Search Results

Search found 1091 results on 44 pages for 'efficiency'.

Page 4/44 | < Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >

  • Best memory allocation strategy for iOS ?

    - by Mr.Gando
    Hey guys, I'm debating myself about memory allocation on iOS. I write most of my code in C++ and I really like using ObjectPools, FreeLists, etc. In order to pre-allocate a lot of the stuff that I'll be constantly "alloc/dealloc" during the course of my game, ( like particles, game entities, etc ). Still on iOS, it's not like we are developing for a console like PSP, where I can know for fact that I'll get a fixed amount of memory. iOS , will issue "memory warnings" when the system needs memory. Does anyone have some suggestions about this ? Is it too serious since the new iPod touch/iPhone 4 are carrying more RAM ? or it's still a big concern ? Thanks!

    Read the article

  • Source of (programmer) inefficiency

    - by Daniel
    I am interested to gain a better insight about the possible reasons of personal inefficiency as programmers (and only in programming) due to – simply - our own errors (because we are humans – well, almost all of us). I am not interested in how much we are productive or in how many adjustements the customer asks for when the work is done, but where and how each of us spend that part of its time in tasks that are unproductive and there is no one to blame except ourselves. Excluding ego - feeding and / or self – gratification, what I am trying to get (for all of us) is: what are the common issues eating our time; insight on reasons for that issues; identify simple way for us, personally (not delegating actions to other or our organizations), to correct our own problems. Please, do not think in academic terms but aim at the opportunity to compare our daily experiences and understand what are and how we try to fix our personal deficiencies. If you are interested to respond to this post, please: integrate the list if you see something important (or obvious) missing; highlight or name honestly your first issue tellng the way you try to address and solve your issue acting on yourself and yourself only in a sort of "continuous quality improving" My criteria for accepting the answer is: choose the best solution (feasibility and utility) to fix one (or more) of the problems of the list. Of course, selecting an error is not a vote on our skills: maybe we are hyper professional programmers and we lose ten minutes only every year or we are terribly inefficient, losing a couple of days a week: reasons for inefficiency could be really the same - but in a different scale. A possible list: Plain error in the names (variables, functions). Inability to see the obvious in your code. Misreading. Lack of concentration. Trying to use a technology you have not mastered. Errors with data types. Time required to understand your previous code or your documentation. Trying to do something more than requested because you enjoy it Using solutions more complicated than required because you enjoy it. Plain logical errors. Errors due to your fault in communications. Distraction My first personal issue: "Trying to use a technology you do not master." I have to use daily several technologies and I often need to spend significant time correcting code because my assumptions were plainly wrong. Reasons for this: production needs put high pressure and make difficult to find the time to learn. I try to address this reading technical books - as many as I can - even if this actually consumes a lot of time.

    Read the article

  • Powder games: how do they work?

    - by Marc Müller
    Hey guys, I recently found these two gems: http://powdertoy.co.uk/ http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/ My question is: How are the physics with so many elements efficiently handled? Am I just severely underestimating modern computing power or is it possible to 'just' have a two-dimensional array, each cell of which describes what is placed at the according position and simulate each cell in every step. Or are there more complex things being done like summarising large areas of the same kind into a single data set and separating said set as needed? Are there any open-source games like this I could look at?

    Read the article

  • Animating Tile with Blitting taking up Memory.

    - by Kid
    I am trying to animate a specific tile in my 2d Array, using blitting. The animation consists of three different 16x16 sprites in a tilesheet. Now that works perfect with the code below. BUT it's causing memory leakage. Every second the FlashPlayer is taking up +140 kb more in memory. What part of the following code could possibly cause the leak: //The variable Rectangle finds where on the 2d array we should clear the pixels //Fillrect follows up by setting alpha 0 at that spot before we copy in nxt Sprite //Tiletype is a variable that holds what kind of tile the next tile in animation is //(from tileSheet) //drawTile() gets Sprite from tilesheet and copyPixels it into right position on canvas public function animateSprite():void{ tileGround.bitmapData.lock(); if(anmArray[0].tileType > 42){ anmArray[0].tileType = 40; frameCount = 0; } var rect:Rectangle = new Rectangle(anmArray[0].xtile * ts, anmArray[0].ytile * ts, ts, ts); tileGround.bitmapData.fillRect(rect, 0); anmArray[0].tileType = 40 + frameCount; drawTile(anmArray[0].tileType, anmArray[0].xtile, anmArray[0].ytile); frameCount++; tileGround.bitmapData.unlock(); } public function drawTile(spriteType:int, xt:int, yt:int):void{ var tileSprite:Bitmap = getImageFromSheet(spriteType, ts); var rec:Rectangle = new Rectangle(0, 0, ts, ts); var pt:Point = new Point(xt * ts, yt * ts); tileGround.bitmapData.copyPixels(tileSprite.bitmapData, rec, pt, null, null, true); } public function getImageFromSheet(spriteType:int, size:int):Bitmap{ var sheetColumns:int = tSheet.width/ts; var col:int = spriteType % sheetColumns; var row:int = Math.floor(spriteType/sheetColumns); var rec:Rectangle = new Rectangle(col * ts, row * ts, size, size); var pt:Point = new Point(0,0); var correctTile:Bitmap = new Bitmap(new BitmapData(size, size, false, 0)); correctTile.bitmapData.copyPixels(tSheet, rec, pt, null, null, true); return correctTile; }

    Read the article

  • Using a parser to locate faulty code

    - by ryan.riverside
    Lately I've been working a lot in PHP and have run into an abnormally large number of parsing errors. I realize these are my own fault and a result of sloppy initial coding on my part, but it's getting to the point that I'm spending more time resolving tags than developing. In the interest of not slamming my productivity, are there any tricks to locating the problem in the code? What I'd really be looking for would be a line to put in the code which would output the entire faulty tag in the parsing error, or something similar. Purely for reference sake, my current error is Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '}' in /home/content/80/9480880/html/cache/tpl_prosilver_viewtopic_body.html.php on line 50 (which refers to this): </dd><dd><?php if ($_poll_option_val['POLL_OPTION_RESULT'] == 0) { echo ((isset($this->_rootref['L_NO_VOTES'])) ? $this->_rootref['L_NO_VOTES'] : ((isset($user->lang['NO_VOTES'])) ? $user->lang['NO_VOTES'] : '{ NO_VOTES }')); } else { echo $_poll_option_val['POLL_OPTION_PERCENT']; } ?></dd> </dl> <?php }} if ($this->_rootref['S_DISPLAY_RESULTS']) { ?> <dl> <dt>&nbsp;</dt> <dd class="resultbar"><?php echo ((isset($this->_rootref['L_TOTAL_VOTES'])) ? $this->_rootref['L_TOTAL_VOTES'] : ((isset($user->lang['TOTAL_VOTES'])) ? $user->lang['TOTAL_VOTES'] : '{ TOTAL_VOTES }')); ?> : <?php echo (isset($this->_rootref['TOTAL_VOTES'])) ? $this->_rootref['TOTAL_VOTES'] : ''; ?></dd> </dl> <?php } if ($this->_rootref['S_CAN_VOTE']) { ?> <dl style="border-top: none;"> <dt>&nbsp;</dt> <dd class="resultbar"><input type="submit" name="update" value="<?php echo ((isset($this->_rootref['L_SUBMIT_VOTE'])) ? $this->_rootref['L_SUBMIT_VOTE'] : ((isset($user->lang['SUBMIT_VOTE'])) ? $user->lang['SUBMIT_VOTE'] : '{ SUBMIT_VOTE }')); ?>" class="button1" /></dd> </dl> <?php } if (! $this->_rootref['S_DISPLAY_RESULTS']) { ?> <dl style="border-top: none;"> <dt>&nbsp;</dt> <dd class="resultbar"><a href="<?php echo (isset($this->_rootref['U_VIEW_RESULTS'])) ? $this->_rootref['U_VIEW_RESULTS'] : ''; ?>"><?php echo ((isset($this->_rootref['L_VIEW_RESULTS'])) ? $this->_rootref['L_VIEW_RESULTS'] : ((isset($user->lang['VIEW_RESULTS'])) ? $user->lang['VIEW_RESULTS'] : '{ VIEW_RESULTS }')); ?></a></dd> </dl> <?php } ?> </fieldset></div>

    Read the article

  • Keyboard "type ahead" in CRUD web apps?

    - by user61852
    In some data entry contexts, I've seen data typists, type really fast and know so well the app they use, and have a mechanic quality in their work so that they can "type ahead", ie continue typing and "tab-bing" and "enter-ing" faster than the display updates, so that in many occasions they are typing in the data for the next form before it draws itself. Then when this next entry form appears, their keystrokes fill the text boxes and they continue typing, selecting etc. In contexts like this, this speed is desirable, since this persons are really productive. I think this "type ahead of time" is only possible in desktop apps, but I may be wrong. My question is whether this way of handling the keyboard buffer (which in desktop apps require no extra programming) is achievable in web apps, or is this impossible because of the way web apps work, handle sessions, etc (network latency and the overhead of generating new web pages ) ?

    Read the article

  • Can web apps allow fast data-typists to "type-ahead"?

    - by user61852
    In some data entry contexts, I've seen data typists, type really fast and know so well the app they use, and have a mechanic quality in their work so that they can "type ahead", ie continue typing and "tab-bing" and "enter-ing" faster than the display updates, so that in many occasions they are typing in the data for the next form before it draws itself. Then when this next entry form appears, their keystrokes fill the text boxes and they continue typing, selecting etc. In contexts like this, this speed is desirable, since this persons are really productive. I think this "type ahead of time" is only possible in desktop apps, but I may be wrong. My question is whether this way of handling the keyboard buffer (which in desktop apps require no extra programming) is achievable in web apps, or is this impossible because of the way web apps work, handle sessions, etc (network latency and the overhead of generating new web pages ) ? Edit: By "type ahead" I mean "keyboard type ahead" (typing faster than the next entry form can load), not suggets-as-you-type-like-google type ahead. Typeahead is a feature of computers and software (and some typewriters) that enables users to continue typing regardless of program or computer operation—the user may type in whatever speed he or she desires, and if the receiving software is busy at the time it will be called to handle this later. Often this means that keystrokes entered will not be displayed on the screen immediately. This programming technique for handling user what is known as a keyboard buffer.

    Read the article

  • When does "proper" programming no longer matter?

    - by Kai Qing
    I've been a full time programmer for about 8 years now. Web based mostly, ranging in weird jobs for clients. Never anything I "want" to do. So my experience is limited to what I've been contracted to do, having no real incentive to master anything in particular. So here's my scenario and ultimately what I wonder about... I've been building an android game in my spare time. It's using the libgdx library so quite a bit of the heavy lifting is done for me. I don't read much of the docs cause unless it's in tutorial format I will just not care, and ultimately most of my questions have already been asked on stackoverflow. I get along fine and my game works as expected... Suspiciously well, even. So much so that I wonder why one should bother to be "proper" when coding if the end result is ultimately the same. To be more specific, I used a hashtable because I wanted something close to an associative array. Human readable key values. In other places to achieve similar things, I use a vector. I know libgdx has vector2 and vector3 classes, but I've never used them. When I come across weird problems and search stackoverflow for help, I see a lot of people just reaming the questions that use a certain datatype when another one is technically "proper." Like using an ArrayList because it does not require defined bounds versus re-defining an int[] with new known boundaries. Or even something trivial like this: for(int i = 0; i < items.length; i ++) { // do something } I know it evaluates item.length on every iteration. I just don't care. I know items will never be more than 15 to 20 items. So why bother caring if I evaluate items.length on every iteration? So I wonder - why does everyone get all up in arms over this? Who cares if I use a less efficient datatype to get the job done? I ran some tests to see how the app performs using the lazy, get it done fast and don't look back method I just described versus the proper, follow the tutorial and use the exact data types suggested by the community. The results: Same thing. Average 45 fps. I opened every app on the phone and galaxy tab. Same deal. No difference. My game is pretty graphic intensive. It's not like it's just a simple thing. I expected it to perform kind of badly since I don't care to optimize image assets or... well, you probably get the idea. I'm making the game for fun. As a joke, really. But in doing so I'm working outside the normal scope of my job, which is to always follow the rules and do it the right way. So to say, I am without bounds here and this has caused me to wonder why I ever really care to be "proper" So I guess my question to you is this: Is there a threshold when it no longer matters to be proper? Is there a lasting, longer term consequence to the lazy, get it done and don't look back route? Is it ok to say - "so long as it gets the job done, I don't care?" Disclaimer: When I program my game, I am almost always drunk. I do it to remember why I got into this stuff to begin with because the monotony of client based web work will make you hate being a programmer. I'm having a blast and my game is not crashing, tests well, performs well, looks good on all devices so far and has no noticeable negative impact on any of my testing devices. I expected failure because I was being so drunkenly careless with my code, but to my surprise, it had no noticeable impact. I am now starting to question the need to be careful. Help me regain the ability to care! ... or explain why it's not a bad thing to not care. Secondary disclaimer: I am aware of the benefits of maintainability. For myself and others. Agreed. But it's not like someone happening across my inefficient int[] loop won't know what it does. As an experienced programmer those kinds of things are just clear on sight. I document the complex stuff for myself knowing I was drunk and will probably need a reminder. Those notes would clarify any confusion for someone who might ever gaze upon my ridiculous game - though the reality is that either I maintain it myself or it fades into time. I'm ok with that. But if it doesn't slow the device down, or crash, then crossing the t's and dotting the i's might actually require more time than it's worth.

    Read the article

  • How to deal with large open worlds?

    - by Mr. Beast
    In most games the whole world is small enough to fit into memory, however there are games where this is not the case, how is this archived, how can the game still run fluid even though the world is so big and maybe even dynamic? How does the world change in memory while the player moves? Examples for this include the TES games (Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind), MMORPGs (World of Warcraft), Diablo, Titan Quest, Dwarf Fortress, Far Cry.

    Read the article

  • Effective versus efficient code

    - by Todd Williamson
    TL;DR: Quick and dirty code, or "correct" (insert your definition of this term) code? There is often a tension between "efficient" and "effective" in software development. "Efficient" often means code that is "correct" from the point of view of adhering to standards, using widely-accepted patterns/approaches for structures, regardless of project size, budget, etc. "Effective" is not about being "right", but about getting things done. This often results in code that falls outside the bounds of commonly accepted "correct" standards, usage, etc. Usually the people paying for the development effort have dictated ahead of time what it is that they value more. An organization that lives in a technical space will tend towards the efficient end, others will tend towards the effective. Developers often refuse to compromise their favored approach for the other. In my own experience I have found that people with formal education in software development tend towards the Efficient camp. Those that picked up software development more or less as a tool to get things done tend towards the Effective camp. These camps don't get along very well. When managing a team of developers who are not all in one camp it is challenging. In your own experience, which camp do you land in, and do you find yourself having to justify your approach to others? To management? To other developers?

    Read the article

  • Triangle Strips and Tangent Space Normal Mapping

    - by Koarl
    Short: Do triangle strips and Tangent Space Normal mapping go together? According to quite a lot of tutorials on bump mapping, it seems common practice to derive tangent space matrices in a vertex program and transform the light direction vector(s) to tangent space and then pass them on to a fragment program. However, if one was using triangle strips or index buffers, it is a given that the vertex buffer contains vertices that sit at border edges and would thus require more than one normal to derive tangent space matrices to interpolate between in fragment programs. Is there any reasonable way to not have duplicate vertices in your buffer and still use tangent space normal mapping? Which one do you think is better: Having normal and tangent encoded in the assets and just optimize the geometry handling to alleviate the cost of duplicate vertices or using triangle strips and computing normals/tangents completely at run time? Thinking about it, the more reasonable answer seems to be the first one, but why might my professor still be fussing about triangle strips when it seems so obvious?

    Read the article

  • Acceptable GC frequency for a SlimDX/Windows/.NET game?

    - by Rei Miyasaka
    I understand that the Windows GC is much better than the Xbox/WP7 GC, being that it's generational and multithreaded -- so I don't need to worry quite as much about avoiding memory allocation. SlimDX even has some unavoidable functions that generate some amount of garbage (specifically, MapSubresource creates DataBoxes), yet people don't seem to be too upset about it. I'd like to use some functional paradigms to write my code too, which also means creating objects like closures and monads. I know premature optimization isn't a good thing, but are there rules of thumb or metrics that I can follow to know whether I need to cut down on allocations? Is, say, one gen 0 GC per frame too much? One thing that has me stumped is object promotions. Gen 0 GCs will supposedly finish within a millisecond or two, but if I'm understanding correctly, it's the gen 1 and 2 promotions that start to hurt. I'm not too sure how I can predict/prevent these.

    Read the article

  • How to expose game data in the game without a singelton?

    - by zardon
    I'm quite new to cocos2d and games programming, and am currently I am writing a game that is currently in Prototype stage. Everything is going okay, but I've realized a potentially big problem and I am not sure how to solve it. I am using a singelton to store a bunch of arrays for everything, a global list of planets, a global list of troops, a global list of products, etc. And only now I'm realizing that all of this will be in memory and this is the wrong way to do it. I am not storing files or anything on the disk just yet, with exception to a save/load state, which is a capture of everything. My game makes use of a map which allows you to select a planet, then it will give you a breakdown of that planets troops and resources, Lets use this scenario: My game has 20 planets. On which you can have 20 troops. Straight away that's an array of 400! This does not add the NPC, which is another 10. So, 20x10 = 200 So, now we have 600 all in arrays inside a Singelton. This is obviously very bad, and very wrong. Especially as the game scales in the amount of data. But I need to expose pretty much everything, especially on the map page, and I am not sure how else to do it. I've been told that I can use a controller for the map page which has the information I need for each planet, and other controllers for other items I require global display for. I've also thought about storing each planet's data in a save file, using initWithCoder however there could be a boatload of files on the user's device? I really don't want to use a database, mainly because I would need to translate NSObjects and non-NSObjects like CGRects and CGPoints and Colors into/from SQL. I am open to other ideas on how to store and read game data to prevent using a singelton to store everything, everywhere. Thanks for your time.

    Read the article

  • Java Alphabetize Algorithm Insertion sort vs Bubble Sort

    - by Chris Okyen
    I am supposed to "Develop a program that alphabetizes three strings. The program should allow the user to enter the three strings, and then display the strings in alphabetical order." It's instructed that I need to use the String library compareTo()/charAt()/toLowerCase() to make all the characters lowercase so the Lexicon comparison is also a alphabetical comparison. Input Pseudo Code: String input[3]; Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in); System.out.println("Enter three strings: "); for(byte i = 0; i < 3; i++) input[i] = keyboard.next() The sorting would be Insertion Sort: 321 2 3 1 2 31 231 1 23 1 2 3 1 23 1 23 123 Bubble Sort 321 231 213 123 Which would be more efficient in this case? The bubble sort seems to be more efficient though they seem to have equal stats for worst best and avg case, but I read the Insertion Sort is quicker for small amounts of data like my case.

    Read the article

  • Preferred way to render text in OpenGL

    - by dukeofgaming
    Hi, I'm about tu pick up computer graphics once again for an university project. For a previous project I used a library called ftgl that didn't leave me quite satisfied as it felt kind of heavy (I tried all rendering techniques, text rendering didn't scale very well). My question is, is there a good and efficient library for this?, if not, what would be the way to implement fast but nice looking text?. Some intended uses are: Floating object/character labels Dialogues Menus HUD Regards and thanks in advance. EDIT: Preferrably that it can load fonts

    Read the article

  • Why not have a High Level Language based OS? Are Low Level Languages more efficient?

    - by rtindru
    Without being presumptuous, I would like you to consider the possibility of this. Most OS today are based on pretty low level languages (mainly C/C++) Even the new ones such as Android uses JNI & underlying implementation is in C In fact, (this is a personal observation) many programs written in C run a lot faster than their high level counterparts (eg: Transmission (a bittorrent client on Ubuntu) is a whole lot faster than Vuze(Java) or Deluge(Python)). Even python compilers are written in C, although PyPy is an exception. So is there a particular reason for this? Why is it that all our so called "High Level Languages" with the great "OOP" concepts can't be used in making a solid OS? So I have 2 questions basically. Why are applications written in low level languages more efficient than their HLL counterparts? Do low level languages perform better for the simple reason that they are low level and are translated to machine code easier? Why do we not have a full fledged OS based entirely on a High Level Language?

    Read the article

  • How can I approach creating an efficient algorithm for maximizing value with these specific constraints?

    - by sway
    I'm having trouble coming up with an approach that isn't n^2 for this problem. Here's a contrived, simplified version I've come up with: Let's say you're a company that needs 4 employees to launch in a new city, a manager, two salespeople, and a customer support rep, and you magically know how much impact every candidate will have and how much salary they require to take the job. Your table of potential employees looks something like this: Name Position Salary Impact Adam Smith Manager 60,000 11 Allison Brown Salesperson 40,000 9 Brad Stewart Manager 55,000 9 ...etc (thousands of records) What algorithmic approach can be taken to find the maximum "impact" while still filling all the positions and remaining under, say, a 200,000 budget? Thanks!

    Read the article

  • Efficient coding in Visual Studio (or another IDE), with touch typing

    - by cheeesus
    Moving the cursor to another position in code is one of the most frequent actions when coding. I don't write my programs from the beginning to the end, like a letter. However, moving the cursor requires me to move my right hand to the key arrows or to the mouse, which feels like an interruption to my writing rhythm, since I'm using touch typing. I want my hands to rest on the keyboard. It's difficult to explain what I mean, but I think every coder using touch typing knows what I mean. I tried many things, like defining some shortcuts as surrogate arrow keys (Shift+Alt+J, K, L, I), or buying a keyboard with a Trackpoint, Trackpad, or Trackball on it, but I have not yet found a satisfying solution to the problem. What is the best solution you know of, regardless of which IDE you use? Edit: Thank you for your answers. I am using a lot of shortkeys, but I think using a Vim plugin in Visual Studio would interfere too much with the shortkeys I am used to. Also, I have a keyboard with a built-in mouse, but I'm still looking for a better solution.

    Read the article

  • How can I render player movement on a 2d plane efficiently?

    - by user422318
    I'm prototyping a 2d HTML5 game with similar interaction to Diablo II. (See an older post of mine describing the interaction here: How can I imitate interaction and movement in Diablo II?) I just got the player click-to-move system working using the Bresenham algorithm but I can't figure out how to efficiently render the player's avatar as he moves across the screen. By the time redraw() is called, the player has already finished moving to the target point. If I try to call redraw() more frequently (based on my game timer), there's incredible system lag and I don't even see the avatar image glide across the screen. I have a game timer based off this awesome timer class: http://www.dailycoding.com/Posts/object_oriented_programming_with_javascript__timer_class.aspx In the future, there will be multiple enemies chasing the player. Fast pace is essential to the experience. What should I do?

    Read the article

  • Is creating a separate pool for each individual image created from a png appropriate?

    - by Panzercrisis
    I'm still possibly a little green about object-pooling, and I want to make sure something like this is a sound design pattern before really embarking upon it. Take the following code (which uses the Starling framework in ActionScript 3): [Embed(source = "/../assets/images/game/misc/red_door.png")] private const RED_DOOR:Class; private const RED_DOOR_TEXTURE:Texture = Texture.fromBitmap(new RED_DOOR()); private const m_vRedDoorPool:Vector.<Image> = new Vector.<Image>(50, true); . . . public function produceRedDoor():Image { // get a Red Door image } public function retireRedDoor(pImage:Image):void { // retire a Red Door Image } Except that there are four colors: red, green, blue, and yellow. So now we have a separate pool for each color, a separate produce function for each color, and a separate retire function for each color. Additionally there are several items in the game that follow this 4-color pattern, so for each of them, we have four pools, four produce functions, and four retire functions. There are more colors involved in the images themselves than just their predominant one, so trying to throw all the doors, for instance, in a single pool, and then changing their color properties around isn't going to work. Also the nonexistence of the static keyword is due to its slowness in AS3. Is this the right way to do things?

    Read the article

  • High CPU usage on Pong clone

    - by max
    I just made my first game, a clone of Pong, using OpenGL and C++. But its using ~50% of the CPU, which I guess is very high for a game like this. How can I improve that? Can you please look up my code and tell me what all things I am doing wrong? Any feedback is welcome. http://pastebin.com/L5zE3axh Also it would be extremely helpful if you give some general points on how to develop games in OpenGL efficiently.. Thanks in advance!

    Read the article

  • Efficiently representing a dynamic transform hierarchy

    - by Mattia
    I'm looking for a way to represent a dynamic transform hierarchy (i.e. one where nodes can be inserted and removed arbitrarily) that's a bit more efficient than using a standard tree of pointers . I saw the answers to this question ( Efficient structure for representing a transform hierarchy. ), but as far as I can determine the tree-as-array approach only works for static hierarchies or dynamic ones where nodes have a fixed number of children (both deal-breakers for me). I'm probably wrong about that but could anyone point out how? If I'm not wrong are there other alternatives that work for dynamic hierarchies?

    Read the article

  • Is creating a separate pool for each individual png image in the same class appropriate?

    - by Panzercrisis
    I'm still possibly a little green about object-pooling, and I want to make sure something like this is a sound design pattern before really embarking upon it. Take the following code (which uses the Starling framework in ActionScript 3): [Embed(source = "/../assets/images/game/misc/red_door.png")] private const RED_DOOR:Class; private const RED_DOOR_TEXTURE:Texture = Texture.fromBitmap(new RED_DOOR()); private const m_vRedDoorPool:Vector.<Image> = new Vector.<Image>(50, true); . . . public function produceRedDoor():Image { // get a Red Door image } public function retireRedDoor(pImage:Image):void { // retire a Red Door Image } Except that there are four colors: red, green, blue, and yellow. So now we have a separate pool for each color, a separate produce function for each color, and a separate retire function for each color. Additionally there are several items in the game that follow this 4-color pattern, so for each of them, we have four pools, four produce functions, and four retire functions. There are more colors involved in the images themselves than just their predominant one, so trying to throw all the doors, for instance, in a single pool, and then changing their color properties around isn't going to work. Also the nonexistence of the static keyword is due to its slowness in AS3. Is this the right way to do things?

    Read the article

  • How to program something with the expectation that it will work the first time?

    - by Peter Turner
    I had a friend in college who programmed something that worked the first time, that was pretty amazing. But as for me, I just fire up the debugger as soon as I finally get whatever I'm working on to compile - saves me time (kidding of course, I sometimes hold out a little bit of hope or use a lot of premeditated debug strings). What's the best way to approach the Dijkstrain ideal for our programs? -or- Is this just some sort of pie-in-the-sky old fools quest for greatness applicable only to finite tasks that no one should hope for in our professional lives because programming is just too complex?

    Read the article

  • Java Animation Memory Overload [on hold]

    - by user2425429
    I need a way to reduce the memory usage of these programs while keeping the functionality. Every time I add 50 milliseconds or so to the set&display loop in AnimationTest1, it throws an out of memory error. Here is the code I have now: import java.awt.DisplayMode; import java.awt.Graphics; import java.awt.Graphics2D; import java.awt.Image; import java.awt.Polygon; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import java.util.concurrent.Executor; import java.util.concurrent.Executors; import javax.swing.ImageIcon; public class AnimationTest1 { public static void main(String args[]) { AnimationTest1 test = new AnimationTest1(); test.run(); } private static final DisplayMode POSSIBLE_MODES[] = { new DisplayMode(800, 600, 32, 0), new DisplayMode(800, 600, 24, 0), new DisplayMode(800, 600, 16, 0), new DisplayMode(640, 480, 32, 0), new DisplayMode(640, 480, 24, 0), new DisplayMode(640, 480, 16, 0) }; private static final long DEMO_TIME = 4000; private ScreenManager screen; private Image bgImage; private Animation anim; public void loadImages() { // create animation List<Polygon> polygons=new ArrayList(); int[] x=new int[]{20,4,4,20,40,56,56,40}; int[] y=new int[]{20,32,40,44,44,40,32,20}; polygons.add(new Polygon(x,y,8)); anim = new Animation(); //# of frames long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); long currTimer = startTime; long elapsedTime = 0; boolean animated = false; Graphics2D g = screen.getGraphics(); int width=200; int height=200; //set&display loop while (currTimer - startTime < DEMO_TIME*2) { //draw the polygons if(!animated){ for(int j=0; j<polygons.size();j++){ for(int pos=0; pos<polygons.get(j).npoints; pos++){ polygons.get(j).xpoints[pos]+=1; } } anim.setNewPolyFrame(polygons , width , height , 64); } else{ // update animation anim.update(elapsedTime); draw(g); g.dispose(); screen.update(); try{ Thread.sleep(20); } catch(InterruptedException ie){} } if(currTimer - startTime == DEMO_TIME) animated=true; elapsedTime = System.currentTimeMillis() - currTimer; currTimer += elapsedTime; } } public void run() { screen = new ScreenManager(); try { DisplayMode displayMode = screen.findFirstCompatibleMode(POSSIBLE_MODES); screen.setFullScreen(displayMode); loadImages(); } finally { screen.restoreScreen(); } } public void draw(Graphics g) { // draw background g.drawImage(bgImage, 0, 0, null); // draw image g.drawImage(anim.getImage(), 0, 0, null); } } ScreenManager: import java.awt.Color; import java.awt.DisplayMode; import java.awt.Graphics; import java.awt.Graphics2D; import java.awt.GraphicsConfiguration; import java.awt.GraphicsDevice; import java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment; import java.awt.Toolkit; import java.awt.Window; import java.awt.event.KeyListener; import java.awt.event.MouseListener; import java.awt.image.BufferStrategy; import java.awt.image.BufferedImage; import javax.swing.JFrame; import javax.swing.JPanel; public class ScreenManager extends JPanel { private GraphicsDevice device; /** Creates a new ScreenManager object. */ public ScreenManager() { GraphicsEnvironment environment=GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment(); device = environment.getDefaultScreenDevice(); setBackground(Color.white); } /** Returns a list of compatible display modes for the default device on the system. */ public DisplayMode[] getCompatibleDisplayModes() { return device.getDisplayModes(); } /** Returns the first compatible mode in a list of modes. Returns null if no modes are compatible. */ public DisplayMode findFirstCompatibleMode( DisplayMode modes[]) { DisplayMode goodModes[] = device.getDisplayModes(); for (int i = 0; i < modes.length; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < goodModes.length; j++) { if (displayModesMatch(modes[i], goodModes[j])) { return modes[i]; } } } return null; } /** Returns the current display mode. */ public DisplayMode getCurrentDisplayMode() { return device.getDisplayMode(); } /** Determines if two display modes "match". Two display modes match if they have the same resolution, bit depth, and refresh rate. The bit depth is ignored if one of the modes has a bit depth of DisplayMode.BIT_DEPTH_MULTI. Likewise, the refresh rate is ignored if one of the modes has a refresh rate of DisplayMode.REFRESH_RATE_UNKNOWN. */ public boolean displayModesMatch(DisplayMode mode1, DisplayMode mode2) { if (mode1.getWidth() != mode2.getWidth() || mode1.getHeight() != mode2.getHeight()) { return false; } if (mode1.getBitDepth() != DisplayMode.BIT_DEPTH_MULTI && mode2.getBitDepth() != DisplayMode.BIT_DEPTH_MULTI && mode1.getBitDepth() != mode2.getBitDepth()) { return false; } if (mode1.getRefreshRate() != DisplayMode.REFRESH_RATE_UNKNOWN && mode2.getRefreshRate() != DisplayMode.REFRESH_RATE_UNKNOWN && mode1.getRefreshRate() != mode2.getRefreshRate()) { return false; } return true; } /** Enters full screen mode and changes the display mode. If the specified display mode is null or not compatible with this device, or if the display mode cannot be changed on this system, the current display mode is used. <p> The display uses a BufferStrategy with 2 buffers. */ public void setFullScreen(DisplayMode displayMode) { JFrame frame = new JFrame(); frame.setUndecorated(true); frame.setIgnoreRepaint(true); frame.setResizable(true); device.setFullScreenWindow(frame); if (displayMode != null && device.isDisplayChangeSupported()) { try { device.setDisplayMode(displayMode); } catch (IllegalArgumentException ex) { } } frame.createBufferStrategy(2); Graphics g=frame.getGraphics(); g.setColor(Color.white); g.drawRect(0, 0, frame.WIDTH, frame.HEIGHT); frame.paintAll(g); g.setColor(Color.black); g.dispose(); } /** Gets the graphics context for the display. The ScreenManager uses double buffering, so applications must call update() to show any graphics drawn. <p> The application must dispose of the graphics object. */ public Graphics2D getGraphics() { Window window = device.getFullScreenWindow(); if (window != null) { BufferStrategy strategy = window.getBufferStrategy(); return (Graphics2D)strategy.getDrawGraphics(); } else { return null; } } /** Updates the display. */ public void update() { Window window = device.getFullScreenWindow(); if (window != null) { BufferStrategy strategy = window.getBufferStrategy(); if (!strategy.contentsLost()) { strategy.show(); } } // Sync the display on some systems. // (on Linux, this fixes event queue problems) Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().sync(); } /** Returns the window currently used in full screen mode. Returns null if the device is not in full screen mode. */ public Window getFullScreenWindow() { return device.getFullScreenWindow(); } /** Returns the width of the window currently used in full screen mode. Returns 0 if the device is not in full screen mode. */ public int getWidth() { Window window = device.getFullScreenWindow(); if (window != null) { return window.getWidth(); } else { return 0; } } /** Returns the height of the window currently used in full screen mode. Returns 0 if the device is not in full screen mode. */ public int getHeight() { Window window = device.getFullScreenWindow(); if (window != null) { return window.getHeight(); } else { return 0; } } /** Restores the screen's display mode. */ public void restoreScreen() { Window window = device.getFullScreenWindow(); if (window != null) { window.dispose(); } device.setFullScreenWindow(null); } /** Creates an image compatible with the current display. */ public BufferedImage createCompatibleImage(int w, int h, int transparency) { Window window = device.getFullScreenWindow(); if (window != null) { GraphicsConfiguration gc = window.getGraphicsConfiguration(); return gc.createCompatibleImage(w, h, transparency); } return null; } } Animation: import java.awt.Color; import java.awt.Graphics; import java.awt.Graphics2D; import java.awt.Image; import java.awt.Polygon; import java.awt.image.BufferedImage; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; /** The Animation class manages a series of images (frames) and the amount of time to display each frame. */ public class Animation { private ArrayList frames; private int currFrameIndex; private long animTime; private long totalDuration; /** Creates a new, empty Animation. */ public Animation() { frames = new ArrayList(); totalDuration = 0; start(); } /** Adds an image to the animation with the specified duration (time to display the image). */ public synchronized void addFrame(BufferedImage image, long duration){ ScreenManager s = new ScreenManager(); totalDuration += duration; frames.add(new AnimFrame(image, totalDuration)); } /** Starts the animation over from the beginning. */ public synchronized void start() { animTime = 0; currFrameIndex = 0; } /** Updates the animation's current image (frame), if necessary. */ public synchronized void update(long elapsedTime) { if (frames.size() >= 1) { animTime += elapsedTime; /*if (animTime >= totalDuration) { animTime = animTime % totalDuration; currFrameIndex = 0; }*/ while (animTime > getFrame(0).endTime) { frames.remove(0); } } } /** Gets the Animation's current image. Returns null if this animation has no images. */ public synchronized Image getImage() { if (frames.size() > 0&&!(currFrameIndex>=frames.size())) { return getFrame(currFrameIndex).image; } else{ System.out.println("There are no frames!"); System.exit(0); } return null; } private AnimFrame getFrame(int i) { return (AnimFrame)frames.get(i); } private class AnimFrame { Image image; long endTime; public AnimFrame(Image image, long endTime) { this.image = image; this.endTime = endTime; } } public void setNewPolyFrame(List<Polygon> polys,int imagewidth,int imageheight,int time){ BufferedImage image=new BufferedImage(imagewidth, imageheight, 1); Graphics g=image.getGraphics(); for(int i=0;i<polys.size();i++){ g.drawPolygon(polys.get(i)); } addFrame(image,time); g.dispose(); } }

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >