Games g = new Games(); Scanner scanline = new Scanner(System.in); System.out.println("Please enter the name of the game you wish to find:"); g.setTitle(scanline.nextLine()); aref.SearchGame(); System.out.println(); System.out.println("Game Id: " + g.getGameId()); System.out.println("Title: " + g.getTitle()); System.out.println("Rating: " + g.getRating()); System.out.println("Platform: "+ g.getPlatform()); System.out.println("Developer: "+ g.getDeveloper()); return g; } and here is my logic layer public Games SearchGame() { Games g = new Games(); try { Class.forName(driver).newInstance(); Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url+dbName,userName,password); java.sql.PreparedStatement statement = conn.prepareStatement("SELECT GameId,Title,Rating,Platform,Developer FROM games WHERE Title=?"); statement.setString(1, g.getTitle()); ResultSet rs = statement.executeQuery(); while(rs.next()){ g.setGameId(rs.getInt("GameId")); g.setTitle(rs.getString("Title")); g.setRating(rs.getString("Rating")); g.setPlatform(rs.getString("Platform")); g.setDeveloper(rs.getString("Developer")); statement.executeUpdate(); } } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return g; } here is also my last results Please enter the name of the game you wish to find: Skyrim Game Id: 0 Title: Skyrim Rating: null Platform: null Developer: null any help would be greatly appreciated and thanks in advance EDIT: here is my code for my games class public class Games { public int GameId; public String Title; public String Rating; public String Platform; public String Developer; public int getGameId() { return GameId; } public int setGameId(int gameId) { return GameId = gameId; } public String getTitle() { return Title; } public String setTitle(String title) { return Title = title; } public String getRating() { return Rating; } public void setRating(String rating) { Rating = rating; } public String getPlatform() { return Platform; } public void setPlatform(String platform) { Platform = platform; } public String getDeveloper() { return Developer; } public void setDeveloper(String developer) { Developer = developer; } }

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  • Easiest, most fun way to program 2D games? Flash? XNA? Some other engine?

    - by Maxi
    Hi, this is a post detailing my search for the most enjoyable way for a hobbyist game programmer to sweeten his free time with making a game. My requirements: I looked at Flash first, I made a couple of small games but I'm doubtful of the performance. I would like to make a fairly large strategy game, with several hundred units fighting simultaneously, explosions and animations included. Also zoomable maps. I saw that Adobe has a new 3D API for Flash, but I don't know if that improves 2D performance aswell, I couldn't find anything related to that question on their MAX10 sessions. Would you say that Flash is a good technology for making large 2D games easily? I really like Actionscript, and I love how easy everything is in Flash. There are several engines available which make it even easier. I just do this for fun, and it would be even better if there were proper animation/particle editors available and if the engine I were to use, would be available for multiple platforms. (so more people can play my game once finished). I'd like to have it available on many mobile platforms aswell. (because I love touch input for some reason) I do know the XNA framework pretty well, but there are no good engines available for it, and it will only run on Windows, which is a huge turn off. Even bigger is, that you need to install the XNA redistributable each time you want to give the game to someone. If I use XNA, I would have to make all the tools myself, and I'd probably have to make them with WPF. (I'd love to make tools with Adobe AIR, but unfortunately the API's for image manipulation etc. are far worse in Flash, than they are in XNA/WPF.) Now, I'm aware that I could make my own engine that supports each of those platforms, but quite frankly, that would be too much work plowing through APIs. After all, I want to make a game, not an engine. So the question becomes: Is there maybe a cross platform (free or free to develop?) engine available that I could use for 2D development? I prefer: C#, Actionscript. I don't mind using c++ if the toolset is above average, but I highly doubt that there is something out there like that. Please prove me wrong :) So summary: I'd like to use Flash, but I don't know if it scales well enough. I'm not a scripter, I want some real APIs that I can work with inside a proper IDE. Just for information, I looked at several alternatives, I'm actually looking for a long time already. You'd help me a lot to make a decision finally. Feature-wise the Flatredball engine would be ideal. But I tried their tools, and quite frankly, they are horrible. Absolutely unusable, I'd need to make my own for sure. I didn't look at their API, but if their tools are so bad, I'm not inclined to look further. Unity3D. This one is quite nice, but I really don't need 3D, and it is quite ...a lot of work to learn. I also don't like that it is so expensive to use for different platforms and that I can only code for it through scripting. You have to buy each platform separately. The editor usability is average, the product overall is good enough for most purposes, but learning it myself would be overkill. Shiva 3D. It looks good enough, but again: I don't really need 3D. The editor usability is a little worse than Unity3D in my opinion and it wasn't clear to me how to start programming. I think it requires C++ for coding, so that's a negative too. I want to have fun, and c# is fun ;) SDL. Quite frankly, I'd still need to port to all those different SDL implementations. And I don't like OpenGL style programming, it's just plain ugly. And it needs c++, I know that there might be some wrappers available, but I don't like to use wrappers, because... Irrlicht. A lot of features, but support seems to be low and it is aimed at enthusiasts. C# bindings get dropped repeatedly. I'm not an engine enthusiast, I just want to make a game. I don't see this happening with Irrlicht. Ogre3D. Way too much work, it's just a graphics engine. Also no multiple platform support and c++. Torque2D. Costs something to use, and I didn't hear a lot of good things about support and documentation. Also costs extra for each platform.

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  • Do you think that in the future it'll be possible to develop games on OS X by using Python and the latest library "Sprite kit" made by Apple? [on hold]

    - by Cesco
    I don't understand a lot about game engines and modules for Python, even though I'm aware of the existance of PyGame and Pyglets, so please don't bash me too hard if I'll wrote something wrong in this question :-) When I upgraded my Mac to the latest version of OS X, I noticed for the first time that Apple is providing a library named Sprite kit for developing games on both iOS and OS X. It looks to me fairly complete, and the fact is managed by a big company gives me the impression of being well-supported for the time being; in summary, it looks... cool. Actually in order to take advantage of "Sprite kit" you need to code in Obj-C. Since I don't know Obj-C but only a little bit of Python, do you think that there's a chance that sooner or later someone will make a wrapper for Python ? Thank you very much and best regards

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  • NVIDIA SLI - Screen blinking

    - by eks
    I have tried multiple drivers and multiple games ( Games tried, Darkfall and source based games). Drivers tried ( 18x,29x and 24x). When i disable SLI the games work perfectly. A description of the blinking effect would be its like one of the video cards are not sending the image to screen.

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  • FTP gives me a error when uploading and deleting files [on hold]

    - by AR Games
    Here's the error I get when trying to delete files... Command: DELE index.html Response: 550 Delete operation failed. Here's the error I get when trying to upload files... Command: OPTS UTF8 ON Response: 200 Always in UTF8 mode. Status: Connected Status: Starting upload of C:\wamp\www\.DS_Store Command: CWD /var/www/html Response: 250 Directory successfully changed. Command: TYPE A Response: 200 Switching to ASCII mode. Command: PASV Response: 227 Entering Passive Mode (76,185,76,101,78,222). Command: STOR .DS_Store Response: 553 Could not create file. Error: Critical file transfer error Status: Retrieving directory listing... Command: TYPE I Response: 200 Switching to Binary mode. Command: PASV Response: 227 Entering Passive Mode (76,185,76,101,23,94). Command: LIST Response: 150 Here comes the directory listing. Response: 226 Directory send OK. Status: Directory listing successful Response: 421 Timeout. Error: Connection closed by server Status: Disconnected from server IM running windows OS and using filezilla FTP client

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  • Algorithm for procedural city generation?

    - by Zove Games
    I am planning on making a (simple) procedural city generator using Java. I need ideas on whan algorithm to use for the layout, and the actual buildings. The city will mostly have skyscrapers, not really much complex stuff. For the layout I already have a simple algorithm implemented: Create a Map with java.awt.Point keys and Integer values. Fill it with all the points in the city's bounds with the value as -1 (unnassigned) Shuffle the map, and assign the 1st 10 of the keys IDs (from 1-10) Loop until all points have IDs: Loop though all points: Assign points next to an assigned point IDs of the point next to them, if 2 or more points border the point, then randomly choose which ID the point will get. You will end up with 10 random regions. Make roads bordering these regions. Fill the inside of each region with a randomly spaced and randomly rotated grid PROBLEM: This is not the fastest way to do it. What algorithm should I use for the layout. And what should I use to make each building's design? I don't even know how I'm going to do that yet (fractals maybe). I just need some ideas, not actual code.

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  • Changing the Operating System with only Ubuntu installed

    - by Games Brainiac
    I really wanted to dive into the world of Open Source operating systems, so I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu (13.10), and installed it on a clean(no operating system installed, absolutely nothing) Lenovo ThinkPad machine. After a few days, I wanted to try out a different Operating System (Elementary OS). I downloaded the ISO file, burned it to a USB, tested that the USB booted from a different computer (I have 2, one is the Lenovo, the other a HP). I was able to get the bootscreen, and everything worked like a charm after I set the BIOS to boot from USB Disk Drive instead of HD. After this, I went back to Lenovo, and tried to open up the boot menu, by pressing F12, so that I could load from a temporary device. To my surprise, nothing but the HD was listed. There was no Optical Drive, No USB Drive, absolutely nothing. So, I thought that these devices were probably disabled. So I went into my BIOS and checked to see what was the case. I saw that all my devices were enabled. USB and all the other devices such as network cable and the rest were all enabled. So, I thought this probably had something to do wit UEFI and Legacy Boot options. So, I made sure that both were enabled. This did not solve the problem either. Again, I got nothing but the option to boot from my Hard Disk. I thought the USB had to be at fault. I tried different ports, but to no avail. Next, I tried with a Live CD, which had Ubuntu on it. This failed too. I simply could not boot from anything other than my hard disk. Okay, so at this point, I was pretty desperate, so I installed Boot-Repair through: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install boot-repair What this did is lead me to GRUB. Ideally, its just a screen that gives me the option to load from Ubuntu or Advanced Settings. The Advanced settings had nothing but Ubuntu options in it. So, I kept on pressing ESC and that led me to the the grub console, and thats where I am right now with my Lenovo. I've also tried updating the BIOS, but Lenovo only has packages for Red Hat and Windows. So, a dead end there too. Right now, I need to know if there is any way that I can just delete everything from my Lenovo? I want to revert it back to its blank factory condition. How can I achieve this? I have tried to elaborate my problem as best I could. If there is any important information that I've missed out, please do not hesitate to leave a comment. I would have included some screen shots, but BIOS screen shots are a little hard to manage. However, I can provide a camera Image of the boot screen if needed (doing that as we speak).

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  • Datamapper has n relationship with multiple keys

    - by jing
    I am working on a simple relationship with DataMapper, a ruby webapp to track games. A game belongs_to 4 players, and each player can have many games. When I call player.games.size, I seem to be getting back a result of 0, for players that I know have games associated with them. I am currently able to pull the player associations off of game, but can't figure out why player.games is empty. Do I need to define a parent_key on the has n association, or is there something else I'm missing? class Game belongs_to :t1_p1, :class_name => 'Player', :child_key => [:player1_id] belongs_to :t1_p2, :class_name => 'Player', :child_key => [:player2_id] belongs_to :t2_p1, :class_name => 'Player', :child_key => [:player3_id] belongs_to :t2_p2, :class_name => 'Player', :child_key => [:player4_id] ... end class Player has n, :games ... end

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  • What do you use to play sound in iPhone games?

    - by zoul
    Hello! I have a performance-intensive iPhone game I would like to add sounds to. There seem to be about three main choices: (1) AVAudioPlayer, (2) Audio Queues and (3) OpenAL. I’d hate to write pages of low-level code just to play a sample, so that I would like to use AVAudioPlayer. The problem is that it seems to kill the performace – I’ve done a simple measuring using CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent and the play message seems to take somewhere from 9 to 30 ms to finish. That’s quite miserable, considering that 25 ms == 40 fps. Of course there is the prepareToPlay method that should speed things up. That’s why I wrote a simple class that keeps several AVAudioPlayers at its disposal, prepares them beforehand and then plays the sample using the prepared player. No cigar, still it takes the ~20 ms I mentioned above. Such performance is unusable for games, so what do you use to play sounds with a decent performance on iPhone? Am I doing something wrong with the AVAudioPlayer? Do you play sounds with Audio Queues? (I’ve written something akin to AVAudioPlayer before 2.2 came out and I would love to spare that experience.) Do you use OpenAL? If yes, is there a simple way to play sounds with OpenAL, or do you have to write pages of code? Update: Yes, playing sounds with OpenAL is fairly simple.

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  • How can I avoid garbage collection delays in Java games? (Best Practices)

    - by Brian
    I'm performance tuning interactive games in Java for the Android platform. Once in a while there is a hiccup in drawing and interaction for garbage collection. Usually it's less than one tenth of a second, but sometimes it can be as large as 200ms on very slow devices. I am using the ddms profiler (part of the Android SDK) to search out where my memory allocations come from and excise them from my inner drawing and logic loops. The worst offender had been short loops done like, for(GameObject gob : interactiveObjects) gob.onDraw(canvas); where every single time the loop was executed there was an iterator allocated. I'm using arrays (ArrayList) for my objects now. If I ever want trees or hashes in an inner loop I know that I need to be careful or even reimplement them instead of using the Java Collections framework since I can't afford the extra garbage collection. That may come up when I'm looking at priority queues. I also have trouble where I want to display scores and progress using Canvas.drawText. This is bad, canvas.drawText("Your score is: " + Score.points, x, y, paint); because Strings, char arrays and StringBuffers will be allocated all over to make it work. If you have a few text display items and run the frame 60 times a second that begins to add up and will increase your garbage collection hiccups. I think the best choice here is to keep char[] arrays and decode your int or double manually into it and concatenate strings onto the beginning and end. I'd like to hear if there's something cleaner. I know there must be others out there dealing with this. How do you handle it and what are the pitfalls and best practices you've discovered to run interactively on Java or Android? These gc issues are enough to make me miss manual memory management, but not very much.

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