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• Why are textures always square powers of two? What if they aren't?

  - by Keavon

  Why are the resolution of textures in games always a power of two (128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024, etc.)? Wouldn't it be smart to save on the game's file size and make the texture exactly fit the UV unwrapped model? What would happen if there was a texture that was not a power of two? Would it be incorrect to have a texture be something like 256x512, or 512x1024? Or would this cause the problems that non-power-of-two textures may cause?

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• Computer Games Technolgy or Software Engineering?

  - by Suleman Anwar

  I'm in the last year of my college and going to university next year. Could you tell me what the difference between Software Engineering and Computer Games Technology is? I know a bit of both but don't know the actual difference. I'm kind off in a dilemma between these two. I want to be a programmer, I'd love to go into gaming but I heard getting a job within a computer games company is really hard.

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• Marshalling C# Structs into DX11 cbuffers

  - by Craig

  I'm having some issues with the packing of my structure in C# and passing them through to cbuffers I have registered in HLSL. When I pack my struct in one manner the information seems to be able to pass to the shader: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit, Size = 16)] internal struct TestStruct { [FieldOffset(0)] public Vector3 mEyePosition; [FieldOffset(12)] public int type; } This works perfectly when used against this HLSL fragment: cbuffer PerFrame : register(b0) { Vector3 eyePos; int type; } float3 GetColour() { float3 returnColour = float(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); switch(type) { case 0: returnColour = float3(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); break; case 1: returnColour = float3(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); break; case 2: returnColour = float3(0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); break; } return returnColour; } However, when I use the following structure definitions... // Note this is 16 because HLSL packs in 4 float 'chunks'. // It is also simplified, but still demonstrates the problem. [StructLayout(Layout.Explicit, Size = 16)] internal struct InternalTestStruct { [FieldOffset(0)] public int type; } [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit, Size = 32)] internal struct TestStruct { [FieldOffset(0)] public Vector3 mEyePosition; //Missing 4 bytes here for correct packing. [FieldOffset(16)] public InternalTestStruct mInternal; } ... the following HLSL fragment no longer works. struct InternalType { int type; } cbuffer PerFrame : register(b0) { Vector3 eyePos; InternalType internalStruct; } float3 GetColour() { float3 returnColour = float(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); switch(internaltype.type) { case 0: returnColour = float3(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); break; case 1: returnColour = float3(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); break; case 2: returnColour = float3(0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); break; } return returnColour; } Is there a problem with the way I am packing the struct, or is it another issue? To re-iterate: I can pass a struct in a cbuffer so long as it does not contain a nested struct.

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• Determine corners of a specific plane in the frustum

  - by Takumi

  I'm working on a game with a 2D view in a 3D world. It's a kind of shoot'em up. I've a spaceship at the center of the screen and i want that ennemies appear at the borders of my window. Now i don't know how to determine positions of the borders of the window. For example, my camera is at (0,0,0) and looking forward (0,0,1). I set my spaceship at (0,0,50). I also know the near plane (1) and the far plane(1000). I think i'd have to find the 4 corners of the plane in the frustum whose z position is 50, and with these corner i can determine borders. But i don't know how to determine x and y.

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• Calculating an orbit and approach velocties

  - by Mob

  I have drones in my game that need to approach and orbit a node and shoot at it. Problem is I want to stay away from a real physics simulation, meaning I don't want to give the node and drone a mass and the drone's thrusters' a force. I just want to find the best way to approach and then enter orbit. There was a pretty good answer about using bezier curves and doing it that way, but that is essentially a tween between two fixed points. The nodes are also moving as the drones enter orbit.

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• How do I make this rendering thread run together with the main one?

  - by funk

  I'm developing an Android game and need to show an animation of an exploding bomb. It's a spritesheet with 1 row and 13 different images. Each image should be displayed in sequence, 200 ms apart. There is one Thread running for the entire game: package com.android.testgame; import android.graphics.Canvas; public class GameLoopThread extends Thread { static final long FPS = 10; // 10 Frames per Second private final GameView view; private boolean running = false; public GameLoopThread(GameView view) { this.view = view; } public void setRunning(boolean run) { running = run; } @Override public void run() { long ticksPS = 1000 / FPS; long startTime; long sleepTime; while (running) { Canvas c = null; startTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); try { c = view.getHolder().lockCanvas(); synchronized (view.getHolder()) { view.onDraw(c); } } finally { if (c != null) { view.getHolder().unlockCanvasAndPost(c); } } sleepTime = ticksPS - (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime); try { if (sleepTime > 0) { sleep(sleepTime); } else { sleep(10); } } catch (Exception e) {} } } } As far as I know I would have to create a second Thread for the bomb. package com.android.testgame; import android.graphics.Bitmap; import android.graphics.Canvas; import android.graphics.Rect; public class Bomb { private final Bitmap bmp; private final int width; private final int height; private int currentFrame = 0; private static final int BMPROWS = 1; private static final int BMPCOLUMNS = 13; private int x = 0; private int y = 0; public Bomb(GameView gameView, Bitmap bmp) { this.width = bmp.getWidth() / BMPCOLUMNS; this.height = bmp.getHeight() / BMPROWS; this.bmp = bmp; x = 250; y = 250; } private void update() { currentFrame++; new BombThread().start(); } public void onDraw(Canvas canvas) { update(); int srcX = currentFrame * width; int srcY = height; Rect src = new Rect(srcX, srcY, srcX + width, srcY + height); Rect dst = new Rect(x, y, x + width, y + height); canvas.drawBitmap(bmp, src, dst, null); } class BombThread extends Thread { @Override public void run() { try { sleep(200); } catch(InterruptedException e){ } } } } The Threads would then have to run simultaneously. How do I do this?

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• Blender - creating bones from transform matrices

  - by user975135

  Notice: this is for the Blender 2.5/2.6 API. Back in the old days in the Blender 2.4 API, you could easily create a bone from a transform matrix in your 3d file as EditBones had an attribute named "matrix", which was an armature-space matrix you could access and modify. The new 2.5+ API still has the "matrix" attribute for EditBones, but for some unknown reason it is now read-only. So how to create EditBones from transform matrices? I could only find one thing: a new "transform()" function, which takes a Matrix too. Transform the the bones head, tail, roll and envelope (when the matrix has a scale component). Perfect, but you already need to have some values (loc/rot/scale) for your bone, otherwise transforming with a matrix like this will give you nothing, your bone will be a zero-sized bone which will be deleted by Blender. if you create default bone values first, like this: bone.tail = mathutils.Vector([0,1,0]) Then transform() will work on your bone and it might seem to create correct bones, but setting a tail position actually generates a matrix itself, use transform() and you don't get the matrix from your model file on your EditBone, but the multiplication of your matrix with the bone's existing one. This can be easily proven by comparing the matrices read from the file with EditBone.matrix. Again it might seem correct in Blender, but now export your model and you see your animations are messed up, as the bind pose rotations of the bones are wrong. I've tried to find an alternative way to assign the transformation matrix from my file to my EditBone with no luck.

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• How to import or "using" a custom class in Unity script?

  - by Bobbake4

  I have downloaded the JSONObject plugin for parsing JSON in Unity but when I use it in a script I get an error indicating JSONObject cannot be found. My question is how do I use a custom object class defined inside another class. I know I need a using directive to solve this but I am not sure of the path to these custom objects I have imported. They are in the root project folder inside JSONObject folder and class is called JSONObject. Thanks

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• Best way to implement an AI for Dominion? [on hold]

  - by j will

  I'm creating a desktop client and server backend for the game, Dominion, by Donald X. Vaccarino. I've been reading up on AI techniques and algorithms and I just wanted to what is the best way to implement an AI for such a game? Would it better to look at neural networks, genetic algorithms, decision trees, fuzzy logic, or any other methodology? For those who do not know how Dominion works, check out this part of the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(card_game)#Gameplay

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• Data structure for bubble shooter game

  - by SundayMonday

  I'm starting to make a bubble shooter game for a mobile OS. Assume this is just the basic "three or more same-color bubbles that touch pop" and all bubbles that are separated from their group fall/pop. What data structures are common for storing the bubbles? I've considered using an undirected, connected graph where each node is a bubble. This seems like it could help answer the question "which bubbles (if any) should fall now?" after some arbitrary bubbles are popped and corresponding nodes are removed from the graph. I think the answer is all bubbles that were just disconnected from the graph should fall. However the graph approach might be overkill so I'm not sure. Another consideration for the data structure is collision detection. Perhaps being able to grab a list of neighboring bubbles in constant time for a particular "bubble slot" is useful. So the collision detection would be something like "moving bubble is closest to slot ij, neighbors of slot ij are bubbles a,b,c, moving bubble is sufficiently close to bubble b hence moving bubble should come to rest in slot ij". A game like this could be probably be made with a relatively crude grid structure as the primary data structure. However it seems like answering "which bubbles (if any) should fall now?" would be trickier with this data structure.

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• How to play the sound of an object sliding on another object for a variable duration

  - by Antoine

  I would like to add sound effects to a basic 2D game. For example, a stone sphere is rolling on wood surface. Let's say I have a 2 second audio recording of this. How could I use the sample to add sound for an arbitrary duration ? So far I have two solutions in mind: a/ record the sound for an amount of time that is greater than the maximum expected duration, and play only a part of it; b/ extract a small portion of the sample and play it in a loop for the duration of the move; however I'm not sure if it makes sense with an audio wave.

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• Designing a flexible tile-based engine

  - by Vee

  I'm trying to create a flexible tile-based game engine to make all sorts of non-realtime puzzle games, just as Bejeweled, Civilization, Sokoban, and so on. The first approach I had was to have a 2D array of Tile objects, and then have classes inheriting from Tile that represented the game objects. Unfortunately that way I couldn't stack more game elements on the same Tile without having a 3D array. Then I did something different: I still had the 2D array of Tile objects, but every Tile object contained a List where I put and different entities. This worked fine until 20 minutes ago, when I realized that it's too expensive to do many things, look at this example: I have a Wall entity. Every update I have to check the 8 adjacent Tiles, then check all of the entities in the Tile's List, check if any of those entities is a Wall, then finally draw the correct sprite. (This is done to draw walls that are next to each other seamlessly) The only solution I see now is having a 3D array, with many layers, that could suit every situation. But that way I can't stack two entities that share the same layer on the same tile. Whenever I want to do that I have to create a new layer. Is there a better solution? What would you do?

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• Interpolation gives the appearance of collisions

  - by Akroy

  I'm implementing a simple 2D platformer with a constant speed update of the game logic, but with the rendering done as fast as the machine can handle. I interpolate positions between actual game updates by just using the position and velocity of objects at the last update. This makes things look really smooth in general, but when something hits a wall/floor, it appears to go through the wall for a moment before being positioned correctly. This is because the interpolator is not taking walls into account, so it guesses the position into walls until the actual game update fixes it. Are there any particularly elegant solutions for this? Simply increasing the update rate seems like a band-aid solution, and I'm trying to avoid increasing the system reqs. I could also check for collisions in the actual interpolator, but that seems like heavy overhead, and then I'm no longer dividing the drawing and the game updating.

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• Role of an entity state in a component based system?

  - by Paul

  Component-based entity systems are all the rage these days; everyone seems to agree they are the way to go, but no one really has a definitive implementation of such a system. I was wondering, what role do entity states (walking-left, standing, jumping, etc) have in a CBS? Do they act like controllers (i.e. they handle events and change the entity's attributes based on those events)? What about cases where a state would, for example, require that the entity enters no-clip mode? Should, that state, when it enters, maybe set the CollisionComponent of the entity to a null pointer or something? (Then, on exit, the state should restore the entity's CollisionComponent to its previous state.) Also, I guess it's the current state's job to change the entity's state to something else, right?

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• Assets.getBytes returns null in test environment

  - by ashes999

  I'm using the latest Haxe (2.10), NME (3.4.3), and MUnit. I've written some unit tests that need to fetch bitmap data from SWF symbols. The first step is to actually load the SWF data. To do this, I use NME's getByteArray along with the swf library, like so: var blah:SWF = new SWF(Assets.getBytes("assets/swf/test.swf")); The call to Assets.getBytes returns null when I'm running this under MUnit. When running my actual game code, I'm able to get the byte array (and consequentially, instantiate the SWF class). Am I doing something wrong? What am I missing? Edit: My directory structure is: . (root .\assets .\assets\*.png (other images) .\assets\swf\*.swf (SWFs) .\Source\*.hx (source code) .\Test\*.hx (tests)

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• Writing to a structured buffer with a compute shader (D3D11)

  - by Vertexwahn

  I have some problems writing to a structured buffer. First I create a structured buffer that is filled with float values beginning from 0 to 99. Afterwards a copy the structured buffer to a CPU accessible buffer is made to print the content of the structured buffer to the console. The output is as expected (Numbers 0 to 99 appear on the console). Afterwards I use a compute shader that should change the contents of the structured buffer: RWStructuredBuffer<float> Result : register( u0 ); [numthreads(1, 1, 1)] void CS_main( uint3 GroupId : SV_GroupID ) { Result[GroupId.x] = GroupId.x * 10; } But the compute shader does not change the contents of the structured buffer. The source code can be found here (main.cpp): https://bitbucket.org/Vertexwahn/cmakedemos/src/4abb067afd5781b87a553c4c720956668adca22a/D3D11ComputeShader/src/main.cpp?at=default FillCS.hlsl: https://bitbucket.org/Vertexwahn/cmakedemos/src/4abb067afd5781b87a553c4c720956668adca22a/D3D11ComputeShader/src/FillCS.hlsl?at=default

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• why is glVertexAttribDivisor crashing?

  - by 2am

  I am trying to render some trees with instancing. This is rather weird, but before sleeping yesterday night, I checked the code, and it was in a running state, when I got up this morning, it is crashing when I am calling glVertexAttribDivisor I haven't changed any code since yesterday. Here is how I am sending data to GPU for instancing. glGenBuffers(1, &iVBO); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, iVBO); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, (ml_instance->i_positions.size()*sizeof(glm::vec4)) , NULL, GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0, (ml_instance->i_positions.size()*sizeof(glm::vec4)), &ml_instance->i_positions[0]); And then in vertex specification-- glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, iVBO); glVertexAttribPointer(i_positions, 4, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(i_positions); glVertexAttribDivisor(i_positions,1); // **THIS IS WHERE THE PROGRAM CRASHES** glDrawElementsInstanced(GL_TRIANGLES, indices.size(), GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0,TREES_INSTANCE_COUNT); I have checked ml_instance->i_positions, it has all the data that needs to render. I have checked the value of i_positions in vertex shader, it is the same as whatever I have defined there. I am little out of ideas here, everything looks pretty much fine. What am I missing?

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• Switching between levels, re-initialize existing structure or create new one?

  - by Martino Wullems

  This is something I've been wondering for quite a while. When building games that exist out of multiple levels (platformers, shmups etc) what is the prefered method to switch between the levels? Let's say we have a level class that does the following: Load data for the level design (tiles), enemies, graphics etc. Setup all these elements in their appriopate locations and display them Start physics and game logic I'm stuck between the following 2 methods: 1: Throw away everything in the level class and make a new one, we have to load an entirely new level anyway! 2: pause the game logic and physics, unload all currents assets, then re-initialize those components with the level data for the new level. They both have their pros and cons. Method 1 is alot easier and seems to make sense since we have to redo everything anyway. But method 2 allows you to re-use exisiting elements which might save resources and allows for a smoother transfer to the new level.

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• How do I morph between meshes that have different vertex counts?

  - by elijaheac

  I am using MeshMorpher from the Unify wiki in my Unity project, and I want to be able to transform between arbitrary meshes. This utility works best when there are an equal number of vertices between the two meshes. Is there some way to equalize the vertex count between a set of meshes? I don't mean that this would reduce the vertex count of a mesh, but would rather add redundant vertices to any meshes with smaller counts. However, if there is an alternate method of handling this (other than increasing vertices), I would like to know.

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• I'm looking to learn how to apply traditional animation techniques to my graphics engine - are there any tutorials or online-resources that can help?

  - by blueberryfields

  There are many traditional animation techniques - such as blurring of motion, motion along an elliptical curve rather than a straight line, counter-motion before beginning of movement - which help with creating the appearance of a realistic 3D animated character. I'm looking to incorporate tools and short cuts for some of these into my graphics engine, to make it easier for my end users to use these techniques in their animations. Is there a good resource listing the techniques and the principles behind them, especially how they might apply to a graphics engine or 3D animation?

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• Sanity checks vs file sizes

  - by Richard Fabian

  In your game assets do you make room for explicit sanity checks, or do you have some generally expected bounds which you assert? I've been thinking about how we compress data and thought that it's much better to have the former, and less of the latter. If your data can exceed your normal valid ranges, but if it does it's an error, then surely that implies you're not compressing the data well enough? What do you do to find out if your data is compressed as far as it can be, and what do you use to ensure your data isn't corrupted and ensure it's an official release? EDIT I'm not interested in sanity checking the file size, but instead, how you manage your sanity checks and whether you arrange the excess size caused by the opportunity to do sanity checks by using explicit extra data, or through allowing the data enough file space (data member size) to be out of valid range and thus able to be checked merely by looking at the asset in memory after loading.

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• Ogre3D : seeking advices about game files management

  - by Tibor

  I'm working on a new game, and its related level editor, based on Ogre3D. I was thinking about how i could manage the game files, knowing that Ogre use .mesh files for models, .material for materials/texture information etc... . At first i thought about a common .zip folder decompressed at runtime (the same way Torchlight and Ogre samples do). But this way the game assets become a monolithic archive, loading takes time, and could be difficult to eventually patch them. So, let's say i have a game object named "Cube" i want to load in my program. Going for modularity, what if i create a compressed file (using zlib compression routines) named Cube.extname, containing its sub-files Cube.mesh, Cube.material and so on ? Are there any alternatives or should i stick with compressed objects? PS: Just to clear things, the answer is unrelated to my program code, at the moment i'm using "resources.cfg" pointing to the OgreSDK media directory.

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• Order independent transparency in particle system

  - by Stepan Zastupov

  I'm writing a particle system and would like to find a trick to achieve proper alpha blending without sorting particles because: Each particle is a point sprite in a single mesh and I can't use scene graph ability to sort transparent nodes. The system node should be properly sorted, though. Particle position is computed on shader from initial velocity, acceleration and time. In order to sort the system I would have to perform all this computations on CPU, which is something I want to avoid. Sorting hundreds of particles against camera position and uploading it on GPU each frame seams to be quiet heavy operation. Alpha testing seems to be fast enough on GLES 2.0 and works fine for non-transparent but "masked" textures. Still, it's not enough for semi-transparent particles. How would you handle this?

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• Multi-Threaded Pipelined Game Engine Data Synchronization Questions

  - by Douglas

  Let's say I'm setting up a worker pool based game engine with pipelining. Let's say I have 4 stages in my pipeline as such: Stage 1: Physics Stage 2: AI/Input Stage 3: Game Logic Stage 4: Rendering Now let's say that the physics detects a collision between a bullet and a character in stage 1. Two frames later the game logic may choose to remove that bullet from the simulation, however none of the other copies of the data for the other pipeline stages will get this information. How is this sort of thing and other things like it get handled? Do you generally make changes like this to every pipeline stage's data at the end of a frame?

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• How do I dynamically reload content files?

  - by Kikaimaru

  Is there a relatively simple way to dynamically reload content files, such as effect files? I know I can do the following: Detect change of file Run content pipeline to rebuild that specific file Unload ALL content that was loaded Load all content And use double references to reference content files. The problem is with step 3 (and step 2 isn't that nice either). I need to unload everything because if I have model Hero.x which references Model.fx effect, and I change the Model.fx file, I need to reload the Hero.x file which will then call LoadExternalReference on Model.fx. Has someone managed to make this work without rewriting the whole ContentManager (and every ContentReader) and tracking calls to LoadExternalReference?

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