Search Results

Search found 12537 results on 502 pages for 'solid state'.

Page 383/502 | < Previous Page | 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390  | Next Page >

• Remote Graphics Diagnostics with Windows RT 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2013/11/12/remote-graphics-diagnostics-with-windows-rt-8.1-and-visual-studio.aspxThis blog post is a brief follow up to my What’s New in Graphics and Game Development in Visual Studio 2013 post on the MVP Award blog. While writing that post I was testing out various features to try to make sure everything worked as expected. I had some trouble getting Remote Graphics Diagnostics (a/k/a remote graphics debugging) working on my first generation Surface RT (upgraded to Windows RT 8.1). It was more strange since I could use remote debugging when doing CPU debugging; it was just graphics debugging that was causing trouble. After some discussions with the great folks who work on the graphics tools in Visual Studio, they were able to repro the problem and recommend a solution. My Surface RT needed the ARM Kits policy installed on it. Once I followed the instructions on the previous link, I could successfully use Remote Graphics Diagnostics on my Surface RT. Please note that this requires Windows RT 8.1 RTM (i.e. not Preview) and that Remote Graphics Diagnostics on ARM only works when you are using Visual Studio 2013 as it is a new feature (it should work just fine using the Express for Windows version). Also, when I installed the ARM Kits policy I needed to do two things to get it to work properly. First, when following the “How to install the Kits policy” instructions, I needed to copy the SecureBoot folder into Program Files on my Surface RT (specifically, I copied the SecureBoot folder to “C:\Program Files\Windows Kits\8.1\bin\arm\” on my Surface RT, creating any necessary directories). It may work if it’s in any system folder; I didn’t test any others after I got it working. I had initially put it in my Downloads folder and tried installing it from there. When the machine restarted it displayed a worrisome error message. I repeatedly pressed the button that would allow me to retry and eventually the machine rebooted and managed to recover itself to its previous state. Second, I needed to install it as an Administrator. The instructions say that this might be necessary. For me it was. This is a Remote Graphics Diagnostics is a great new feature in Visual Studio 2013 so I definitely encourage all of you to check it out!

  Read the article

• Mousin' down the PathListBox

  - by T

  While modifying the standard media player with a new look and feel for Ineta Live I saw a unique opportunity to use their logo with a dotted I with and attached arc as the scrub control. So I created a PathListBox that I wanted an object to follow when a user did a click and drag action.  Below is how I solved the problem.  Please let me know if you have improvements or know of a completely different way.  I am always eager to learn. First, I created a path using the pen tool in Expression Blend (see the yellow line in image below).  Then I right clicked that path and chose [Path] --> [Make Layout Path].   That created a new PathListBox.  Then I chose the object I want to move down the new PathListBox and Placed it as a child in the Objects and Timeline window (see image below).  If the child object (the thing the user will click and drag) is XAML, it will move much smoother than images. Just as another side note, I wanted there to be no highlight when the user selects the “ball” to drag and drop.  This is done by editing the ItemContainerStyle under Additional Templates on the PathListBox.  Post a question if you need help on this and I will expand my explanation. Here is a pic of the object and the path I wanted it to follow.  I gave the path a yellow solid brush here so you could see it but when I lay this over another object, I will make the path transparent.   To animate this object down the path, the trick is to animate the Start number for the LayoutPath.  Not the StartItemIndex, the Start above Span. In order to enable animation when a user clicks and drags, I put in the following code snippets in the code behind. the DependencyProperties are not necessary for the Drag control.   namespace InetaPlayer { public partial class PositionControl : UserControl { private bool _mouseDown; private double _maxPlayTime; public PositionControl() { // Required to initialize variables InitializeComponent(); //mouse events for scrub control positionThumb.MouseLeftButtonDown += new MouseButtonEventHandler(ValueThumb_MouseLeftButtonDown); positionThumb.MouseLeftButtonUp += new MouseButtonEventHandler(ValueThumb_MouseLeftButtonUp); positionThumb.MouseMove += new MouseEventHandler(ValueThumb_MouseMove); positionThumb.LostMouseCapture += new MouseEventHandler(ValueThumb_LostMouseCapture); } // exposed for binding to real slider using a DependencyProperty enables animation, styling, binding, etc.... public double MaxPlayTime { get { return (double)GetValue(MaxPlayTimeProperty); } set { SetValue(MaxPlayTimeProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty MaxPlayTimeProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("MaxPlayTime", typeof(double), typeof(PositionControl), null);   // exposed for binding to real slider using a DependencyProperty enables animation, styling, binding, etc....   public double CurrSliderValue { get { return (double)GetValue(CurrSliderValueProperty); } set { SetValue(CurrSliderValueProperty, value); } }   public static readonly DependencyProperty CurrSliderValueProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("CurrSliderValue", typeof(double), typeof(PositionControl), new PropertyMetadata(0.0, OnCurrSliderValuePropertyChanged));   private static void OnCurrSliderValuePropertyChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { PositionControl control = d as PositionControl; control.OnCurrSliderValueChanged((double)e.OldValue, (double)e.NewValue); }   private void OnCurrSliderValueChanged(double oldValue, double newValue) { _maxPlayTime = (double) GetValue(MaxPlayTimeProperty); if (!_mouseDown) if (_maxPlayTime!=0) sliderPathListBox.LayoutPaths[0].Start = newValue / _maxPlayTime; else sliderPathListBox.LayoutPaths[0].Start = 0; }   //mouse control   void ValueThumb_MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { if (!_mouseDown) return; //get the offset of how far the drag has been //direction is handled automatically (offset will be negative for left move and positive for right move) Point mouseOff = e.GetPosition(positionThumb); //Divide the offset by 1000 for a smooth transition sliderPathListBox.LayoutPaths[0].Start +=mouseOff.X/1000; _maxPlayTime = (double)GetValue(MaxPlayTimeProperty); SetValue(CurrSliderValueProperty ,sliderPathListBox.LayoutPaths[0].Start*_maxPlayTime); }   void ValueThumb_MouseLeftButtonUp(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { _mouseDown = false; } void ValueThumb_LostMouseCapture(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { _mouseDown = false; } void ValueThumb_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { _mouseDown = true; ((UIElement)positionThumb).CaptureMouse(); }   } }   I made this into a user control and exposed a couple of DependencyProperties in order to bind it to a standard Slider in the overall project.  This control is embedded into the standard Expression media player template and is used to replace the standard scrub bar.  When the player goes live, I will put a link here.

  Read the article

• Designing Snake AI

  - by Ronald

  I'm new to this gamedev stackechange but have used the math and cs sites before. So, I'm in a competition to create AI for a snake that will compete with 3 other snakes in 5 minute rounds where the rules are much like the traditional Nokia snake game except that there are 4 snakes, the board is 50x50 and there are a number of small obstacles on the field. Like the Nokia game, your snake grows when you get to the fruit and if you crash into yourself, another snake or the wall you die. The game runs with a 50ms delay between moves and the server sends the new game state every 50ms which the code must analyze and what not and output the next move. The winner is the snake who had the longest length at any point in the game. Tie breakers are decided by kills. So far what I have done is implemented an A* graph search from each snake to determine if my snake is the closest to the apple and if it is, it goes for the apple. Otherwise, I made a neat little algorithm to determine the emptiest area of the board, which my snake goes for, to anticipate the next apple. Other than this I have some small survivability checks to ensure my snake isn't walking into a trap that it can't get out and if it does get stuck, I have something to give it a better chance of getting out. ... Anyway, I've tested my snake on a test server and it does quite well. Generally, my strategy of only going for the apple when its a sure thing and finding space when its not makes it grow faster than any other snakes (some snakes do a similar thing but often just go to the middle or a corner) sometimes it wins these trial games but is more often than not beaten by the same snake who seems to have the edge on survivability(my snake grows quicker but then dies somehow and this other snake just plods slowly along and wins on consistency. So I was wondering about any ideas anyone has to try and improve my snake. Or maybe ideas at a new approach to take. My functions and classes are good so changes that might seem drastic shouldn't be too bad. I encourage all ideas. Any thoughts ??

  Read the article

• The Dreaded Startup Repair Loop on Win 7

  - by HighAltitudeCoder

  For most people, upgrading to Windows 7 has been a relatively painless process.  Not me.  I am in the unlucky 1% or less who had a somewhat less pleasant experience.  First, I cloned my entire onto a larger (and much faster) solid state hard drive, only experiencing minimal problems. Then, I bought the Retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate, took a deep breath and... oh yeah, I almost forgot - BACK UP THE COMPUTER.  The next morning I upgraded to Win 7 and everything seemed fine, until... I rebooted the system, the nice Windows 7 launch graphics come up, it's about to launch and AWWW, are you kidding me?!?!  Back to the BIOS splash screen?  Next comes the sequence of failure - attempt repair - unable to repair - do you want to wipe your hard drive decisions. Because I purchased the retail version, a number is provided where I could call Microsoft Tech support.  When I did, they instructed me to click "Install" from my installation CD, which did not work.  When I tried the "Upgrade" option, it reaches an impasse, telling you that yoiu have a newer version of Win 7, and thus cannot Upgrade.  If you choose "Install" you willl lose everything... files, programs, EVERYTHING.  Or at least this is what it tells you.  I was not willing to take the risk. To make things worse, I had installed a new antivirus software application before I realized my system was unstable (Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security), and this was causing additional problems. One interesting thing, and the only saving grace as it turns out, was that my system WOULD successfully reboot into the OS if I chose to restart it, rather than shut it down.  If I chose to shut down, I would have to go through the loop again until I was given the option to restart. As it turned out, I needed to update my BIOS.  I assumed that since I had updated my BIOS a long time ago to settings that were stable under Windows Vista Ultimate x64, I incorrectly expected Win 7 to adopt the same settings and didn't expect there to be any problems.  WRONG. My BIOS had a setting to halt the boot cycle if various kinds of errors were detected.  Windows Vista didn't care about this, but forget it under Windows 7.  I turned immediately corrected that BIOS setting.  Next, there were the two separate BIOS settings: enable USB mouse and enable USB keyboard.  The only sequence of events that would work were to start my reboot process over from stratch with a hard-wired non-usb keyboard and mouse.  Whent the system booted under these settings, it doesn't detect any errors due to either the mouse or keyboard, and actually booted for the first time in a long while (let me tell ya, that's an amazing experience after fiddling with settings for two entire weekends!) Next step: leave your old mouse and keyboard connected, but also connect your other two devices (mouse, keyboard) that use USB connections.  During the boot cycle, the operating system will not fail due to missing requirements during startup, and it will then pick up the new drivers necessary to use your new hardware. If you think you are in the clear here, you are wrong.  The next VERY IMPORTANT step is to remember to change your settings in the BIOS upon next startup.  Specifically, yoiu will need ot change your BIOS to enable USB mouse and enable USB keyboard input.  If you don't, Windows will detect an incompatibility upon the next startup, and you will be stuck once again in the endless cycle of reboot/Startup Repair/reboot/Startup Repair, without ever reaching a successful boot. Here's the thing - the BIOS and the drivers registered in Win 7 need to match.  If they don't, you're going to lose another weekend worrying and fiddling, all the while wondering if you've permanently damaged your hard drive beyond repair. (Sigh).  In the end, things worked out.  I must note that it is saddening to see how many posts there are out there that recommend just doing a clean install, as if it's the only option.  How many countless poor souls have lost their data, their backups, their pictures and videos, all for nothing other than the fact that the person giving advice just didn't know what to do at that point? My advice to you, try having a look at your BIOS settings first and making sure Win 7 can find your BIOS settings, and also disabling in your BIOS anything that might halt your system boot-up process if it encounters errors.

  Read the article

• Understanding exceptional cases

  - by Justin

  I've been studying the use of exceptions in various php projects (such as Doctrine and Zend Framework). Exceptions seem to be thrown when unordinary input/state occurs. A perfect example is Doctrine throwing an exception when you try to use a invalid query string. I think the creators of the doctrine api understood that first, you can't query data by using an invalid DQL statement, and a developer should immediately be warned that an error has occurred, rather then letting execution continue with the possibility of an error code going un-checked. I also bet that this simplifies reading the code. I can't think of a situation where you would want to use an invalid DQL statement, except unit testing. Since this is true, it's better to avoid plaguing a bunch of code with null/error checks and use exceptions. I've read in books that exceptions shouldn't be thrown when validating dating user input. I've seen examples where of where the guideline is broken. One example is the Zend framework. If supplying an invalid controller or action name, an exception is thrown. Unlike doctrine, the user has more direct control over this sort of input. I know you can configure an error controller and set up a 404 message or what have you, but I'm curious why they have used an exception in this scenario? I guess you can argue the Zend Framework does not know how to continue processing the quest. One last example Is I wrote a function to return some html based on a given resource type. This resource type is hard-coded and sent when a user interacts with a web site (such as clicking a button to display the form to input data). I don't expect users to be mucking around with the request type. Under normal operating conditions, the resource type should be valid. To clean up some logic, I was going to throw an exception if a particular form wasn't found. This is mainly to find the correct form associated with a resource type so proper validation can occur. Does this sound like a valid use case for an exception? Right now it's pretty trivial, but I do plan to implement a restful consumer and re-using a function to map resources to their validation services would be very useful. I can then catch the exception and based on the consumer, return an error message suitable for the request type...

  Read the article

• Android - Force Close - Null Pointer on Canvas?

  - by user22241

  Please bear with me. I have a very odd problem. Basically, my app so far, has 3 activities (a main splash screen, an 'options/menu' screen and the main app). If I follow the very specific steps oulined below, I get a 'null pointer exception' in the 2nd activity) and the app force closes...... Here are the steps: Start the app (a game based on Surfaceview), tap through to the third activity so the game is running, then hit the home key so the game is paused and put to the background, the activity/app is ended through DDMS in the SDK then restarted on the device (all OK so far), now if I hit the back key on the device twice in quick succession, it happens. All other sequence of events is fine, even to the point of pressing the back key, waiting for the previous activity to show, then hitting back again - all OK. Only when the back key is pressed twice in quick succession following all the above steps does the problem occur. I'm assuming that the canvas isn't ready as it's showing as 'null' when this happens, but I'm not sure why this is happening as surely it's happening when I'm trying to go back to activity 1, but the logcat shows the error in activity 2. if I stop the activity running my 'doDraw' method (which referenced the canvas), then all is OK - so I can safely assume it is the canvas causing the problem. Also, if I skip my first activity (which is a very basic full-screen button which just displays a splashscreen and waits for the user to tap the screen), and make my 2nd activity the launch activity, again, it is OK. this is the part of the code that I think is probably relevant: @Override public void surfaceChanged(SurfaceHolder arg0, int arg1, int arg2, int arg3) { vheight = this.getHeight(); vwidth = this.getWidth(); } @Override public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) { vheight = this.getHeight(); vwidth = this.getWidth(); this.viewWidth = vwidth; this.viewHeight = vheight; if (runthread==false){ if (preThread.getState()==Thread.State.TERMINATED){ preThread = new OptionsThread(thisholder, thiscontext, thishandler); } preThread.setRunning(true); preThread.start();} } @Override public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) { preThread.setRunning(false); //Stop the loop boolean retry = true; //Stop the thread while (retry) { try { preThread.join(); retry = false; } catch (InterruptedException e) { } } Thank you all for any help you can offer

  Read the article

• Accounting for waves when doing planar reflections

  - by CloseReflector

  I've been studying Nvidia's examples from the SDK, in particular the Island11 project and I've found something curious about a piece of HLSL code which corrects the reflections up and down depending on the state of the wave's height. Naturally, after examining the brief paragraph of code: // calculating correction that shifts reflection up/down according to water wave Y position float4 projected_waveheight = mul(float4(input.positionWS.x,input.positionWS.y,input.positionWS.z,1),g_ModelViewProjectionMatrix); float waveheight_correction=-0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; projected_waveheight = mul(float4(input.positionWS.x,-0.8,input.positionWS.z,1),g_ModelViewProjectionMatrix); waveheight_correction+=0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; reflection_disturbance.y=max(-0.15,waveheight_correction+reflection_disturbance.y); My first guess was that it compensates for the planar reflection when it is subjected to vertical perturbation (the waves), shifting the reflected geometry to a point where is nothing and the water is just rendered as if there is nothing there or just the sky: Now, that's the sky reflecting where we should see the terrain's green/grey/yellowish reflection lerped with the water's baseline. My problem is now that I cannot really pinpoint what is the logic behind it. Projecting the actual world space position of a point of the wave/water geometry and then multiplying by -.5f, only to take another projection of the same point, this time with its y coordinate changed to -0.8 (why -0.8?). Clues in the code seem to indicate it was derived with trial and error because there is redundancy. For example, the author takes the negative half of the projected y coordinate (after the w divide): float waveheight_correction=-0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; And then does the same for the second point (only positive, to get a difference of some sort, I presume) and combines them: waveheight_correction+=0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; By removing the divide by 2, I see no difference in quality improvement (if someone cares to correct me, please do). The crux of it seems to be the difference in the projected y, why is that? This redundancy and the seemingly arbitrary selection of -.8f and -0.15f lead me to conclude that this might be a combination of heuristics/guess work. Is there a logical underpinning to this or is it just a desperate hack? Here is an exaggeration of the initial problem which the code fragment fixes, observe on the lowest tessellation level. Hopefully, it might spark an idea I'm missing. The -.8f might be a reference height from which to deduce how much to disturb the texture coordinate sampling the planarly reflected geometry render and -.15f might be the lower bound, a security measure.

  Read the article

• Why are MVC & TDD not employed more in game architecture?

  - by secoif

  I will preface this by saying I haven't looked a huge amount of game source, nor built much in the way of games. But coming from trying to employ 'enterprise' coding practices in web apps, looking at game source code seriously hurts my head: "What is this view logic doing in with business logic? this needs refactoring... so does this, refactor, refactorrr" This worries me as I'm about to start a game project, and I'm not sure whether trying to mvc/tdd the dev process is going to hinder us or help us, as I don't see many game examples that use this or much push for better architectural practices it in the community. The following is an extract from a great article on prototyping games, though to me it seemed exactly the attitude many game devs seem to use when writing production game code: Mistake #4: Building a system, not a game ...if you ever find yourself working on something that isn’t directly moving your forward, stop right there. As programmers, we have a tendency to try to generalize our code, and make it elegant and be able to handle every situation. We find that an itch terribly hard not scratch, but we need to learn how. It took me many years to realize that it’s not about the code, it’s about the game you ship in the end. Don’t write an elegant game component system, skip the editor completely and hardwire the state in code, avoid the data-driven, self-parsing, XML craziness, and just code the damned thing. ... Just get stuff on the screen as quickly as you can. And don’t ever, ever, use the argument “if we take some extra time and do this the right way, we can reuse it in the game”. EVER. is it because games are (mostly) visually oriented so it makes sense that the code will be weighted heavily in the view, thus any benefits from moving stuff out to models/controllers, is fairly minimal, so why bother? I've heard the argument that MVC introduces a performance overhead, but this seems to me to be a premature optimisation, and that there'd more important performance issues to tackle before you worry about MVC overheads (eg render pipeline, AI algorithms, datastructure traversal, etc). Same thing regarding TDD. It's not often I see games employing test cases, but perhaps this is due to the design issues above (mixed view/business) and the fact that it's difficult to test visual components, or components that rely on probablistic results (eg operate within physics simulations). Perhaps I'm just looking at the wrong source code, but why do we not see more of these 'enterprise' practices employed in game design? Are games really so different in their requirements, or is a people/culture issue (ie game devs come from a different background and thus have different coding habits)?

  Read the article

• SDL - Getting a single keypress event instead of a keystate?

  - by MrKatSwordfish

  Right now I'm working on a simple SDL project, but I've hit an issue when trying to get a single keypress event to skip past a splash screen. Right now, there are 4 start-up splash screens that I would like to be able to skip with a single keypress (of any key). My issue is that, as of now, if I hold down a key, it skips through each splash screen to the very last one immediately. The splash screens are stored as an array of SDL surfaces which are all loaded at the initialization of the state. I have an variable called currentSplashImage that controls which element of the array is being rendered on the screen. I've set it up so that whenever there's a SDL_KEYDOWN event, it triggers a single incrementation of the currentSplashImage variable. So, I'm really not sure why my code isn't working correctly. For some reason, when I hold down a button, it seems to be treating the held button as a new key press event every time it ticks through the code. Does anyone know how I can go about fixing this issue? [Here's a snippet of code that I've been using...] void SplashScreenState::handleEvents() { SDL_PollEvent( &localEvent ); if ( localEvent.type == SDL_KEYDOWN ) { if ( currentSplashImage < 3 && currentSplashImage >= 0) { currentSplashImage++; } } else if ( localEvent.type == SDL_QUIT ) { smgaEngine.setRunning(false); } } I should also mention that the SDL_Event 'localEvent' is part of the GameState parent class, while this event handling code is part of a SplashScreenState subclass. If anyone knows why this is happening, or if there is any way to improve my code, It'd be helpful to me! :D I'm still a very new programmer, trying to learn. UPDATE: I added a std::cout line to that the code runs multiple times with a single KEYDOWN event. I also tried disabling SDL_EnableKeyRepeat, but it didn't fix the issue. void SplashScreenState::handleEvents() { SDL_PollEvent( &localEvent ); if ( localEvent.type == SDL_KEYDOWN ) { if ( currentSplashImage < 3 && currentSplashImage >= 0) { currentSplashImage++; std::cout << "KEYDOWN.."; //<---- test cout line } } else if ( localEvent.type == SDL_QUIT ) { smgaEngine.setRunning(false); } } This prints out "KEYDOWN..KEYDOWN..KEYDOWN.." in the cout stream when a button is held.

  Read the article

• Why occlusion is failing sometimes?

  - by cad

  I am rendering two cubes in the space using XNA 4.0 and occlusion only works from certain angles. Here is what I see from the front angle (everything ok) Here is what I see from behind This is my draw method. Cubes are drawn by serverManager and serverManager1 protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); switch (_gameStateFSM.State) { case GameFSMState.GameStateFSM.INTROSCREEN: spriteBatch.Begin(); introscreen.Draw(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.End(); break; case GameFSMState.GameStateFSM.GAME: spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Deferred, BlendState.AlphaBlend); // Text screenMessagesManager.Draw(spriteBatch, firstPersonCamera.cameraPosition, fpsHelper.framesPerSecond); // Camera firstPersonCamera.Draw(); // Servers serverManager.Draw(GraphicsDevice, firstPersonCamera.viewMatrix, firstPersonCamera.projMatrix); serverManager1.Draw(GraphicsDevice, firstPersonCamera.viewMatrix, firstPersonCamera.projMatrix); // Room //roomManager.Draw(GraphicsDevice, firstPersonCamera.viewMatrix); spriteBatch.End(); break; case GameFSMState.GameStateFSM.EXITGAME: break; default: break; } base.Draw(gameTime); fpsHelper.IncrementFrameCounter(); } serverManager and serverManager1 are instances of the same class ServerManager that draws a cube. The draw method for ServerManager is: public void Draw(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice, Matrix viewMatrix, Matrix projectionMatrix) { cubeEffect.World = Matrix.CreateTranslation(modelPosition); // Set the World matrix which defines the position of the cube cubeEffect.View = viewMatrix; // Set the View matrix which defines the camera and what it's looking at cubeEffect.Projection = projectionMatrix; // Enable textures on the Cube Effect. this is necessary to texture the model cubeEffect.TextureEnabled = true; cubeEffect.Texture = cubeTexture; // Enable some pretty lights cubeEffect.EnableDefaultLighting(); // apply the effect and render the cube foreach (EffectPass pass in cubeEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes) { pass.Apply(); cubeToDraw.RenderToDevice(graphicsDevice); } } Obviously there is something I am doing wrong. Any hint of where to look? (Maybe z-buffer or occlusion tests?)

  Read the article

• How to implement a component based system for items in a web game.

  - by Landstander

  Reading several other questions and answers on using a component based system to define items I want to use one for the items and spells in a web game written in PHP. I'm just stuck on the implementation. I'm going to use a DB schema suggested in this series (part 5 describes the schema); http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/ This means I'll have an items table with generic item properties, a table listing all of the components for an item and finally records in each component table used to make up the item. Assuming I can select the first two together in a single query, I'm still going to do N queries for each component type. I'm kind of fine with this because I can cache the data into memcache and check there first before doing any queries. I'll need to build up the items on every request they are used in so the implementation needs to be on the lean side even if they're pulled from memcache. But right there is where I feel confident about implementing a component system for my items ends. I figure I'd need to bring attributes and behaviors into the container from each component it uses. I'm just not sure how to do that effectively and not end up writing a lot of specialized code to deal with each component. For example an AttackComponent might need to know how to filter targets inside of a battle context and also maybe provide an attack behavior. That same item might also have a UsableComponent which allows the item to be used and apply some effect onto a different set of targets filtered differently from the same battle context. Then not every part of an item is an active part, an AttributeBonusComponent might need to only kick in when the item is in an equipped state or when displaying the item details page. Ultimately, how should I bring all of the components together into the container so when I use an item as a weapon I get the correct list of targets? Know when a weapon can also be used as an item? Or to apply the bonuses the item provides to a character object? I feel like I've gone too far down the rabbit hole and I can't grasp onto the simple solution in front of me. (If that makes any sense at all.) Likewise if I were to implement the best answer from here I feel like I'd have a lot of the same questions. How to model multiple "uses" (e.g. weapon) for usable-inventory/object/items (e.g. katana) within a relational database.

  Read the article

• Can Anything be Done to Make Improv (a 1993 Win 3.1 App) handle larger Files?

  - by user75185

  My very favorite spradsheet is Improv, a 1993 Windows 3.1 application. It still puts Excel to shame for building spreadsheets and writing formulas. The only problem is because Improv was written when 1 Meg of RAM was state of the art, it becomes unstable when working with larger spreadsheets and often crashes and/or corrupts the data file. I am working on a project that greatly exceeds Improv's limits. Although it will ultimately require more robust databasing capability, I could save a lot of critical time if I could delay that headache and continue working in Improv for now. To that end, I moved to the only product I could find that comes close, Quantrix, which is nothing more than Improv updated to handle large spreadsheets and utilize today's technologies. The problems with Quantrix are its speed (significantly slower than Improv) and its $1000 price (which I cannot afford). I have already had 3 15 day extensions after the initial 30 day trial, so my time to use Quantrix as a bridge is at its end. Searches for Improv over the years have gotten me nowhere and, not surprisingly after reading some posts on this site, I got nothing for the money and time invested to find a programmer to write code to "fix" this problem. Improv is freely available as "abandonware" at http://vetusware.com/download/LotusImprov2.1/?id=5797 , and the best background info can be found on Wikipedia and at "Moose's Greatest Software Products of All Time - Lotus Improv" http://moosevalley.fhost.com.au/mooses_review_page_lotus_improv.html It is critically urgent for me to focus on analyzing the data asap. Working in a stable Improv would, without question, be the fastest route. To that end, I am looking for answers to the following questions and anything else that might be helpful: 1) Is it lawful to hire someone to fix Improv for my own use? If so, 2) About how much should it cost? 3) About how long should it take? 4) What skills should I be looking for &/or how should a post be worded? 5) Is there a niche site where it should it be posted? 6) What questions can I ask to quickly screen candidates? Since I am not a programmer, I need questions the answers to which leave no room to confuse me, whether intentional or not. For example, what tools or players should someone with an acceptable competency level have knowledge of?

  Read the article

• "You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run: libc.so.6" The common fixes don't work,

  - by M_Steam_User

  So I know this is a problem that has been asked around a lot, but I've tried a bunch of solutions with no success. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit), and I just installed it yesterday. This is my first time working with linux. The error is: You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run: libc.so.6 Things I've tried. First, I had downloaded from the steam website. I uninstalled it, and tried again from the ubuntu software centre. sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ia32-libs sudo apt-get upgrade This installed a bunch of the 32 bit libraries, but did not fix the issue. This seems like the major fix for most people. The direct approach of sudo apt-get install libc.so.6 returns this: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package libc.so.6 E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'libc.so.6' I guess libc.so.6 isn't a package, just a single file or something? I also tried gksudo gedit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/steam.conf Added these two lines, those the second one was all ready in the file, but copied over: /usr/lib32 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa Then executed: sudo ldconfig But nothing seemed to happen, steam still doesn't work. So, I feel like it is more likely that I have the library and steam isn't looking in the right place. One thing I've seen is people usually reference /usr/local/lib/ for your library locations. However, I can't find where to cd into /usr/, it isn't in my home folder. If /usr/ is the home folder, there is only a /.local folder which only has /share, no lib anywhere. Sorry for my linux ignorance. I appreciate any help, I honestly have no idea how to confirm I have the library and point steam to it, or if that is even the right thing to do. Edit: Tried this, not entirely sure what it means ~$ ls -l /lib32/libc* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1721832 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libc-2.15.so -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 185928 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libcidn-2.15.so lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libcidn.so.1 -> libcidn-2.15.so -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34316 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libcrypt-2.15.so lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libcrypt.so.1 -> libcrypt-2.15.so lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Sep 30 11:06 /lib32/libc.so.6 -> libc-2.15.so

  Read the article

• How to do proper Alpha in XNA?

  - by Soshimo

  Okay, I've read several articles, tutorials, and questions regarding this. Most point to the same technique which doesn't solve my problem. I need the ability to create semi-transparent sprites (texture2D's really) and have them overlay another sprite. I can achieve that somewhat with the code samples I've found but I'm not satisfied with the results and I know there is a way to do this. In mobile programming (BREW) we did it old school and actually checked each pixel for transparency before rendering. In this case it seems to render the sprite below it blended with the alpha above it. This may be an artifact of how I'm rendering the texture but, as I said before, all examples point to this one technique. Before I go any further I'll go ahead and paste my example code. public void Draw(SpriteBatch batch, Camera camera, float alpha) { int tileMapWidth = Width; int tileMapHeight = Height; batch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Texture, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.PointWrap, DepthStencilState.Default, RasterizerState.CullNone, null, camera.TransformMatrix); for (int x = 0; x < tileMapWidth; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < tileMapHeight; y++) { int tileIndex = _map[y, x]; if (tileIndex != -1) { Texture2D texture = _tileTextures[tileIndex]; batch.Draw( texture, new Rectangle( (x * Engine.TileWidth), (y * Engine.TileHeight), Engine.TileWidth, Engine.TileHeight), new Color(new Vector4(1f, 1f, 1f, alpha ))); } } } batch.End(); } As you can see, in this code I'm using the overloaded SpriteBatch.Begin method which takes, among other things, a blend state. I'm almost positive that's my problem. I don't want to BLEND the sprites, I want them to be transparent when alpha is 0. In this example I can set alpha to 0 but it still renders both tiles, with the lower z ordered sprite showing through, discolored because of the blending. This is not a desired effect, I want the higher z-ordered sprite to fade out and not effect the color beneath it in such a manner. I might be way off here as I'm fairly new to XNA development so feel free to steer me in the correct direction in the event I'm going down the wrong rabbit hole. TIA

  Read the article

• Best Practice Method for Including Images in a DataGrid using MVVM

  - by Killercam

  All, I have a WPF DataGrid. This DataGrid shows files ready for compilation and should also show the progress of my compiler as it compiles the files. The format of the DataGrid is Image|File Path|State -----|---------|----- * |C:\AA\BB |Compiled & |F:PP\QQ |Failed > |G:HH\LL |Processing .... The problem is the image column (the *, &, and are for representation only). I have a ResourceDictionary that contains hundreds of vector images as Canvas objects: <ResourceDictionary xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"> <Canvas x:Key="appbar_acorn" Width="48" Height="48" Clip="F1 M 0,0L 48,0L 48,48L 0,48L 0,0"> <Path Width="22.3248" Height="25.8518" Canvas.Left="13.6757" Canvas.Top="11.4012" Stretch="Fill" Fill="{DynamicResource BlackBrush}" Data="F1 M 16.6309,18.6563C 17.1309,8.15625 29.8809,14.1563 29.8809,14.1563C 30.8809,11.1563 34.1308,11.4063 34.1308,11.4063C 33.5,12 34.6309,13.1563 34.6309,13.1563C 32.1309,13.1562 31.1309,14.9062 31.1309,14.9062C 41.1309,23.9062 32.6309,27.9063 32.6309,27.9062C 24.6309,24.9063 21.1309,22.1562 16.6309,18.6563 Z M 16.6309,19.9063C 21.6309,24.1563 25.1309,26.1562 31.6309,28.6562C 31.6309,28.6562 26.3809,39.1562 18.3809,36.1563C 18.3809,36.1563 18,38 16.3809,36.9063C 15,36 16.3809,34.9063 16.3809,34.9063C 16.3809,34.9063 10.1309,30.9062 16.6309,19.9063 Z "/> </Canvas> </ResourceDictionary> Now, I want to be able to include these in my image column and change them at run-time. I was going to attempt to do this by setting up a property in my View Model that was of type Image and binding this to my View via: <DataGrid.Columns> <DataGridTemplateColumn Header="" Width="SizeToCells" IsReadOnly="True"> <DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Image Source="{Binding Canvas}"/> </DataTemplate> </DataGridTemplateColumn.CellTemplate> </DataGridTemplateColumn> </DataGrid.Columns> Where in the View Model I have the appropriate property. Now, I was told this is not 'pure' MVVM. I don't fully accept this, but I want to know if there is a better way of doing this. Say, binding to an enum and using a converter to get the image? Any advice would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Raid superblock missing on single parition. Recovery needed!

  - by user171639

  Ok so I have a 2 TB raid 1 setup that has three partitions: sdc1: linux sdc2: swap sdc3: LVM for data However the LVM will no longer mount. So I thought that I would take the first drive, mount it in linux (ive done this b4), and reset the spare drive to copy the data. Normally I can mount a single drive for data recovery using: sudo su apt-get install mdadm lvm2 mdadm --assemble --scan modprobe dm-mod vgscan vgchange -ay c mount -o ro /dev/c/c /mnt Unfortunately, vgscan doesnot recognize the data partition. It appears as though the superblock on the first drive's data partition was erased while syncing with the second. So now I cannot mount that partition and the second drive is stuck in spare mode. Any ideas? Or a way to force mount the data partition just to copy the data? knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ sudo su root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# apt-get install mdadm lvm2 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done lvm2 is already the newest version. mdadm is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 551 not upgraded. root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# mdadm --assemble --scan mdadm: /dev/md/1 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2). mdadm: /dev/md/0 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2). root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# modprobe dm-mod root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# vgscan Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... No volume groups found root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md0 : active raid1 sdc1[2] 4193268 blocks super 1.2 [2/1] [U_] md1 : active raid1 sdc2[2] 524276 blocks super 1.2 [2/1] [U_] unused devices: <none> root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# mdadm -v --assemble --auto=yes /dev/md2 /dev/sdc3 mdadm: looking for devices for /dev/md2 mdadm: no recogniseable superblock on /dev/sdc3 mdadm: /dev/sdc3 has no superblock - assembly aborted root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# dumpe2fs /dev/md0 | grep -i superblock dumpe2fs 1.42.4 (12-Jun-2012) Primary superblock at 0, Group descriptors at 1-1 Backup superblock at 32768, Group descriptors at 32769-32769 Backup superblock at 98304, Group descriptors at 98305-98305 Backup superblock at 163840, Group descriptors at 163841-163841 Backup superblock at 229376, Group descriptors at 229377-229377 Backup superblock at 294912, Group descriptors at 294913-294913 Backup superblock at 819200, Group descriptors at 819201-819201 Backup superblock at 884736, Group descriptors at 884737-884737 root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# Notes: I can read the super block from the spare drive. I was gonna try and restore the superblock from one of the backups, but i dont know how or if this would work. I also heard creating a new array (mdadm --create) using the same parameters will not delete the data on the drive but i didnt want to risk it. Recommendations?

  Read the article

• How to synchronize the ball in a network pong game?

  - by Thaars

  I’m developing a multiplayer network pong game, my first game ever. The current state is, I’ve running the physic engine with the same configurations on the server and the clients. The own paddle movement is predicted and get just confirmed by the authoritative server. Is a difference detected between them, I correct the position at the client by interpolation. The opponent paddle is also interpolated 200ms to 100ms in the past, because the server is broadcasting snapshots every 100ms to each client. So far it works very well, but now I have to simulate the ball and have a problem to understanding the procedure. I’ve read Valve’s (and many other) articles about fast-paced multiplayer several times and understood their approach. Maybe I can compare my ball with their bullets, but their advantage is, the bullets are not visible. When I have to display the ball, and see my paddle in the present, the opponent in the past and the server is somewhere between it, how can I synchronize the ball over all instances and ensure, that it got ever hit by the paddle even if the paddle is fast moving? Currently my ball’s position is simply set by a server update, so it can happen, that the ball bounces back, even if the paddle is some pixel away (because of a delayed server position). Until now I’ve got no synced clock over all instances. I’m sending a client step index with each update to the server. If the server did his job, he sends the snapshot with the last step index of each client back to the clients. Now I’m looking for the stored position at the returned step index and compare them. Do I need a common clock to sync the ball? EDIT: I've tried to sync a common clock for the server and all clients with a timestamp. But I think it's better to use an own stepping instead of a timestamp (so I don't need to calculate with the ping and so on - and the timestamp will never be exact). The physics are running 60 times per second and now I use this for keeping them synchronized. Is that a good way? When the ball gets calculated by each client, the angle after bouncing can differ because of the different position of the paddles (the opponent is 200ms in the past). When the server is sending his ball position, velocity and angle (because he knows the position of each paddle and is authoritative), the ball could be in a very different position because of the different angles after bouncing (because the clients receive the server data after 100ms). How is it possible to interpolate such a huge difference? I posted this question some days ago at stackoverflow, but got no answer yet. Maybe this is the better place for this question.

  Read the article

• Mousin' down the PathListBox

  - by T

  While modifying the standard media player with a new look and feel for Ineta Live I saw a unique opportunity to use their logo with a dotted I with and attached arc as the scrub control. So I created a PathListBox that I wanted an object to follow when a user did a click and drag action.  Below is how I solved the problem.  Please let me know if you have improvements or know of a completely different way.  I am always eager to learn. First, I created a path using the pen tool in Expression Blend (see the yellow line in image below).  Then I right clicked that path and chose [Path] --> [Make Layout Path].   That created a new PathListBox.  Then I chose the object I want to move down the new PathListBox and Placed it as a child in the Objects and Timeline window (see image below).  If the child object (the thing the user will click and drag) is XAML, it will move much smoother than images. Just as another side note, I wanted there to be no highlight when the user selects the “ball” to drag and drop.  This is done by editing the ItemContainerStyle under Additional Templates on the PathListBox.  Post a question if you need help on this and I will expand my explanation. Here is a pic of the object and the path I wanted it to follow.  I gave the path a yellow solid brush here so you could see it but when I lay this over another object, I will make the path transparent.   To animate this object down the path, the trick is to animate the Start number for the LayoutPath.  Not the StartItemIndex, the Start above Span. In order to enable animation when a user clicks and drags, I put in the following code snippets in the code behind. the DependencyProperties are not necessary for the Drag control. namespace InetaPlayer{ public partial class PositionControl : UserControl { private bool _mouseDown; private double _maxPlayTime; public PositionControl() { // Required to initialize variables InitializeComponent(); //mouse events for scrub control positionThumb.MouseLeftButtonDown += new MouseButtonEventHandler(ValueThumb_MouseLeftButtonDown); positionThumb.MouseLeftButtonUp += new MouseButtonEventHandler(ValueThumb_MouseLeftButtonUp); positionThumb.MouseMove += new MouseEventHandler(ValueThumb_MouseMove); positionThumb.LostMouseCapture += new MouseEventHandler(ValueThumb_LostMouseCapture); } // exposed for binding to real slider using a DependencyProperty enables animation, styling, binding, etc.... public double MaxPlayTime { get { return (double)GetValue(MaxPlayTimeProperty); } set { SetValue(MaxPlayTimeProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty MaxPlayTimeProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("MaxPlayTime", typeof(double), typeof(PositionControl), null);   // exposed for binding to real slider using a DependencyProperty enables animation, styling, binding, etc....   public double CurrSliderValue { get { return (double)GetValue(CurrSliderValueProperty); } set { SetValue(CurrSliderValueProperty, value); } }   public static readonly DependencyProperty CurrSliderValueProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("CurrSliderValue", typeof(double), typeof(PositionControl), new PropertyMetadata(0.0, OnCurrSliderValuePropertyChanged));   private static void OnCurrSliderValuePropertyChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { PositionControl control = d as PositionControl; control.OnCurrSliderValueChanged((double)e.OldValue, (double)e.NewValue); }   private void OnCurrSliderValueChanged(double oldValue, double newValue) { _maxPlayTime = (double) GetValue(MaxPlayTimeProperty); if (!_mouseDown) if (_maxPlayTime!=0) sliderPathListBox.LayoutPaths[0].Start = newValue / _maxPlayTime; else sliderPathListBox.LayoutPaths[0].Start = 0; }  //mouse control   void ValueThumb_MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { if (!_mouseDown) return; //get the offset of how far the drag has been //direction is handled automatically (offset will be negative for left move and positive for right move) Point mouseOff = e.GetPosition(positionThumb); //Divide the offset by 1000 for a smooth transition sliderPathListBox.LayoutPaths[0].Start +=mouseOff.X/1000; _maxPlayTime = (double)GetValue(MaxPlayTimeProperty); SetValue(CurrSliderValueProperty ,sliderPathListBox.LayoutPaths[0].Start*_maxPlayTime); }   void ValueThumb_MouseLeftButtonUp(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { _mouseDown = false; } void ValueThumb_LostMouseCapture(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { _mouseDown = false; } void ValueThumb_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { _mouseDown = true; ((UIElement)positionThumb).CaptureMouse(); }   }}  I made this into a user control and exposed a couple of DependencyProperties in order to bind it to a standard Slider in the overall project.  This control is embedded into the standard Expression media player template and is used to replace the standard scrub bar.  When the player goes live, I will put a link here.

  Read the article

• Wired connection not being recognized

  - by maxifick

  I'm on Ubuntu Maverick (10.10). I've read a few threads regarding wired connection problems, but haven't found a solution yet. The problem appears after I connect to a wireless network. When I disconnect wireless and plug in an internet cable, the wired connection is not recognized at all. Even the socket appears dead (there are no diodes flashing). The only solution so far seems to be restarting the computer. Network Manager then tries to connect to a Wi-Fi, but the wired connection is listed and working. I've tried sudo restart network-manager, but that doesn't solve anything. After a while, available wireless networks start appearing, but the wired still doesn't. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. Edit: Here is the dmesg output after switching off Wi-Fi and then plugging the internet cable. [18200.623543] Restarting tasks ... done. [18200.648422] video LNXVIDEO:00: Restoring backlight state [18200.707580] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: phy I/O error [18200.707715] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: phy I/O error [18200.707819] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: phy I/O error [18200.707922] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: phy I/O error [18200.708025] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: phy I/O error [18200.708127] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: phy I/O error [18200.708229] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: phy I/O error [18200.708332] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: phy I/O error [18200.708824] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: enabling interface [18200.709587] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [18202.662422] EXT4-fs (sda9): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,commit=0 [18203.324061] EXT4-fs (sda9): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,commit=0 [18211.193137] eth1: no IPv6 routers present [18212.844649] usb 5-1: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 5 [18213.017235] input: USB Optical Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/usb5/5-1/5-1:1.0/input/input16 [18213.017499] generic-usb 0003:0461:4D17.0004: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [USB Optical Mouse] on usb-0000:00:13.0-1/input0 After system restart, dmesg says this: [ 19.802126] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: enabling interface [ 19.802394] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 20.812533] device eth0 entered promiscuous mode [ 21.495547] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex, flow control rx [ 21.495677] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex, flow control rx [ 21.496574] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready

  Read the article

• How should game objects be aware of each other?

  - by Jefffrey

  I find it hard to find a way to organize game objects so that they are polymorphic but at the same time not polymorphic. Here's an example: assuming that we want all our objects to update() and draw(). In order to do that we need to define a base class GameObject which have those two virtual pure methods and let polymorphism kicks in: class World { private: std::vector<GameObject*> objects; public: // ... update() { for (auto& o : objects) o->update(); for (auto& o : objects) o->draw(window); } }; The update method is supposed to take care of whatever state the specific class object needs to update. The fact is that each objects needs to know about the world around them. For example: A mine needs to know if someone is colliding with it A soldier should know if another team's soldier is in proximity A zombie should know where the closest brain, within a radius, is For passive interactions (like the first one) I was thinking that the collision detection could delegate what to do in specific cases of collisions to the object itself with a on_collide(GameObject*). Most of the the other informations (like the other two examples) could just be queried by the game world passed to the update method. Now the world does not distinguish objects based on their type (it stores all object in a single polymorphic container), so what in fact it will return with an ideal world.entities_in(center, radius) is a container of GameObject*. But of course the soldier does not want to attack other soldiers from his team and a zombie doesn't case about other zombies. So we need to distinguish the behavior. A solution could be the following: void TeamASoldier::update(const World& world) { auto list = world.entities_in(position, eye_sight); for (const auto& e : list) if (auto enemy = dynamic_cast<TeamBSoldier*>(e)) // shoot towards enemy } void Zombie::update(const World& world) { auto list = world.entities_in(position, eye_sight); for (const auto& e : list) if (auto enemy = dynamic_cast<Human*>(e)) // go and eat brain } but of course the number of dynamic_cast<> per frame could be horribly high, and we all know how slow dynamic_cast can be. The same problem also applies to the on_collide(GameObject*) delegate that we discussed earlier. So what it the ideal way to organize the code so that objects can be aware of other objects and be able to ignore them or take actions based on their type?

  Read the article

• 2d, Top-down map with different levels

  - by Ktash

  So, I'm creating a 2d, top down, sprite based (tiled) game, and right now I'm working on maps (well, a map editor at the moment, but it will be creating my maps, so basically the same thing). The scenario So, I'm thinking about efficiency and creating a map in pieces. In each piece, I plan on having 'layers'. Basically, I plan on rendering it down to a 'below hero' level, and an 'above hero' level, with the hero rendered in between obviously. There will likely also be a 'on level with hero' layer, but I'm not quite there yet. Not even worrying about events or interaction yet. Just looking to get a hero on the screen. Now for movement, I obviously need to know what tiles can be moved and in what direction. My plan at the moment is each tile getting 8 bits (4 'can enter in direction' bits, 4 'can leave in direction'). This will allow me to limit movement and even allow one way directional movement. The dilemma This works great for a lot of scenarios. It will allow me to store a map in essentially 3 layers, a string, and gives me flexibility going forward. However, I can't create maps that themselves have layers. A good example is a bridge where the user can go under or over the bridge without invalid moves being allowed. I can't create a platform and allow movement underneath. These are things I would like to be able to include in my game. My idea In theory, I could allow multiple hero layers and then allow multiple sets of 'below' and 'above' layers (or sandwich layers). But this complicates my system, and makes movement between maps potentially tricky (If the hero is on the third layer at the edge of a map, but that corresponds to the second layer on the other map, how can I allow or disallow movement). My question Is there a better way to manage multiple maps with multiple levels like this where a users level may be 'connected' on different levels on different maps? Or even... Am I doing this the hard way? Is there a more standard way to handle top-down 2d tiled maps that I am just not aware of? Things to note or that might be helpful This will be done in Javascript (transferred around in JSON) State will need to be transferred quickly, so a map-id and x/y/direction should be enough to get me a boolean 'can move' value Maps will not be standard sized (though they will be in a certain number of tiles) Making an editor tool so that I can have others help, so something that I can create in a tool would be helpful 'Teleportation' locations will likely need to exist to get into building maps and to and from different map sets (which will not necessarily be connected), but have not been created yet (lumping in with events at the moment).

  Read the article

• Should Item Grouping/Filter be in the ViewModel or View layer?

  - by ronag

  I'm in a situation where I have a list of items that need to be displayed depending on their properties. What I'm unsure of is where is the best place to put the filtering/grouping logic of the viewmodel state? Currently I have it in my view using converters, but I'm unsure whether I should have the logic in the viewmodel? e.g. ViewModel Layer: class ItemViewModel { DateTime LastAccessed { get; set; } bool IsActive { get; set; } } class ContainerViewModel { ObservableCollection<Item> Items {get; set;} } View Layer: <TextView Text="Active Items"/> <List ItemsSource={Binding Items, Converter=GroupActiveItemsByDay}/> <TextView Text="Active Items"/> <List ItemsSource={Binding Items, Converter=GroupInActiveItemsByDay}/> or should I build it like this? ViewModel Layer: class ContainerViewModel { ObservableCollection<IGrouping<string, Item>> ActiveItemsByGroup {get; set;} ObservableCollection<IGrouping<string, Item>> InActiveItemsByGroup {get; set;} } View Layer: <TextView Text="Active Items"/> <List ItemsSource={Binding ActiveItemsGroupByDate }/> <TextView Text="Active Items"/> <List ItemsSource={Binding InActiveItemsGroupByDate }/> Or maybe something in between? ViewModel Layer: class ContainerViewModel { ObservableCollection<IGrouping<string, Item>> ActiveItems {get; set;} ObservableCollection<IGrouping<string, Item>> InActiveItems {get; set;} } View Layer: <TextView Text="Active Items"/> <List ItemsSource={Binding ActiveItems, Converter=GroupByDate }/> <TextView Text="Active Items"/> <List ItemsSource={Binding InActiveItems, Converter=GroupByDate }/> I guess my question is what is good practice in terms as to what logic to put into the ViewModel and what logic to put into the Binding in the View, as they seem to overlap a bit?

  Read the article

• What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2?

  - by Fat Bloke

  A year is a long time in the IT industry. Since the last VirtualBox feature release, which was a little over a year ago, we've seen: new releases of cool new operating systems, such as Windows 8, ChromeOS, and Mountain Lion; we've seen a myriad of new Linux releases from big Enterprise class distributions like Oracle 6.3, to accessible desktop distros like Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 17; and we've also seen the spec of a typical PC or laptop double in power. All of these events have influenced our new VirtualBox version which we're releasing today. Here's how... Powerful hosts  One of the trends we've seen is that as the average host platform becomes more powerful, our users are consistently running more and more vm's. Some of our users have large libraries of vm's of various vintages, whilst others have groups of vm's that are run together as an assembly of the various tiers in a multi-tiered software solution, for example, a database tier, middleware tier, and front-ends.  So we're pleased to unveil a more powerful VirtualBox Manager to address the needs of these users: VM Groups Groups allow you to organize your VM library in a sensible way, e.g.  by platform type, by project, by version, by whatever. To create groups you can drag one VM onto another or select one or more VM's and choose Machine...Group from the menu bar. You can expand and collapse groups to save screen real estate, and you can Enter and Leave a group (think iPad navigation here) by using the right and left arrow keys when groups are selected. But groups are more than passive folders, because you can now also perform operations on groups, rather than all the individual VMs. So if you have a multi-tiered solution you can start the whole stack up with just one click. Autostart Many VirtualBox users run dedicated services in their VMs, for example, running a Wiki. With these types of VM workloads, you really want the VM start up when the host machine boots up. So with 4.2 we've introduced a cross-platform Auto-start mechanism to allow you to treat VMs as host services. Headless VM Launching With VM's such as web servers, wikis, and other types of server-class workloads, the Console of the VM is pretty much redundant. For some time now VirtualBox has offered a separate launch mechanism for these VM's, namely the command-line interface commands VBoxHeadless or VBoxManage startvm ... --type headless commands. But with 4.2 we also allow you launch headless VMs from the Manager. Simply hold down Shift when launching the VM from the Manager.  It's that easy. But how do you stop a headless VM? Well, with 4.2 we allow you to Close the VM from the Manager. (BTW best to use the ACPI Shutdown method which allows the guest VM to close down gracefully.) Easy VM Creation For our expert users, the  New VM Wizard was a little tiresome, so now there's a faster 2-click VM creation mode. Just Hide the description when creating a new VM. Powerful VMs  As the hosts have become more powerful, so are the guests that are running inside them. Here are some of the 4.2 features to accommodate them: Virtual Network Interface Cards  With 4.2, it's now possible to create VMs with up to 36 NICs, when using the ICH9 chipset emulation. But with great power comes great responsibility (didn't Obi-Wan say something similar?), and so we have also introduced bandwidth limiting to prevent a rogue VM stealing the whole pipe. VLAN tagging Some of our users leverage VLANs extensively so we've enhanced the E1000 NICs to support this.  Processor Performance If you are running a CPU which supports Nested Paging (aka EPT in the Intel world) such as most of the Core i5 and i7 CPUs, or are running an AMD Bulldozer or later, you should see some performance improvements from our work with these processors. And while we're talking Processors, we've added support for some of the more modern VIA CPUs too. Powerful Automation Because VirtualBox runs atop a fully blown operating system, it makes sense to leverage the capabilities of the host to run scripts that can drive the guest VMs. Guest Automation was introduced in a prior release but with 4.2 we've revamped the APIs to allow a richer and more powerful set of operations to be executed by the guest. Check out the IGuest APIs in the VirtualBox Programming Guide and Reference (SDK). Powerful Platforms  All the hardcore engineering that has gone into 4.2 has been done for a purpose and that is to deliver a fast and powerful engine that can run almost any x86 OS because of the integrity of the virtualization. So we're pleased to add support for these platforms: Mac OS X "Mountain Lion"  Windows 8 Windows Server 2012 Ubuntu 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”) Fedora 17 Oracle Linux 6.3  Here's the proof: We don't have time to go into the myriad of smaller improvements such as support for burning audio CDs from a guest, bi-directional clipboard control,  drag-and-drop of files into Linux guests, etc. so we'll leave that as an exercise for the user as soon as you've downloaded from the Oracle or community site and taken a peek at the User Guide. So all in all, a pretty solid release, one that we hope you'll enjoy discovering. - FB 

  Read the article

• Why distant objects draw in front of close objects?

  - by cad

  I am rendering two cubes in the space using XNA 4.0 and the layering of objects only works from certain angles. Here is what I see from the front angle (everything ok) Here is what I see from behind This is my draw method. Cubes are drawn by serverManager and serverManager1 protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); switch (_gameStateFSM.State) { case GameFSMState.GameStateFSM.INTROSCREEN: spriteBatch.Begin(); introscreen.Draw(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.End(); break; case GameFSMState.GameStateFSM.GAME: spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Deferred, BlendState.AlphaBlend); // Text screenMessagesManager.Draw(spriteBatch, firstPersonCamera.cameraPosition, fpsHelper.framesPerSecond); // Camera firstPersonCamera.Draw(); // Servers serverManager.Draw(GraphicsDevice, firstPersonCamera.viewMatrix, firstPersonCamera.projMatrix); serverManager1.Draw(GraphicsDevice, firstPersonCamera.viewMatrix, firstPersonCamera.projMatrix); // Room //roomManager.Draw(GraphicsDevice, firstPersonCamera.viewMatrix); spriteBatch.End(); break; case GameFSMState.GameStateFSM.EXITGAME: break; default: break; } base.Draw(gameTime); fpsHelper.IncrementFrameCounter(); } serverManager and serverManager1 are instances of the same class ServerManager that draws a cube. The draw method for ServerManager is: public void Draw(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice, Matrix viewMatrix, Matrix projectionMatrix) { cubeEffect.World = Matrix.CreateTranslation(modelPosition); // Set the World matrix which defines the position of the cube cubeEffect.View = viewMatrix; // Set the View matrix which defines the camera and what it's looking at cubeEffect.Projection = projectionMatrix; // Enable textures on the Cube Effect. this is necessary to texture the model cubeEffect.TextureEnabled = true; cubeEffect.Texture = cubeTexture; // Enable some pretty lights cubeEffect.EnableDefaultLighting(); // apply the effect and render the cube foreach (EffectPass pass in cubeEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes) { pass.Apply(); cubeToDraw.RenderToDevice(graphicsDevice); } } Obviously there is something I am doing wrong. Any hint of where to look? (Maybe z-buffer or occlusion tests?)

  Read the article

• MVVM and Animations in Silverlight

  - by Aligned

  I wanted to spin an icon to show progress to my user while some content was downloading. I'm using MVVM (aren't you) and made a satisfactory Storyboard to spin the icon. However, it took longer than expected to trigger that animation from my ViewModel's property.I used a combination of the GoToState action and the DataTrigger from the Microsoft.Expression.Interactions dll as described here.Then I had problems getting it to start until I found this approach that saved the day. The DataTrigger didn't bind right away because "it doesn’t change visual state on load is because the StateTarget property of the GotoStateAction is null at the time the DataTrigger fires.". Here's my XAML, hopefully you can fill in the rest.<Image x:Name="StatusIcon" AutomationProperties.AutomationId="StatusIcon" Width="16" Height="16" Stretch="Fill" Source="inProgress.png" ToolTipService.ToolTip="{Binding StatusTooltip}"> <i:Interaction.Triggers> <utilitiesBehaviors:DataTriggerWhichFiresOnLoad Value="True" Binding="{Binding IsDownloading, Mode=OneWay, TargetNullValue=True}"> <ei:GoToStateAction StateName="Downloading" /> </utilitiesBehaviors:DataTriggerWhichFiresOnLoad> <utilitiesBehaviors:DataTriggerWhichFiresOnLoad Value="False" Binding="{Binding IsDownloading, Mode=OneWay, TargetNullValue=True}"> <ei:GoToStateAction StateName="Complete"/> </utilitiesBehaviors:DataTriggerWhichFiresOnLoad> </i:Interaction.Triggers> <Image.Projection> <PlaneProjection/> </Image.Projection> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> <VisualStateGroup x:Name="VisualStateGroup"> <VisualStateGroup.Transitions> <VisualTransition GeneratedDuration="0" To="Downloading"> <VisualTransition.GeneratedEasingFunction> <QuadraticEase EasingMode="EaseInOut"/> </VisualTransition.GeneratedEasingFunction> <Storyboard RepeatBehavior="Forever"> <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Projection).(PlaneProjection.RotationZ)" Storyboard.TargetName="StatusIcon"> <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="0:0:1.5" Value="-360"/> <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="0:0:2" Value="-360"/> </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames> </Storyboard> </VisualTransition> <VisualTransition From="Downloading" GeneratedDuration="0"/> </VisualStateGroup.Transitions> <VisualState x:Name="Downloading"/> <VisualState x:Name="Complete"/> </VisualStateGroup> </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups></Image>MVVMAnimations.zip

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390  | Next Page >