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  • Does Android 2.1's Browser Support HTML 5 and What Video Format Does It Play?

    - by John Giotta
    The company I work for produces allot of video and we want to target as many devices as possible, but the question came up of what does the Android do? I personally own an Android based phone running 2.1, but I can't seem to get the HTML 5 tag to work. Even when I can trigger the browser to playback the video it just throws a notification error that it can't. Are there guidelines to producing Android/HTML 5 compatible videos? Is it truly supported?

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  • VLC will sometimes have issues displaying video in fullscreen. What could cause this? How would I troubleshoot the issue?

    - by George Marian
    Recently VLC has been having issues displaying video in fullscreen mode. AFAIK, nothing has changed with the video card drivers and it's certainly the same version of VLC. (/me shakes a fist at the repository maintainers) This has worked without issue in the past. In fact, I've had as many as 6 instances of VLC running, each playing a video. One was always fullscreen on my second monitor, while the others were tiled on my primary monitor. I was able to toggle any of the other 5 into fullscreen mode and the video displayed without issue. Lately, I've been having trouble running 2 instances in fullscreen mode. (Sometimes, even a single instance will not display the video in fullscreen.) VLC will continue to play the video, but in fullscreen mode I see nothing but a black screen. Sometimes, the video will display if I maximize the VLC window. Other times, I have to settle for a smaller sized window. I don't know if this is pertinent, but sometimes changing the min/max state of a Firefox window (Minefield, specifically) seemed to allow the troublesome instance to display the video in fullscreen mode. However, that did not prove to be a consistent workaround. Sometimes, it seemed that closing a Firefox window did the trick, though that isn't consistently successful either. (I futzed with Firefox, because with the crazy number of windows and tabs that I normally have open, it regularly hogs about 1 GB of RAM.) Another bit of funkiness that comes to mind is the fact that my secondary monitor is considered the primary on boot-up. I use xrandr to designate the real 1st monitor as primary after boot-up, as suggested by someone in a question I asked on the Unix & Linux SE site. Specs: Ubuntu 10.10 w/ Gnome and Compiz 8GB RAM AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition Asus M4A79 Deluxe mobo XFX ATI Radeon HD 5750 w/ 1GB RAM VLC is configured to use the hardware overlay for video (as per the default setting) Does anyone have an idea what may cause this issue or how I may go about troubleshooting it? Update: Right now I have 2 instances of VLC playing, each in fullscreen mode on a separate monitor. This is what I see:

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  • Video not playing on android webview

    - by rand
    I am working with an Android and PhoneGap application and am using the HTML5 video tag to play videos on my web page. When I play the video is not visible and video is not playing itself. How can I play a HTML5 video on Android? Code for the same given below <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="cordova-1.8.1.js"></script> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset="> <title></title> </head> <body > <video id="video" autobuffer height="240" width="360" onclick="this.play();> <source src="test.mp4"> <source src="test.mp4" type="video/webm"> <source src="test.mp4" type="video/ogg"> </video> <div id="msg"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> </script> </body> </html> and the activity class onCreate method-- public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_main); final WebView webView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webview); WebSettings webSettings = webView.getSettings(); webSettings.setLayoutAlgorithm(LayoutAlgorithm.NARROW_COLUMNS); webView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true); webSettings.setBuiltInZoomControls(true); webSettings.setPluginState(PluginState.ON); webView.getSettings().setPluginsEnabled(true); webSettings.setAllowFileAccess(true); webView.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/www/html5videoEvents.html"); }

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  • Can't serve HTML5 video through PHP on Safari/Mac (5.0)

    - by JKS
    I'm encountering a strange bug in Safari where, when I serve MP4 video through PHP (to obfuscate the file beneath the document root with a token-based authentication system), Safari for some reason fires the <video>'s onerror event, and the video never loads (I can't get any useful information out of the event object sent to onerror — everything is undefined). When I access the PHP script directly (i.e., the video is not embedded in a page), the video controls appear momentarily before flashing to a QuickTime question mark. When I access the MP4 file directly, it works as expected. What's bizarre is that the embedded video works perfectly in the latest version of Chrome for Mac. Here are the headers when accessed through PHP: Connection:Keep-Alive Content-Disposition:inline; filename="test.mp4" Content-Length:5558749 Content-Type:video/mp4 Date:Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:24:25 GMT Keep-Alive:timeout=10, max=29 Server:Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) mod_ssl/2.2.15 0.9.8l DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 X-Powered-By:PHP/5.2.13 And here are the headers when test.mp4 is accessed directly: Accept-Ranges:bytes Connection:Keep-Alive Content-Length:5558749 Content-Type:video/mp4 Date:Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:26:45 GMT Etag:"1c04757-54d1dd-489944c5a6400" Keep-Alive:timeout=10, max=30 Last-Modified:Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:25:36 GMT Server:Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) mod_ssl/2.2.15 0.9.8l DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 The only differing headers are: Accept-Ranges (which I don't think is necessary), Etag, Last-Modified, Content-Disposition, and X-Powered-By. Not only can Chrome handle the PHP-served video fine, but when I use the same script to load the MP4 through a Flash player, it also works fine. I just can't figure out what Safari is choking on. EDIT: Also, when I change the content disposition to "attachment", Safari will download the MP4 file just fine.

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  • Could you please provide me with comments on a Java game of mine?

    - by Peter Perhác
    Hello there. I have marked this question as community wiki, so no rep points are thrown around. I made this game, Forest Defender, a proof-of-feasibility little project, which I would like to share with you and collect your constructive comments, first impressions, etc. It is a the first playable (and enjoyable) game I have released to the public, so I am, naturally, very eager to get some recognition by you, as my peers. I read in a StackOverflow blog, that One of the major reasons we created Stack Overflow to give every programmer a chance to be recognized by their peers. Recognized for their knowledge, their passion, [...] It comes in the form of a Java applet, I used an animation framework called PulpCore and I must say that it's been extremely enjoyable to work with it. I do recommend to people interested in Java game development. Since the product is free, fun, entirely commercial-free and I am willing to share the code to it (on request), I thought it would be OK to post this as a topic here. Moderators, please feel free to move this to another place if you deem the other place more appropriate. EDIT: I am ever so stupid to forget to include a link :-) http://www.perhac.com/shared/forest-defender/index.html

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  • How can we best represent the SDLC process as a board game?

    - by Innogetics
    I recently got interested in financial board games and saw how they can be very useful in educating children about certain concepts. It got me thinking whether it was also possible to represent certain aspects of executing a software project via a boardgame and make it fun. Here are a few things that I have come up so far: human resources and tools / techniques are represented as cards. requirements are also represented as cards, which are dealt equally to each player, and the objective is to move all requirement cards through an "SDLC" board (one per player) that represent a series of squares grouped according to phases (design all the way to deployment) the passage of time is represented in a main square board like monopoly, and completing a trip around the board (passing "Go") allows the player to move each of the requirement cards a number of steps through the SDLC board depending on the capability of the resource cards (senior programmer allows one requirement to move two squares in the dev phase, junior programmer only one, etc.) players will start with play money representing the project budget, and at every pass at "Go" is payday. the player is out of the game if he runs out of funds. the main board also has "chance" / "risk" cards, which represent things that can mess up a project. damage is applied at the roll of a die, and chance modifiers depend on whether the user has "bought" tools / techniques. I haven't implemented this idea yet as I'm still looking at more play elements that can make the game more engaging, as well as soliciting for more ideas. I am planning to release this under Creative Commons license but haven't decided on the exact license yet. Any more game play suggestions are welcome. UPDATE: This was posted in BoardGameGeek and there's now an active discussion thread there. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/4436694

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  • What happened to the Journal of Game Development?

    - by Ricket
    The lengthy mission statement from its website states: The lack of game-specific research has prevented many in the academic community from embracing game development as a serious field of study. The Journal of Game Development (JOGD), however, provides a much-needed, peer-reviewed, medium of communication and the raison d'etre for serious academic research focused solely on game-related issues. The JOGD provides the vehicle for disseminating research and findings indigenous to the game development industry. It is an outlet for peer-reviewed research that will help validate the work and garner acceptance for the study of game development by the academic community. JOGD will serve both the game development industry and academic community by presenting leading-edge, original research, and theoretical underpinnings that detail the most recent findings in related academic disciplines, hardware, software, and technology that will directly affect the way games are conceived, developed, produced, and delivered. The Journal of Game Development was established in 2003. It's hard to find any information about the issues but at four issues per year, I estimate the last issue was distributed sometime in 2005 or 2006. It had a good editorial board of college professors and a founding editor from Ubisoft. The list of articles looks good. The price was reasonable. So what happened to it? Its website recently went down but you can see the last Archive.org version. The editor-in-chief is a professor at my school so I intend to ask him in person in a week or two, but I thought I'd see what you might be able to dig up about it first. Of course I will be sure to add an answer with his official word on the matter at that time.

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  • Architecture of an action multiplayer game from scratch

    - by lcf
    Not sure whether it's a good place to ask (do point me to a better one if it's not), but since what we're developing is a game - here it goes. So this is a "real-time" action multiplayer game. I have familiarized myself with concepts like lag compensation, view interpolation, input prediction and pretty much everything that I need for this. I have also prepared a set of prototypes to confirm that I understood everything correctly. My question is about the situation when game engine must be rewind to the past to find out whether there was a "hit" (sometimes it may involve the whole 'recomputation' of the world from that moment in the past up to the present moment. I already have a piece of code that does it, but it's not as neat as I need it to be. The domain logic of the app (the physics of the game) must be separated from the presentation (render) and infrastructure tools (e.g. the remote server interaction specifics). How do I organize all this? :) Is there any worthy implementation with open sources I can take a look at? What I'm thinking is something like this: -> Render / User Input -> Game Engine (this is the so called service layer) -> Processing User Commands & Remote Server -> Domain (Physics) How would you add into this scheme the concept of "ticks" or "interactions" with the possibility to rewind and recalculate "the game"? Remember, I cannot change the Domain/Physics but only the Game Engine. Should I store an array of "World's States"? Should they be just some representations of the world, optimized for this purpose somehow (how?) or should they be actual instances of the world (i.e. including behavior and all that). Has anybody had similar experience? (never worked on a game before if that matters)

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  • game play strategy in an arena

    - by joulesm
    I am writing a player's behavior for an arena game, and I'm wondering if you can offer some strategies. I'm writing it in Python, but I'm just interested in the high level game play. Here are the game aspects: Arena is a circle of a given size. The arena size shrinks every round to help break ties. Players are much smaller circles, can be on teams of 1 or 2 players. Players attack by colliding with other players, and based on the physics of the collision (speed of both players, angle), one could force another player out of the arena. Once a player is out of the arena, they are out of the game (for that round). The goal is to be the only team with players left in the arena. All other players have been pushed (through collisions or mistakes) out of the arena. It is possible for there to be no winner if the last two players exit the arena at the same time. Once the player has been programmed, the game just runs. There is no human intervention in the game. I'm thinking it's easiest to implement a few simple programmatic rules for my player to follow. For example, stay close to center of the arena, attack opponents from the inner side of the arena, etc. Are there any good simple game strategies? Would adding a random aspect to the game help? For example, to avoid predictability by the other team or something. Thanks in advance.

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  • HTML5 video tag in chrome - wmv

    - by elcuco
    Hi Al, I need to make a page which displays a video. Firefox and and Opera support the OGG format, no problem there. Chrome is ... "stupid" and does not recognize OGG. Does Chrome on Windows know how to handle WMV? I already have them encoded, and no I cannot recode new videos since the media is limited in spaced (CDROM). My code currently looks like this (and not working in chrome) <video controls> <source codecs="theora, vorbis" media="video/ogg" src="video.ogv" /> <source media="video/x-ms-wmv" src="video.wmv" /> Please install a new browser, or just get out </video> Note that I am missing a codec entry, does anyone know what I need to put there?

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  • Play video in UIWebView from NSData

    - by Papagalli
    Hello there, Does anybody know how to play a video in a UIVebView ? The video comes from the iphone library, when I pick it, I store it in core data as binary data. If i use the local url of the video it's working fine, the problem I have is that the this url refers to a folder named "tmp", and I don't know the lifetime of it. If I can get the real url of the video file it will be ok. //attachment is the core data object containing the data NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:attachment.path]; [self.webView loadRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url]]; I tried a solution that doesn't work: (i tried MIMETypes : "video/quicktime" and "video/mp4") [self.webView loadData:attachment.data MIMEType:@"video/mov" textEncodingName:nil baseURL:nil]; I think the second solution is the closest, and the problem comes from the MIMEType. Thanks by advance if anybody has a solution for this :)

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  • Streaming Flash Video Problem - Clipping

    - by Stanley
    I have a simple flash video player that streams the video from a streaming media server. The stream plays fine and I have no problems with playing the video and doing simple functions. However, my problem is that on a mouse over of the video, I have the controls come up and when I do a seek or scrub on the video, I get little weird boxes that show over the video - like little pockets - of the video playing super fast (you can basically see it seeking) until it gets to the point it needs to be at and then these little boxes disappear. Is anybody else having these problems and if so, how do I fix this? I thought it might be some kind of masking problem, but I haven't been able to figure it out. Please Help!!!

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  • GWT and Panda Video Converter

    - by Maksim
    I'm writing GWT application where I need to upload video file and encode that video into different video formats. I've decided to use Panda Video Converter. I was able to run panda on my EC2 instance (using their image) and I can upload video from Panda's test pages but now I'm trying to make same thing with my own application in GWT. The question that I have is: How do I get Video id and how do I post my video to the server. What URL do I need to use for that? I tried to read their documentation but have no clue where to start. This is my fist time working with webservices and url, probably that's why I don't how it works.

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  • HTML5 video on iPad

    - by mrollinsiv
    I have a dynamic video gallery and it works great on a computer. When moving to an iPad, the video starts loading and it shows the cannot play icon. Instead of this I'd rather the video not show until it's ready to play. I have tried to add events listeners for "canplaythrough" and "canplay" and when they occur for the video to fade in then play. Does the iPad not support these events? new_video = document.createElement('video'); new_video.setAttribute('class', 'none'); new_video.setAttribute('width', '568'); new_video.setAttribute('height', '269'); new_video.setAttribute('id', 'video'+video_num); current_video.insertBefore(new_video, video_controls); new_video.load(); new_video.addEventListener('canplaythrough', function() { $('#video'+video_num').fadeIn(100); new_video.play(); });

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  • How to make a secure game in javascript ?

    - by rnaud
    Hello, I'm working on games using javascript some html and css, and I was wondering if there was any way to secure the game so that the user can't just call game.php?result=victory to finish the game and earn some point. As of right now here are the solution I have. For a chance game, start the page with the result already in place, win or loose, then just do some animations to show it, but all the score and win/loose stuff is done server-side. For a battle game, just get the action from the javascript call, and do the damage calculation, reaction of the oponent on the server and just send back the data. but the last solution imply that I will have to send actions each time the user do anything. This might work for a turn by turn battle game, but I think it would be to slow for any other kind of game. So my question is, is there some kind of secure way I can prep my javascript to secure the infomation sent.

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  • Jwplayer 6: html5 fullscreen when video clicked to play

    - by caaruiz
    I want to be able to use jwplayer so that when the user clicks on the video the video will start to play in fullscreen mode. I want this functionality to work on mobile devices that support html5. If the video is played on a mobile device it will take up the whole screen. Youtube and Vimeo currently do this on mobile devices. The Link Below uses Html5 video tag, which plays in fullscreen on mobile device when the video is clicked on. The only way I that I know that jwplayer allows fullscreen is that I manually click on the fullscreen button, but it would be nice to only click on the video to trigger the video to play in full screen.

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  • Why does Chrome video performance substantially degrade after waking from suspend in 10.10?

    - by Grant Heaslip
    Note: For some more details, some of which may not be true given what I've figured out, see this post. When I first boot my computer, video performance (both native H.264 HTML5 in YouTube and Vimeo, and in Flash) in Chrome is perfectly reasonable. CPU usage stays slow, everything works correctly, and the video is silky-smooth. But for whatever reason, if I suspend my computer then wake it up, video performance plummets. Full screen HTML5 video is choppy at best, and full-screen Flash video basically brings my computer to its knees (I'm talking less than a frame a second, and a 5 second lead time to leave full-screen after hitting Esc). Restarting Chrome doesn't fix this — I need to completely restart my machine before performance goes back to normal. Video performance in other applications, such as Movie Player, doesn't seem to be affected at all by the suspend cycle — it's only Chrome. I'm using a Lenovo X201, with an Intel GMA HD graphics chipset, and Intel compnents all around (I don't need any proprietary drivers). This didn't happen in 10.04, and I haven't anything that I think would have caused this to happen. It's possible that a Chrome release could have caused this, but it seems less likely than a regression between 10.04 and 10.10. Any ideas? EDIT: In response Georg's comment, logging in and out doesn't fix it. Restarting Compiz or switching to Metacity (at least by using "compiz/metacity --replace & disown" — am I doing it right?) doesn't help (actually, it seemed to help somewhat with Flash once, but I haven't been able to reproduce this). I'm not sure about GDM — when I use "sudo restart gdm" I get kicked back to the Linux shell (?), which I have no idea how to get out of. Also, I want to make very clear that this isn't just a case of Flash sucking (it does,but that's beside the point). I"m seeing the same general problem with HTML5 videos, and Flash is performing better on my Nexus One than it does on my Core i5 laptop. There's something screwy going on with Chrome and/or 10.10.

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  • How do I add and/or keep subtitles when converting video?

    - by JoeSteiger
    I have a mkv video I want to convert to mp4, but every which way I try and convert it (Handbrake, WinFF, ffmpeg, mencoder,...I lose the video's subtitles. How can I convert the video,keeping the subtitles, or add a subtitles.srt? I also would like 2 pass encoding with a video bitrate of 4054 and audio bitrate of 160. Thanks. I was asked for the ffmpeg -i: joe@joe-Leopard-Extreme:/media/Elements/Home Folder/Videos$ ffmpeg -i iron.mkv ffmpeg version 0.8.3-4:0.8.3-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the Libav developers built on Jun 12 2012 16:52:09 with gcc 4.6.3 *** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED *** This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead. [matroska,webm @ 0x1a319a0] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate Input #0, matroska,webm, from 'iron.mkv': Metadata: title : Iron Duration: 02:06:01.67, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1280 kb/s Chapter #0.0: start 0.000000, end 546.170622 Metadata: title : Chapter 00 Chapter #0.1: start 546.170622, end 1080.579489 Metadata: title : Chapter 01 Chapter #0.2: start 1080.579489, end 1609.941667 Metadata: title : Chapter 02 Chapter #0.3: start 1609.941667, end 2101.849733 Metadata: title : Chapter 03 Chapter #0.4: start 2101.849733, end 2595.259333 Metadata: title : Chapter 04 Chapter #0.5: start 2595.259333, end 3158.488667 Metadata: title : Chapter 05 Chapter #0.6: start 3158.488667, end 3564.644400 Metadata: title : Chapter 06 Chapter #0.7: start 3564.644400, end 4052.423356 Metadata: title : Chapter 07 Chapter #0.8: start 4052.423356, end 4304.300000 Metadata: title : Chapter 08 Chapter #0.9: start 4304.300000, end 4711.206489 Metadata: title : Chapter 09 Chapter #0.10: start 4711.206489, end 5080.575489 Metadata: title : Chapter 10 Chapter #0.11: start 5080.575489, end 5700.111067 Metadata: title : Chapter 11 Chapter #0.12: start 5700.111067, end 6269.346400 Metadata: title : Chapter 12 Chapter #0.13: start 6269.346400, end 6811.471333 Metadata: title : Chapter 13 Chapter #0.14: start 6811.471333, end 7561.679000 Metadata: title : Chapter 14 Stream #0.0(eng): Video: h264 (High), yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 23.98 fps, 23.98 tbr, 1k tbn, 47.95 tbc Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 640 kb/s (default) Metadata: title : 3/2+1 Stream #0.2(ita): Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 640 kb/s Metadata: title : 3/2+1 Stream #0.3(eng): Subtitle: pgssub (default) Stream #0.4(eng): Subtitle: pgssub Stream #0.5(eng): Subtitle: pgssub Stream #0.6(eng): Subtitle: pgssub At least one output file must be specified joe@joe-Leopard-Extreme:/media/Elements/Home Folder/Videos

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  • Efficient existing rating system for multiplayer?

    - by Nikolay Kuznetsov
    I would like to add a rating for online version of a board game. In this game there are many game rooms each normally having 3-4 people. So I expect that player's rating adjustments (RA) should depends on Rating of opponents in the game room Number of players in game room and final place of a player Person gets rating increase if he plays more games and more frequently If a person leaves a game room (disconnect) before the game ends he should get punished with a high rating decrease I have found two related questions in here Developing an ELO like point system for a multiplayer gaming site Simplest most effective way to rank and measure player skill in a multi-player environment? Please, let me know what would be the most appropriate existing rating model to refer.

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  • How to download streaming video from a flash player (arte)?

    - by wim
    there are a couple of concerts that I would very much like to view from Arte (I think it's a french TV channel?) but my connection is not good enough to stream the video. How can I download the file to play it locally? Here is an example link: http://www.my-jazzlive.tv/?p=1862 I have tried popular browser plugins such as DownloadHelper and Flash Video Downloader, these are working fine for me on sites such as youtube but they don't seem to recognise any stream from the Arte video player. I also looked through /tmp for something that looks like a partially downloaded video, but no luck.

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  • Can I get enough experience to get an industry job just by reading books?

    - by MahanGM
    I've been recently working with DirectX and getting familiar with game engines, sub-systems and have done game development for the last 5 years. I have a real question for those whom have worked in larger game making companies before. How is it possible to get to into these big game creators such as Ubisoft, Infinity Ward or EA. I'm not a beginner in my field and I'm going to produce a real nice 2D platform with my team this year, which is the result of 5 years 2D game creation experience. I'm working with prepared engines such as Unity3D or Game Maker software and using .Net with C# to write many tools for our production and proceeding in my way but never had a real engine programming experience 'till now. I'm now reading good books around this topic but I wanted to know: Is it possible to become an employee in big game company by just reading books? I mean beside having an active mind and new ideas and being a solution solver.

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  • Are scheduled job servers the right choice for a time sensitive game engine?

    - by maple_shaft
    I am currently architecting and designing an exciting new web application that will be entering into some areas that I have very little experience in, game development. The application is not necessarily a game, but there are some very time sensitive tasks and scheduled jobs that a server will need to run to perform game related activities (Eg. New match up starts at noon every day for a 12 day tournament, updating scoreboards at 5pm every day, etc...) In the past I have typically used cron jobs with the Quartz Scheduler running within a web application server, but I know that this isn't likely a scalable solution for the truly massive userbase that management is telling me to expect (Granted they are management and are probably highly optimistic about this) and also for how important the role of these tasks are in this web application. The other important thing I want to consider is that I want to avoid SPOF (Single Point Of Failure). If the primary job server goes down, another job server should be able to successfully run the job in its place. I suppose this can be done appropriately record locking and database transactions. My question is if scheduled jobs like CRON running on a web application server are a wise design choice given the time sensitive game tasks of this application, or is there something more appropriate for running a scalable game engine parallel to the web application servers?

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  • Find optimal strategy and AI for the game 'Proximity'?

    - by smci
    'Proximity' is a strategy game of territorial domination similar to Othello, Go and Risk. Two players, uses a 10x12 hex grid. Game invented by Brian Cable in 2007. Seems to be a worthy game for discussing a) optimal algorithm then b) how to build an AI. Strategies are going to be probabilistic or heuristic-based, due to the randomness factor, and the insane branching factor (20^120). So it will be kind of hard to compare objectively. A compute time limit of 5s per turn seems reasonable. Game: Flash version here and many copies elsewhere on the web Rules: here Object: to have control of the most armies after all tiles have been placed. Each turn you received a randomly numbered tile (value between 1 and 20 armies) to place on any vacant board space. If this tile is adjacent to any ally tiles, it will strengthen each tile's defenses +1 (up to a max value of 20). If it is adjacent to any enemy tiles, it will take control over them if its number is higher than the number on the enemy tile. Thoughts on strategy: Here are some initial thoughts; setting the computer AI to Expert will probably teach a lot: minimizing your perimeter seems to be a good strategy, to prevent flips and minimize worst-case damage like in Go, leaving holes inside your formation is lethal, only more so with the hex grid because you can lose armies on up to 6 squares in one move low-numbered tiles are a liability, so place them away from your main territory, near the board edges and scattered. You can also use low-numbered tiles to plug holes in your formation, or make small gains along the perimeter which the opponent will not tend to bother attacking. a triangle formation of three pieces is strong since they mutually reinforce, and also reduce the perimeter Each tile can be flipped at most 6 times, i.e. when its neighbor tiles are occupied. Control of a formation can flow back and forth. Sometimes you lose part of a formation and plug any holes to render that part of the board 'dead' and lock in your territory/ prevent further losses. Low-numbered tiles are obvious-but-low-valued liabilities, but high-numbered tiles can be bigger liabilities if they get flipped (which is harder). One lucky play with a 20-army tile can cause a swing of 200 (from +100 to -100 armies). So tile placement will have both offensive and defensive considerations. Comment 1,2,4 seem to resemble a minimax strategy where we minimize the maximum expected possible loss (modified by some probabilistic consideration of the value ß the opponent can get from 1..20 i.e. a structure which can only be flipped by a ß=20 tile is 'nearly impregnable'.) I'm not clear what the implications of comments 3,5,6 are for optimal strategy. Interested in comments from Go, Chess or Othello players. (The sequel ProximityHD for XBox Live, allows 4-player -cooperative or -competitive local multiplayer increases the branching factor since you now have 5 tiles in your hand at any given time, of which you can only play one. Reinforcement of ally tiles is increased to +2 per ally.)

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  • Find optimal/good-enough strategy and AI for the game 'Proximity'?

    - by smci
    'Proximity' is a strategy game of territorial domination similar to Othello, Go and Risk. Two players, uses a 10x12 hex grid. Game invented by Brian Cable in 2007. Seems to be a worthy game for discussing a) optimal algorithm then b) how to build an AI. Strategies are going to be probabilistic or heuristic-based, due to the randomness factor, and the insane branching factor (20^120). So it will be kind of hard to compare objectively. A compute time limit of 5s per turn seems reasonable. Game: Flash version here and many copies elsewhere on the web Rules: here Object: to have control of the most armies after all tiles have been placed. Each turn you received a randomly numbered tile (value between 1 and 20 armies) to place on any vacant board space. If this tile is adjacent to any ally tiles, it will strengthen each tile's defenses +1 (up to a max value of 20). If it is adjacent to any enemy tiles, it will take control over them if its number is higher than the number on the enemy tile. Thoughts on strategy: Here are some initial thoughts; setting the computer AI to Expert will probably teach a lot: minimizing your perimeter seems to be a good strategy, to prevent flips and minimize worst-case damage like in Go, leaving holes inside your formation is lethal, only more so with the hex grid because you can lose armies on up to 6 squares in one move low-numbered tiles are a liability, so place them away from your main territory, near the board edges and scattered. You can also use low-numbered tiles to plug holes in your formation, or make small gains along the perimeter which the opponent will not tend to bother attacking. a triangle formation of three pieces is strong since they mutually reinforce, and also reduce the perimeter Each tile can be flipped at most 6 times, i.e. when its neighbor tiles are occupied. Control of a formation can flow back and forth. Sometimes you lose part of a formation and plug any holes to render that part of the board 'dead' and lock in your territory/ prevent further losses. Low-numbered tiles are obvious-but-low-valued liabilities, but high-numbered tiles can be bigger liabilities if they get flipped (which is harder). One lucky play with a 20-army tile can cause a swing of 200 (from +100 to -100 armies). So tile placement will have both offensive and defensive considerations. Comment 1,2,4 seem to resemble a minimax strategy where we minimize the maximum expected possible loss (modified by some probabilistic consideration of the value ß the opponent can get from 1..20 i.e. a structure which can only be flipped by a ß=20 tile is 'nearly impregnable'.) I'm not clear what the implications of comments 3,5,6 are for optimal strategy. Interested in comments from Go, Chess or Othello players. (The sequel ProximityHD for XBox Live, allows 4-player -cooperative or -competitive local multiplayer increases the branching factor since you now have 5 tiles in your hand at any given time, of which you can only play one. Reinforcement of ally tiles is increased to +2 per ally.)

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  • What is the fastest and best way to convert an rmvb video to mp4/mkv without losing any quality?

    - by Eric Leung
    the file will be played in a popbox3d. my old method was to convert the video using vidcoder (an offshoot of handbrake) using normal settings, but i've recently confirmed that this significantly reduces video and audio quality. i bumped up the conversion quality to 'high profile' and this produced a higher quality video but raised the conversion time to about twice the video length (95 minutes to convert a 45 minute video) on a core2duo laptop. this is less than ideal when a large number of videos need to be converted. i have tried a direct remuxing using mkv toolnix but this produced a video that refused to display video on the popbox3d, which is consistent with the reported: [quote=other old thread] it is possible to put RealMedia A/V in MKV container (used MKVtoolnix) - however, it is awkward to play later. RV40 is only suspected to be based on H.264 - simplify, is not consistent with MPEG-4 AVC specification. [/quote] i have read that ... [quote=from old thread] Under normal circumstances, [ffmpeg] should convert the video to .video.mp4 and the audio to (.wav then to) .audio.mp4, then mux the video and audio into a new .mp4 file and delete the temporary video-only and audio-only files.[/quote] and i am currently attempting to discover how this is done. help? PS: i download a lot of series from asia and for some strange reason, rmvb is a really popular format over there. sometimes, it's the only format that's available. unfortunately, it's a format that is incompatible with the popbox3d, so i have to convert the files before i can watch them on my tv.

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