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• How can I make an MMORPG appeal to casual players?

  - by Philipp

  I believe that there is a significant market of players who would enjoy the exploration and interaction aspects of MMORPGs, but simply don't have the time for the endless grinding marathons which are part of the average MMORPG. MMORPGs are all about interaction between players. But when different players have different amounts of time to invest into a game, those with less time to spend will soon lack behind their power-leveling friends and won't be able to interact with them anymore. One way to solve this would be to limit the progress a player can achieve per day, so that it simply doesn't make sense to play more than one or two hours a day. But even the busiest casual players sometimes like to spend a whole sunday afternoon playing a video game. Just stopping them after two hours would be really frustrating. It also creates a pressure to use the daily progress limit every day, because otherwise the player would feel like wasting something. This pressure would be detrimental for casual gamers. What else could be done to level the playing field between those players who play 40+ hours a week and those who can't play more than 10?

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• Z Order in 2D with orthographic projection and texture atlas

  - by Carbon Crystal

  I am working with a 2D game in OpenGL ES and have a question about z-order together with a texture atlas. I am using an orthographic projection because I want pixel-perfect rendering of 2D sprites, however from what I can determine the draw order is really the only thing that will determine which textures (sprites) appear above or below their neighbors. That is, the "z-index" is a function of the order in which the textures are drawn as opposed to the z coordinate on the vertex array being drawn. So.. I have a texture atlas to save binding multiple textures for each draw call but this immediately creates a problem if there is more than one atlas in play. If I need to draw textures from more than one atlas (typically the case if I have too many sprites to fit in a single atlas of a reasonable size), then I can't maintain a "draw order" across atlases unless I want to bind/unbind the atlas textures more than once.. which kinda defeats the purpose. Does anyone have any clues as to what the best approach is here? Currently I'm running under an assumption that I will have to declare different fixed "depths" (e.g foreground, background etc) in my 2D scene and assume that the z-order for sprites at a given depth is the same. Then I can have as many atlases as I need at each depth and simply draw the depths in order (along with their associated atlases) I'd love to hear what other people are doing.

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• GLSL Shader Texture Performance

  - by Austin

  I currently have a project that renders OpenGL video using a vertex and fragment shader. The shaders work fine as-is, but in trying to add in texturing, I am running into performance issues and can't figure out why. Before adding texturing, my program ran just fine and loaded my CPU between 0%-4%. When adding texturing (specifically textures AND color -- noted by comment below), my CPU is 100% loaded. The only code I have added is the relevant texturing code to the shader, and the "glBindTexture()" calls to the rendering code. Here are my shaders and relevant rending code. Vertex Shader: #version 150 uniform mat4 mvMatrix; uniform mat4 mvpMatrix; uniform mat3 normalMatrix; uniform vec4 lightPosition; uniform float diffuseValue; layout(location = 0) in vec3 vertex; layout(location = 1) in vec3 color; layout(location = 2) in vec3 normal; layout(location = 3) in vec2 texCoord; smooth out VertData { vec3 color; vec3 normal; vec3 toLight; float diffuseValue; vec2 texCoord; } VertOut; void main(void) { gl_Position = mvpMatrix * vec4(vertex, 1.0); VertOut.normal = normalize(normalMatrix * normal); VertOut.toLight = normalize(vec3(mvMatrix * lightPosition - gl_Position)); VertOut.color = color; VertOut.diffuseValue = diffuseValue; VertOut.texCoord = texCoord; } Fragment Shader: #version 150 smooth in VertData { vec3 color; vec3 normal; vec3 toLight; float diffuseValue; vec2 texCoord; } VertIn; uniform sampler2D tex; layout(location = 0) out vec3 colorOut; void main(void) { float diffuseComp = max( dot(normalize(VertIn.normal), normalize(VertIn.toLight)) ), 0.0); vec4 color = texture2D(tex, VertIn.texCoord); colorOut = color.rgb * diffuseComp * VertIn.diffuseValue + color.rgb * (1 - VertIn.diffuseValue); // FOLLOWING LINE CAUSES PERFORMANCE ISSUES colorOut *= VertIn.color; } Relevant Rendering Code: // 3 textures have been successfully pre-loaded, and can be used // texture[0] is a 1x1 white texture to effectively turn off texturing glUseProgram(program); // Draw squares glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[1]); // Set attributes, uniforms, etc glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS, 0, 6*4); // Draw triangles glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); // Set attributes, uniforms, etc glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 3*4); // Draw reference planes glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); // Set attributes, uniforms, etc glDrawArrays(GL_LINES, 0, 4*81*2); // Draw terrain glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[2]); // Set attributes, uniforms, etc glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 501*501*6); // Release glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); glUseProgram(0); Any help is greatly appreciated!

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• Cocos2d and Body with few collision shapes using chipmunk

  - by Eimantas

  I'm using Cocos2d (0.99.5) with chipmunk physics engine. Currently I'm trying to place a body into space which is combined from few circle shapes. Let's say I have a corresponding sprite image with displays atom (nucleus + 3 electrons around it. Something like this without orbit lines). In it's simplest form - only one circle shape at the center should be enough which would detect collisions from other objects with nucleus. Now I'd like to add other circle shapes for each electron. How can I do that? Now when I add those shapes to the body and add the body into chipmunk space - the shapes (together with the body/sprite) start flickering and spinning with no recognizable pattern (or reason for that matter).

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• How to determine where on a path my object will be at a given point in time?

  - by Dave

  I have map and an obj that is meant to move from start to end in X amount of time. The movements are all straight lines, as curves are beyond my ability at the moment. So I am trying to get the object to move from these points, but along the way there are way points which keep it on a given path. The speed of the object is determined by how long it will take to get from start to end (based on X). This is what i have so far: //get_now() returns seconds since epoch var timepassed = get_now() - myObj[id].start; //seconds since epoch for departure var timeleft = myObj[id].end - get_now(); //seconds since epoch for arrival var journey_time = 60; //this means 60 minutes total journey time var array = [[650,250]]; //way points along the straight paths if(step == 0 || step =< array.length){ var destinationx = array[step][0]; var destinationy = array[step][1]; }else if( step == array.length){ var destinationx = 250; var destinationy = 100; } else { var destinationx = myObj[id].startx; var destinationy = myObj[id].starty; } step++; When the user logs in at any given time, the object needs to be drawn in the correct place of the path, almost as if its been travelling along the path whilst the user has not been at the PC with the available information i have above. How do I do this? Note: The camera angle in the game is a birds eye view so its a straight forward X:Y rather than isometric angles.

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• How can I perform 2D side-scroller collision checks in a tile-based map?

  - by bill

  I am trying to create a game where you have a player that can move horizontally and jump. It's kind of like Mario but it isn't a side scroller. I'm using a 2D array to implement a tile map. My problem is that I don't understand how to check for collisions using this implementation. After spending about two weeks thinking about it, I've got two possible solutions, but both of them have some problems. Let's say that my map is defined by the following tiles: 0 = sky 1 = player 2 = ground The data for the map itself might look like: 00000 10002 22022 For solution 1, I'd move the player (the 1) a complete tile and update the map directly. This make the collision easy because you can check if the player is touching the ground simply by looking at the tile directly below the player: // x and y are the tile coordinates of the player. The tile origin is the upper-left. if (grid[x][y+1] == 2){ // The player is standing on top of a ground tile. } The problem with this approach is that the player moves in discrete tile steps, so the animation isn't smooth. For solution 2, I thought about moving the player via pixel coordinates and not updating the tile map. This will make the animation much smoother because I have a smaller movement unit per frame. However, this means I can't really accurately store the player in the tile map because sometimes he would logically be between two tiles. But the bigger problem here is that I think the only way to check for collision is to use Java's intersection method, which means the player would need to be at least a single pixel "into" the ground to register collision, and that won't look good. How can I solve this problem?

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• 2D game collision response: SAT & minimum displacement along a given axis?

  - by Archagon

  I'm trying to implement a collision system in a 2D game I'm making. The separating axis theorem (as described by metanet's collision tutorial) seems like an efficient and robust way of handling collision detection, but I don't quite like the collision response method they use. By blindly displacing along the axis of least overlap, the algorithm simply ignores the previous position of the moving object, which means that it doesn't collide with the stationary object so much as it enters it and then bounces out. Here's an example of a situation where this would matter: According to the SAT method described above, the rectangle would simply pop out of the triangle perpendicular to its hypotenuse: However, realistically, the rectangle should stop at the lower right corner of the triangle, as that would be the point of first collision if it were moving continuously along its displacement vector: Now, this might not actually matter during gameplay, but I'd love to know if there's a way of efficiently and generally attaining accurate displacements in this manner. I've been racking my brains over it for the past few days, and I don't want to give up yet! (Cross-posted from StackOverflow, hope that's not against the rules!)

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• Bitmap font rendering, UV generation and vertex placement

  - by jack

  I am generating a bitmap, however, I am not sure on how to render the UV's and placement. I had a thread like this once before, but it was too loosely worded as to what I was looking to do. What I am doing right now is creating a large 1024x1024 image with characters evenly placed every 64 pixels. Here is an example of what I mean. I then save the bitmap X/Y information to a file (which is all multiples of 64). However, I am not sure how to properly use this information and bitmap to render. This falls into two different categories, UV generation and kerning. Now I believe I know how to do both of these, however, when I attempt to couple them together I will get horrendous results. For example, I am trying to render two different text arrays, "123" and "njfb". While ignoring the texture quality (I will be increasing the texture to provide more detail once I fix this issue), here is what it looks like when I try to render them. http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/599/badfontrendering.png Now for the algorithm. I am doing my letter placement with both GetABCWidth and GetKerningPairs. I am using GetABCWidth for the width of the characters, then I am getting the kerning information for adjust the characters. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can implement my own bitmap font renderer? I am trying to do this without using external libraries such as angel bitmap tool or freetype. I also want to stick to the way the bitmap font sheet is generated so I can do extra effects in the future. Rendering Algorithm for(U32 c = 0, vertexID = 0, i = 0; c < numberOfCharacters; ++c, vertexID += 4, i += 6) { ObtainCharInformation(fontName, m_Text[c]); letterWidth = (charInfo.A + charInfo.B + charInfo.C) * scale; if(c != 0) { DWORD BytesReq = GetGlyphOutlineW(dc, m_Text[c], GGO_GRAY8_BITMAP, &gm, 0, 0, &mat); U8 * glyphImg= new U8[BytesReq]; DWORD r = GetGlyphOutlineW(dc, m_Text[c], GGO_GRAY8_BITMAP, &gm, BytesReq, glyphImg, &mat); for (int k=0; k<nKerningPairs; k++) { if ((kerningpairs[k].wFirst == previousCharIndex) && (kerningpairs[k].wSecond == m_Text[c])) { letterBottomLeftX += (kerningpairs[k].iKernAmount * scale); break; } } letterBottomLeftX -= (gm.gmCellIncX * scale); } SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX, 0.0f, zFight, vertexID); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX, letterHeight, zFight, vertexID + 1); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX + letterWidth, letterHeight, zFight, vertexID + 2); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX + letterWidth, 0.0f, zFight, vertexID + 3); zFight -= 0.001f; float BottomLeftX = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapXOrigin) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float BottomLeftY = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapYOrigin + charInfo.charBitmapHeight) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopLeftX = BottomLeftX; float TopLeftY = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapYOrigin) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopRightX = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapXOrigin + charInfo.B - charInfo.C) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopRightY = TopLeftY; float BottomRightX = TopRightX; float BottomRightY = BottomLeftY; SetTextureCoordinate(TopLeftX, TopLeftY, vertexID + 1); SetTextureCoordinate(BottomLeftX, BottomLeftY, vertexID + 0); SetTextureCoordinate(BottomRightX, BottomRightY, vertexID + 3); SetTextureCoordinate(TopRightX, TopRightY, vertexID + 2); /// index setting letterBottomLeftX += letterWidth; previousCharIndex = m_Text[c]; }

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• Finding Z given X & Y coordinates on terrain?

  - by mrky

  I need to know what the most efficient way of finding Z given X & Y coordinates on terrain. My terrain is set up as a grid, each grid block consisting of two triangles, which may be flipped in any direction. I want to move game objects smoothly along the floor of the terrain without "stepping." I'm currently using the following method with unexpected results: double mapClass::getZ(double x, double y) { int vertexIndex = ((floor(y))*width*2)+((floor(x))*2); vec3ray ray = {glm::vec3(x, y, 2), glm::vec3(x, y, 0)}; vec3triangle tri1 = { glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex].v1), glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex].v2), glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex].v3) }; vec3triangle tri2 = { glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex+1].v1), glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex+1].v2), glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex+1].v3) }; glm::vec3 intersect; if (!intersectRayTriangle(tri1, ray, intersect)) { intersectRayTriangle(tri2, ray, intersect); } return intersect.z; } intersectRayTriangle() and glmFrom() are as follows: bool intersectRayTriangle(vec3triangle tri, vec3ray ray, glm::vec3 &worldIntersect) { glm::vec3 barycentricIntersect; if (glm::intersectLineTriangle(ray.origin, ray.direction, tri.p0, tri.p1, tri.p2, barycentricIntersect)) { // Convert barycentric to world coordinates double u, v, w; u = barycentricIntersect.x; v = barycentricIntersect.y; w = 1 - (u+v); worldIntersect.x = (u * tri.p0.x + v * tri.p1.x + w * tri.p2.x); worldIntersect.y = (u * tri.p0.y + v * tri.p1.y + w * tri.p2.y); worldIntersect.z = (u * tri.p0.z + v * tri.p1.z + w * tri.p2.z); return true; } else { return false; } } glm::vec3 glmFrom(s_point3f point) { return glm::vec3(point.x, point.y, point.z); } My convenience structures are defined as: struct s_point3f { GLfloat x, y, z; }; struct s_triangle3f { s_point3f v1, v2, v3; }; struct vec3ray { glm::vec3 origin, direction; }; struct vec3triangle { glm::vec3 p0, p1, p2; }; vertices is defined as: std::vector<s_triangle3f> vertices; Basically, I'm trying to get the intersect of a ray (which is positioned at the x, and y coordinates specified facing pointing downwards toward the terrain) and one of the two triangles on the grid. getZ() rarely returns anything but 0. Other times, the numbers it generates seem to be completely off. Am I taking the wrong approach? Can anyone see a problem with my code? Any help or critique is appreciated!

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• Is there a simpler way to create a borderless window with XNA 4.0?

  - by Cypher

  When looking into making my XNA game's window border-less, I found no properties or methods under Game.Window that would provide this, but I did find a window handle to the form. I was able to accomplish what I wanted by doing this: IntPtr hWnd = this.Window.Handle; var control = System.Windows.Forms.Control.FromHandle( hWnd ); var form = control.FindForm(); form.FormBorderStyle = System.Windows.Forms.FormBorderStyle.None; I don't know why but this feels like a dirty hack. Is there a built-in way to do this in XNA that I'm missing?

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• Pathfinding in multi goal, multi agent environment

  - by Rohan Agrawal

  I have an environment in which I have multiple agents (a), multiple goals (g) and obstacles (o). . . . a o . . . . . . . o . g . . a . . . . . . . . . . o . . . . o o o o . g . . o . . . . . . . o . . . . o . . . . o o o o a What would an appropriate algorithm for pathfinding in this environment? The only thing I can think of right now, is to Run a separate version of A* for each goal separately, but i don't think that's very efficient.

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• Robust line of sight test on the inside of a polygon with tolerance

  - by David Gouveia

  Foreword This is a followup to this question and the main problem I'm trying to solve. My current solution is an hack which involves inflating the polygon, and doing most calculations on the inflated polygon instead. My goal is to remove this step completely, and correctly solve the problem with calculations only. Problem Given a concave polygon and treating all of its edges as if they were walls in a level, determine whether two points A and B are in line of sight of each other, while accounting for some degree of floating point errors. I'm currently basing my solution on a series of line-segment interection tests. In other words: If any of the end points are outside the polygon, they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B crosses any of the edges from the polygon, then they are not in line of sight. If both end points are inside the polygon, and the line segment from A to B does not cross any of the edges from the polygon, then they are in line of sight. But the problem is dealing correctly with all the edge cases. In particular, it must be able to deal with all the situations depicted below, where red lines are examples that should be rejected, and green lines are examples that should be accepted. I probably missed a few other situations, such as when the line segment from A to B is colinear with an edge, but one of the end points is outside the polygon. One point of particular interest is the difference between 1 and 9. In both cases, both end points are vertices of the polygon, and there are no edges being intersected, but 1 should be rejected while 9 should be accepted. How to distinguish these two? I could check some middle point within the segment to see if it falls inside or not, but it's easy to come up with situations in which it would fail. Point 7 was also pretty tricky and I had to to treat it as a special case, which checks if two points are adjacent vertices of the polygon directly. But there are also other chances of line segments being col linear with the edges of the polygon, and I'm still not entirely sure how I should handle those cases. Is there any well known solution to this problem?

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• Component-wise GLSL vector branching

  - by Gustavo Maciel

  I'm aware that it usually is a BAD idea to operate separately on GLSL vec's components separately. For example: //use instrinsic functions, they do the calculation on 4 components at a time. float dot = v1.x*v2.x + v1.y * v2.y + v1.z * v2.z; //NEVER float dot = dot(v1, v2); //YES //Multiply one by one is not good too, since the ALU can do the 4 components at a time too. vec3 mul = vec3(v1.x * v2.x, v1.y * v2.y, v1.z * v2.z); //NEVER vec3 mul = v1 * v2; I've been struggling thinking, are there equivalent operations for branching? For example: vec4 Overlay(vec4 v1, vec4 v2, vec4 opacity) { bvec4 less = lessThan(v1, vec4(0.5)); vec4 blend; for(int i = 0; i < 4; ++i) { if(less[i]) blend[i] = 2.0 * v1[i]*v2[i]; else blend[i] = 1.0 - 2.0 * (1.0 - v1[i])*(1.0 - v2[i]); } return v1 + (blend-v1)*opacity; } This is a Overlay operator that works component wise. I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it, since I'm afraid these for and if can be a bottleneck later. Tl;dr, Can I branch component wise? If yes, how can I optimize that Overlay function with it?

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• How to move Objects smoothly like swimming arround

  - by philipp

  I have a Box2D project that is about to create a view where the user looks from the Sky onto Water. Or perhaps on a bathtub filled with water or something like this. The Object which holds the fluid actually does not matter, what matters is the movement of the bodies, because they should move like drops of grease on a soup, or wood on water, I can even imagine the the fluid is mercurial, extreme heavy and "lazy". How can I manipulate the bodies (every frame or time by time) to make them move like this? I started with randomly manipulation their linear velocity, but I turned out that this not very smooth and looks quite hard. Is it a better idea to check their velocity and apply impulses? Is there any example? Greetings philipp

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• What is the best way to "carve" a terrain created from a heightmap?

  - by tigrou

  I have a 3d landscape created from a heightmap. I'd like to "carve" some holes in that terrain. That will allow me to create bridges, caverns and tunnels inside it. That operation will be done in the game editor so it doesn't need to be realtime. In the end, rendering is done using traditional polygons. What would be the best/easiest way to do that ? I already think about several solutions : Solution 1 1) Create voxels from the heightmap (very easy). In other words, fill a 3D array like this : voxels[32][32][32] from the heightmap values. 2) Carve holes in the voxels as i want (easy too). 3) Convert voxels to polygons using some iso-surface extraction technique (like marching cubes). 4) Reduce (decimate) polygons created in 3). This technique seems to be the most promising for giving good results (untested). However the problem with marching cubes is that they tends to produce lots of polygons thus reducing them is mandatory. Implementing 4) also seems not trivial, i have read several papers on the web and it seems pretty complex. I was also unable to find an example, code snippet or something to start writing an algorithm for triangle mesh decimation. Maybe there is a special decimation algorithm (simpler) for meshes created from marching cubes ? Solution 2 1) Create some triangle mesh from the heighmap (easy). 2) Apply severals 3D boolean operation (eg: subtraction with a sphere) to carve the mesh. 3) apply some procedure to reduce polygons (optional). Operation 2) seems to be very complex and to be honest i have no idea how to do that. Also applying many boolean operation seems to be slow and will maybe degrade the triangle mesh every time a boolean operation is applied.

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• OpenGL Shading Program Object Memory Requirement

  - by Hans Wurst

  gDEbugger states that OpenGL's program objects only occupy an insignificant amount of memory. How much is this actually? I don't know if the stuff I looked up in mesa is actually that I was looking for but it requires 16KB [Edit: false, confusing struct names, less than 1KB immediate, some further behind pointers] per program object. Not quite insignificant. So is it recommended to create a unique program object for each object of the scene? Or to share a single program object and set the scene's object's custom variables just before its draw call?

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• Lighting-Reflectance Models & Licensing Issues

  - by codey

  Generally, or specifically, is there any licensing issue with using any of the well known lighting/reflectance models (i.e. the BRDFs or other distribution or approximation functions): Phong, Blinn–Phong, Cook–Torrance, Blinn-Torrance-Sparrow, Lambert, Minnaert, Oren–Nayar, Ward, Strauss, Ashikhmin-Shirley and common modifications where applicable, such as: Beckmann distribution, Blinn distribution, Schlick's approximation, etc. in your shader code utilised in a commercial product? Or is it a non-issue?

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• Difference between the terms Material & Effect

  - by codey

  I'm making an effect system right now (I think, because it may be a material system... or both!). The effects system follows the common (e.g. COLLADA, DirectX) effect framework abstraction of Effects have Techniques, Techniques have Passes, Passes have States & Shader Programs. An effect, according to COLLADA, defines the equations necessary for the visual appearance of geometry and screen-space image processing. Keeping with the abstraction, effects contain techniques. Each effect can contain one or many techniques (i.e. ways to generate the effect), each of which describes a different method for rendering that effect. The technique could be relate to quality (e.g. high precision, high LOD, etc.), or in-game-situation (e.g. night/day, power-up-mode, etc.). Techniques hold a description of the textures, samplers, shaders, parameters, & passes necessary for rendering this effect using one method. Some algorithms require several passes to render the effect. Pipeline descriptions are broken into an ordered collection of Pass objects. A pass provides a static declaration of all the render states, shaders, & settings for "one rendering pipeline" (i.e. one pass). Meshes usually contain a series of materials that define the model. According to the COLLADA spec (again), a material instantiates an effect, fills its parameters with values, & selects a technique. But I see material defined differently in other places, such as just the Lambert, Blinn, Phong "material types/shaded surfaces", or as Metal, Plastic, Wood, etc. In game dev forums, people often talk about implementing a "material/effect system". Is the material not an instance of an effect? Ergo, if I had effect objects, stored in a collection, & each effect instance object with there own parameter setting, then there is no need for the concept of a material... Or am I interpreting it wrong? Please help by contributing your interpretations as I want to be clear on a distinction (if any), & don't want to miss out on the concept of a material if it should be implemented to follow the abstraction of the DirectX FX framework & COLLADA definitions closely.

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• Android threads trouble wrapping my head around design

  - by semajhan

  I am having trouble wrapping my head around game design. On the android platform, I have an activity and set its content view with a custom surface view. The custom surface view acts as my panel and I create instances of all classes and do all the drawing and calculation in there. Question: Should I instead create the instances of other classes in my activity? Now I create a custom thread class that handles the game loop. Question: How do I use this one class in all my activities? Or do I have to create a separate thread each time? In my previous game, I had multiple levels that had to create an instance of the thread class and in the thread class I had to set constructor methods for each separate level and in the loop use a switch statement to check which level it needs to render and update. Sorry if that sounds confusing. I just want to know if the method I am using is inefficient (which it probably is) and how to go about designing it the correct way. I have read many tutorials out there and I am still having lots of trouble with this particular topic. Maybe a link to a some tutorials that explain this? Thanks.

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• Example of DOD design (on a generic Zombie game)

  - by Jeffrey

  I can't seem to find a nice explanation of the Data Oriented Design for a generic zombie game (it's just an example, pretty common example). Could you make an example of the Data Oriented Design on creating a generic zombie class? Is the following good? Zombie list class: class ZombieList { GLuint vbo; // generic zombie vertex model std::vector<color>; // object default color std::vector<texture>; // objects textures std::vector<vector3D>; // objects positions public: unsigned int create(); // return object id void move(unsigned int objId, vector3D offset); void rotate(unsigned int objId, float angle); void setColor(unsigned int objId, color c); void setPosition(unsigned int objId, color c); void setTexture(unsigned int, unsigned int); ... void update(Player*); // move towards player, attack if near } Example: Player p; Zombielist zl; unsigned int first = zl.create(); zl.setPosition(first, vector3D(50, 50)); zl.setTexture(first, texture("zombie1.png")); ... while (running) { // main loop ... zl.update(&p); zl.draw(); // draw every zombie } Or would creating a generic World container that contains every action from bite(zombieId, playerId) to moveTo(playerId, vector) to createPlayer() to shoot(playerId, vector) to face(radians)/face(vector); and contains: std::vector<zombie> std::vector<player> ... std::vector<mapchunk> ... std::vector<vbobufferid> player_run_animation; ... be a good example? Whats the proper way to organize a game with DOD?

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• Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

  - by mgibsonbr

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

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• Seeking an C/C++ OBJ geometry read/write that does not modify the representation

  - by Blake Senftner

  I am seeking a means to read and write OBJ geometry files with logic that does not modify the geometry representation. i.e. read geometry, immediately write it, and a diff of the source OBJ and the one just written will be identical. Every OBJ writing utility I've been able to find online fails this test. I am writing small command line tools to modify my OBJ geometries, and I need to write my results, not just read the geometry for rendering purposes. Simply needing to write the geometry knocks out 95% of the OBJ libraries on the web. Also, many of the popular libraries modify the geometry representation. For example, Nat Robbin's GLUT library includes the GLM library, which both converts quads to triangles, as well as reverses the topology (face ordering) of the geometry. It's still the same geometry, but if your tool chain expects a given topology, such as for rigging or morph targets, then GLM is useless. I'm not rendering in these tools, so dependencies like OpenGL or GLUT make no sense. And god forbid, do not "optimize" the geometry! Redundant vertices are on purpose for maintaining oneself on cache with our weird little low memory mobile devices.

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• Updating physics for animated models

  - by Mathias Hölzl

  For a new game we have do set up a scene with a minimum of 30 bone animated models.(shooter) The problem is that the update process for the animated models takes too long. Thats what I do: Each character has ~30 bones and for every update tick the animation gets calculated and every bone fires a event with the new matrix. The physics receives the event with the new matrix and updates the collision shape for that bone. The time that it takes to build the animation isn't that bad (0.2ms for 30 Bones - 6ms for 30 models). But the main problem is that the physic engine (Bullet) uses a diffrent matrix for transformation and so its necessary to convert it. Code for matrix conversion: (~0.005ms) btTransform CLEAR_PHYSICS_API Mat_to_btTransform( Mat mat ) { btMatrix3x3 bulletRotation; btVector3 bulletPosition; XMFLOAT4X4 matData = mat.GetStorage(); // copy rotation matrix for ( int row=0; row<3; ++row ) for ( int column=0; column<3; ++column ) bulletRotation[row][column] = matData.m[column][row]; for ( int column=0; column<3; ++column ) bulletPosition[column] = matData.m[3][column]; return btTransform( bulletRotation, bulletPosition ); } The function for updating the transform(Physic): void CLEAR_PHYSICS_API BulletPhysics::VKinematicMove(Mat mat, ActorId aid) { if ( btRigidBody * const body = FindActorBody( aid ) ) { btTransform tmp = Mat_to_btTransform( mat ); body->setWorldTransform( tmp ); } } The real problem is the function FindActorBody(id): ActorIDToBulletActorMap::const_iterator found = m_actorBodies.find( id ); if ( found != m_actorBodies.end() ) return found->second; All physic actors are stored in m_actorBodies and thats why the updating process takes to long. But I have no idea how I could avoid this. Friendly greedings, Mathias

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• Pong Collision Help in C# w/ XNA

  - by Ramses Brown

  Edit: My goal is to have it function like this: Ball hits 1st Quarter = rebounds higher (aka Y++) Ball hits 2nd Quarter = rebounds higher (using random value) Ball hits 3rd Quarter = rebounds lower (using random value) Ball hits 4th Quarter = rebounds lower (aka Y--) I'm currently using Rectangle Collision for my collision detection, and it's worked. Now I wish to expand it. Instead of it simply detecting whether or not the paddle/ball intersect, I want to make it so that it can determine what section of the paddle gets hit. I wanted it in 4 parts, with each having a different reaction to impact. My first thought is to base it on the Ball's Y position compared to the Paddle's Y position. But since I want it in 4 parts, I don't know how to do that. So it's essentially be if (ball.Y > Paddle.Y) { PaddleSection1 == true; } Except modified so that instead of being top half/bottom half, it's 1st Quarter, etc.

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• How can I convert a 2D bitmap (Used for terrain) to a 2D polygon mesh for collision?

  - by Megadanxzero

  So I'm making an artillery type game, sort of similar to Worms with all the usual stuff like destructible terrain etc... and while I could use per-pixel collision that doesn't give me collision normals or anything like that. Converting it all to a mesh would also mean I could use an existing physics library, which would be better than anything I can make by myself. I've seen people mention doing this by using Marching Squares to get contours in the bitmap, but I can't find anything which mentions how to turn these into a mesh (Unless it refers to a 3D mesh with contour lines defining different heights, which is NOT what I want). At the moment I can get a basic Marching Squares contour which looks something like this (Where the grid-like lines in the background would be the Marching Squares 'cells'): That needs to be interpolated to get a smoother, more accurate result but that's the general idea. I had a couple ideas for how to turn this into a mesh, but many of them wouldn't work in certain cases, and the one which I thought would work perfectly has turned out to be very slow and I've not even finished it yet! Ideally I'd like whatever I end up using to be fast enough to do every frame for cases such as rapidly-firing weapons, or digging tools. I'm thinking there must be some kind of existing algorithm/technique for turning something like this into a mesh, but I can't seem to find anything. I've looked at some things like Delaunay Triangulation, but as far as I can tell that won't correctly handle concave shapes like the above example, and also wouldn't account for holes within the terrain. I'll go through the technique I came up with for comparison and I guess I'll see if anyone has a better idea. First of all interpolate the Marching Squares contour lines, creating vertices from the line ends, and getting vertices where lines cross cell edges (Important). Then, for each cell containing vertices create polygons by using 2 vertices, and a cell corner as the 3rd vertex (Probably the closest corner). Do this for each cell and I think you should have a mesh which accurately represents the original bitmap (Though there will only be polygons at the edges of the bitmap, and large filled in areas in between will be empty). The only problem with this is that it involves lopping through every pixel once for the initial Marching Squares, then looping through every cell (image height + 1 x image width + 1) at least twice, which ends up being really slow for any decently sized image...

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