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  • Android Loading Screen: How do I use a stack to load elements?

    - by tom_mai78101
    I have some problems with figuring out what value I should put in the function: int value_needed_to_figure_out = X; ProgressBar.incrementProgressBy(value_needed_to_figure_out); I've been researching about loading screens and how to use them. Some examples I've seen have implemented Thread.sleep() in a Handler.post(new Runnable()) function. To me, I got most of that concept of using the Handler to update the ProgressBar, while pretending to do some heavy crunching work. So, I kept looking. I have read this thread here: How do I load chunks of data from an assest manager during a loading screen? It said that I can try using a stack it needs to load, and adding a size counter as I add elements to the stack. What does it mean? This is the part where I'm totally stumped. If anyone would provide some hints, I'll gladly appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

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  • What is the proper way to maintain the angle of a gun mounted on a car?

    - by Blair
    So I am making a simple game. I want to put a gun on top of a car. I want to be able to control the angle of the gun. Basically it can go forward all the way so that it is parallel to the ground facing the direction the car is moving or it can point behind the car and any of the angles in between these positions. I have something like the following right now but its not really working. Is there an better way to do this that I am not seeing? #This will place the car glPushMatrix() glTranslatef(self.position.x,1.5,self.position.z) glRotated(self.rotation, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0) glScaled(0.5, 0.5, 0.5) glCallList(self.model.gl_list) glPopMatrix() #This will place the gun on top glPushMatrix() glTranslatef(self.position.x,2.5,self.position.z) glRotated(self.tube_angle, self.direction.z, 0.0, self.direction.x) print self.direction.z glRotated(45, self.position.z, 0.0, self.position.x) glScaled(1.0, 0.5, 1.0) glCallList(self.tube.gl_list) glPopMatrix() This almost works. It moves the gun up and down. But when the car moves around, the angle of the gun changes. Not what I want.

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  • Keep 3d model facing the camera at all angles

    - by Sparky41
    I'm trying to keep a 3d plane facing the camera at all angles but while i have some success with this: Vector3 gunToCam = cam.cameraPosition - getWorld.Translation; Vector3 beamRight = Vector3.Cross(torpDirection, gunToCam); beamRight.Normalize(); Vector3 beamUp = Vector3.Cross(beamRight, torpDirection); shipeffect.beamWorld = Matrix.Identity; shipeffect.beamWorld.Forward = (torpDirection) * 1f; shipeffect.beamWorld.Right = beamRight; shipeffect.beamWorld.Up = beamUp; shipeffect.beamWorld.Translation = shipeffect.beamPosition; *Note: Logic not wrote by me i just found this rather useful It seems to only face the camera at certain angles. For example if i place the camera behind the plane you can see it that only Roll's around the axis like this: http://i.imgur.com/FOKLx.png (imagine if you are looking from behind where you have fired from. Any idea what to what the problem is (angles are not my specialty) shipeffect is an object that holds this class variables: public Texture2D altBeam; public Model beam; public Matrix beamWorld; public Matrix[] gunTransforms; public Vector3 beamPosition;

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  • Any open source editor to make video games online without programming knowledge?

    - by chelder
    With Scratch we can create video games online, from its web platform, and publish them on the same web. I could download its source code and use it, as many others already did (see Scratch modifications). Unfortunately, we need programming knowledge to use it. Actually, Scratch is mainly for teaching kids to code. I also found editors like Construct 2, GameSalad Creator and many others (just type on Google: create a video game without programming). With those editors we can create video games without coding. Unfortunately they are neither open source nor web platform. They need to be installed on Windows or Mac. Do you know some editor like Construct 2 or GameSalad Creator but open source and executable from a web server? Maybe some HTML5 game engine can do it?

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  • How to remove seams from a tile map in 3D?

    - by Grimshaw
    I am using my OpenGL custom engine to render a tilemap made with Tiled, using a well spread tileset from the web. There is nothing fancy going on. I load the TMX file from Tiled and generate vertex arrays and index arrays to render the tilemap. I am rendering this tilemap as a wall in my 3D world, meaning that I move around with a fly camera in my 3D world and at Z=0 there is a plane showing me my tiles. Everything is working correctly but I get ugly seems between the tiles. I've tried orthographic and perspective cameras and with either I found particular sets of parameters for the projection and view matrices where the artifacts did not show, but otherwise they are there 99% of the time in multiple patterns, depending on the zoom and camera parameters like field of view. Here's a screenshot of the artifact being shown: http://i.imgur.com/HNV1g4M.png Here's the tileset I am using (which Tiled also uses and renders correctly): http://i.imgur.com/SjjHK4q.png My tileset has no mipmaps and is set to GL_NEAREST and GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE values. I've looked around many articles in the internet and nothing helped. I tried uv correction so the uv fall at half of the texel, rather than the end of the texel to prevent interpolating with the neighbour value(which is transparency). I tried debugging with my geometry and I verified that with no texture and a random color in each tile, I don't seem to see any seams. All vertices have integer coordinates, i.e, the first tile is a quad from (0,0) to (1,1) and so on. Tried adding a little offset both to the UV and to the vertices to see if the gaps cease to exist. Disabled multisampling too. Nothing fixed it so far. Thanks.

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  • GetContactList stops reporting collisions on welded bodies

    - by Henrique Jung
    I have some strange problem with my game which uses Box2D as physics engine and I'm out of ideas on what I can do to solve it. My game is a class assignment where I need to build a simple game where the main character moves in a 2D environment while square blocks comes from below him. Each time a collision occurs, that block is attached to the character using a weld joint, when three blocks of the same colors are together, they annihilate themselves(an effect similar to Bejeweled). I'm using a recursive function to iterate through all the attached blocks of a given block to see if there are enough blocks for them to be deleted. I'm using GetContactList function to iterate through the list of contacts to see which blocks are adjacent to each other. The results are quite disappointing, the blocks only get annihilated in few cases. After a lot of debugging, I found the issue, but I still don't know how to solve. My issue is: after some time, GetContactList STOPS returning contacts (return NULL) to blocks that were already attached for some time. I spent some time reading the Box2D manual as well as some tutorials and still didn't find any clue of what is happening. Below there's some simplified version of the code that I wrote. for(int a = 0; a < blocksList.size(); a++) { blocksList[a].BuildConnections(); } And on BuildConnections b2ContactEdge* edge = body->GetContactList(); while(edge != NULL) { if (long_check_to_see_if_there's_a_block_nearby) { // add itself to the list to be anihilated globalList.push_back(this); //if there's, call BuildConnections again on the adjacent block adjacentBody->GetUserData()->BuildConnections; } edge = edge->next; } I know that there's another issue related to circular inclusions, but I fairly sure that this problem isn't causing the problem with the collisions. You can download my entire code from this page if you'd like http://code.google.com/p/fellz/source/list

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  • Simple OpenGL program major slow down at high resolution

    - by Grieverheart
    I have created a small OpenGL 3.3 (Core) program using freeglut. The whole geometry is two boxes and one plane with some textures. I can move around like in an FPS and that's it. The problem is I face a big slow down of fps when I make my window large (i.e. above 1920x1080). I have monitors GPU usage when in full-screen and it shows GPU load of nearly 100% and Memory Controller load of ~85%. When at 600x600, these numbers are at about 45%, my CPU is also at full load. I use deferred rendering at the moment but even when forward rendering, the slow down was nearly as severe. I can't imagine my GPU is not powerful enough for something this simple when I play many games at 1080p (I have a GeForce GT 120M btw). Below are my shaders, First Pass #VS #version 330 core uniform mat4 ModelViewMatrix; uniform mat3 NormalMatrix; uniform mat4 MVPMatrix; uniform float scale; layout(location = 0) in vec3 in_Position; layout(location = 1) in vec3 in_Normal; layout(location = 2) in vec2 in_TexCoord; smooth out vec3 pass_Normal; smooth out vec3 pass_Position; smooth out vec2 TexCoord; void main(void){ pass_Position = (ModelViewMatrix * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0)).xyz; pass_Normal = NormalMatrix * in_Normal; TexCoord = in_TexCoord; gl_Position = MVPMatrix * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0); } #FS #version 330 core uniform sampler2D inSampler; smooth in vec3 pass_Normal; smooth in vec3 pass_Position; smooth in vec2 TexCoord; layout(location = 0) out vec3 outPosition; layout(location = 1) out vec3 outDiffuse; layout(location = 2) out vec3 outNormal; void main(void){ outPosition = pass_Position; outDiffuse = texture(inSampler, TexCoord).xyz; outNormal = pass_Normal; } Second Pass #VS #version 330 core uniform float scale; layout(location = 0) in vec3 in_Position; void main(void){ gl_Position = mat4(1.0) * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0); } #FS #version 330 core struct Light{ vec3 direction; }; uniform ivec2 ScreenSize; uniform Light light; uniform sampler2D PositionMap; uniform sampler2D ColorMap; uniform sampler2D NormalMap; out vec4 out_Color; vec2 CalcTexCoord(void){ return gl_FragCoord.xy / ScreenSize; } vec4 CalcLight(vec3 position, vec3 normal){ vec4 DiffuseColor = vec4(0.0); vec4 SpecularColor = vec4(0.0); vec3 light_Direction = -normalize(light.direction); float diffuse = max(0.0, dot(normal, light_Direction)); if(diffuse 0.0){ DiffuseColor = diffuse * vec4(1.0); vec3 camera_Direction = normalize(-position); vec3 half_vector = normalize(camera_Direction + light_Direction); float specular = max(0.0, dot(normal, half_vector)); float fspecular = pow(specular, 128.0); SpecularColor = fspecular * vec4(1.0); } return DiffuseColor + SpecularColor + vec4(0.1); } void main(void){ vec2 TexCoord = CalcTexCoord(); vec3 Position = texture(PositionMap, TexCoord).xyz; vec3 Color = texture(ColorMap, TexCoord).xyz; vec3 Normal = normalize(texture(NormalMap, TexCoord).xyz); out_Color = vec4(Color, 1.0) * CalcLight(Position, Normal); } Is it normal for the GPU to be used that much under the described circumstances? Is it due to poor performance of freeglut? I understand that the problem could be specific to my code, but I can't paste the whole code here, if you need more info, please tell me.

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  • Method for spawning enemies according to player score and game time

    - by Sun
    I'm making a top-down shooter and want to scale the difficulty of the game according to what the score is and how much time has Passed. Along with this, I want to spawn enemies in different patterns and increase the intervals at which these enemies are shown. I'm going for a similar effect to Geometry wars. However, I can think of a to do this other than have multiple if-else statments, e.g. : if (score > 1000) { //spawn x amount if enemies } else if (score > 10000) { //spawn x amount of enemy type 1 & 2 } else if (score > 15000) { //spawn x amount of enemy type 1 & 2 & 3 } else if (score > 25000) { //spawn x amount of enemy type 1 & 2 & 3 //create patterns with enemies } ...etc What would be a better method of spawning enemies as I have described?

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  • Scanline filling of polygons that share edges and vertices

    - by Belgin
    In this picture (a perspective projection of an icosahedron), the scanline (red) intersects that vertex at the top. In an icosahedron each edge belongs to two triangles. From edge a, only one triangle is visible, the other one is in the back. Same for edge d. Also, in order to determine what color the current pixel should be, each polygon has a flag which can either be 'in' or 'out', depending upon where on the scanline we currently are. Flags are flipped according to the intersection of the scanline with the edges. Now, as we go from a to d (because all edges are intersected with the scanline at that vertex), this happens: the triangle behind triangle 1 and triangle 1 itself are set 'in', then 2 is set in and 1 is 'out', then 3 is set 'in', 2 is 'out' and finally 3 is 'out' and the one behind it is set 'in', which is not the desired behavior because we only need the triangles which are facing us to be set 'in', the rest should be 'out'. How do process the edges in the Active Edge List (a list of edges that are currently intersected by the scanline) so the right polys are set 'in'? Also, I should mention that the edges are unique, which means there exists an array of edges in the data structure of the icosahedron which are pointed to by edge pointers in each of the triangles.

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  • Errors happen when using World.destroyBody( Body body )

    - by minami
    on Android application using libgdx, when I use World.destroyBody( Body body ) method, once in a while the application suddenly shuts down. Is there some setting I need to do with body collision or Box2DDebugRenderer before I destroy bodies? Below is the source I use for destroying bodies. private void deleteUnusedObject( ) { for( Iterator<Body> iter = mWorld.getBodies() ; iter.hasNext() ; ){ Body body = iter.next( ) ; if( body.getUserData( ) != null ) { Box2DUserData data = (Box2DUserData) body.getUserData( ) ; if( ! data.getActFlag() ) { if( body != null ) { mWorld.destroyBody( body ) ; } } } } } Thanks

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  • Animation API vs frame animation

    - by Max
    I'm pretty far down the road in my game right now, closing in on the end. And I'm adding little tweaks here and there. I used custom frame animation of a single image with many versions of my sprite on it, and controlled which part of the image to show using rectangles. But I'm starting to think that maybe I should've used the Animation API that comes with android instead. Will this effect my performance in a negative way? Can I still use rectangles to draw my bitmap? Could I add effects from the Animation API to my current frame-controlled animation? like the fadeout-effect etc? this would mean I wont have to change my current code. I want some of my animations to fade out, and just noticed that using the Animation API makes things alot easier. But needless to say, I would prefer not having to change all my animation-code. I'm bad at explaining, so Ill show a bit of how I do my animation: private static final int BMP_ROWS = 1; //I use top-view so only need my sprite to have 1 direction private static final int BMP_COLUMNS = 3; public void update(GameControls controls) { if (sprite.isMoving) { currentFrame = ++currentFrame % BMP_COLUMNS; } else { this.setFrame(1); } } public void draw(Canvas canvas, int x, int y, float angle) { this.x=x; this.y=y; canvas.save(); canvas.rotate(angle , x + width / 2, y + height / 2); int srcX = currentFrame * width; int srcY = 0 * height; Rect src = new Rect(srcX, srcY, srcX + width, srcY + height); Rect dst = new Rect(x, y, x + width, y + height); canvas.drawBitmap(bitmap, src, dst, null); canvas.restore(); }

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  • Creating models in 3ds max and exporting as .x for XNA

    - by Sweta Dwivedi
    I have created a few models in 3DS max which contains textures, geometry and animations . .however .fbx doesnt really support textures.. So im planning to use .x format.. I have seen a few converters in pandasoft but once i unzip the file and place the .dle file in the plugins folder of 3D max gives an error saying failed to initialize.. Is there any way to convert my .max models into .x format ? ? I dont know blender so that isnt an option. . I'm currently using 3ds max 2013 After adding the .3DS object content importer. . i get the following error:

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  • How to determine the end of list has been reached?

    - by Sweta Dwivedi
    I'm trying to animate my object according to a set of recorded values from kinect skeleton stream by saving the (x,y,z) stream from the skeletal data into a list and then set my objects x and y position from the x,y of the list. However, once the list end has been reached it starts to animate again from the start. I don't want that - I just want the model position to keep going in the positive X direction. Is there any way I can check if end of the list has been reached and to just update the model position in x direction? Or is there any other way to continue moving my sprite once the points in the list are over... i dont want it to start animating all the way again.. protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { //position += spriteSpeed * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; //// TODO: Add your update logic here using (StreamReader r = new StreamReader(f)) { string line; Viewport view = graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport; int maxWidth = view.Width; int maxHeight = view.Height; while((line = r.ReadLine()) != null) { string[] temp = line.Split(','); int x = (int) Math.Floor(((float.Parse(temp[0]) * 0.5f) + 0.5f) * maxWidth); int y = (int) Math.Floor(((float.Parse(temp[1]) * -0.5f) + 0.5f) * maxHeight); motion_2.Add(new Point(x, y)); } } position.X = motion_2[i].X; position.Y = motion_2[i].Y; i++; a_butterfly_up.Update(gameTime); a_butterfly_side.Update(gameTime); G_vidPlayer.Play(mossV); base.Update(gameTime); }

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  • How can I implement an Iris Wipe effect?

    - by Vandell
    For those who doesn't know: An iris wipe is a wipe that takes the shape of a growing or shrinking circle. It has been frequently used in animated short subjects, such as those in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon series, to signify the end of a story. When used in this manner, the iris wipe may be centered around a certain focal point and may be used as a device for a "parting shot" joke, a fourth wall-breaching wink by a character, or other purposes. Example from flasheff.com Your answer may or may not include a coding sample, a language agnostic explanation is considered enough.

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  • GLSL Shader Effects: How to do motion blur, etc?

    - by DevilWithin
    I am not sure how right it is to ask this question, but still here it goes. I have a full 2D environment, with sprites going around as landscape, characters, etc And to make it more state-of-art looking, i want to implement a motion blur effect, similar to modern FPS's (i.e. crysis) blur when moving fast the camera. In a sidescroller, the desired effect is having this slight blur appearing to give the idea of fast movement, when the camera is moving. If anyone could give me some tips on doing this, im assuming in a pixel shader, i'd be grate. Also, if anyone has other good tips on cool pixel shader effects for 2D games it would be awesome, like some stylizing post fx, such as previous Prince of Persia illustrative style. Thanks

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  • How do I generate a level randomly?

    - by Charlton Santana
    I am currently hard coding 10 different instances like the code below, but but I'd like to create many more. Instead of having the same layout for the new level, I was wondering if there is anyway to generate a random X value for each block (this will be how far into the level it is). A level 100,000 pixels wide would be good enough but if anyone knows a system to make the level go on and on, I'd like to know that too. This is basically how I define a block now (with irrelevant code removed): block = new Block(R.drawable.block, 400, platformheight); block2 = new Block(R.drawable.block, 600, platformheight); block3 = new Block(R.drawable.block, 750, platformheight); The 400 is the X position, which I'd like to place randomly through the level, the platformheight variable defines the Y position which I don't want to change.

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  • How to visually "connect" skybox edges with terrain model

    - by David
    I'm working on a simple airplane game where I use skybox cube rendered using disabled depth test. Very close to the bottom side of the skybox is my terrain model. What bothers me is that the terrain is not connected to the skybox bottom. This is not visible while the plane flies low, but as it gets some altitude, the terrain looks smaller because of the perspective. Since the skybox center is always same as the camera position, the skybox moves with the plane, but the terrain goes into the distance. Ok, I think you understand the problem. My question is how to fix it. It's an airplane game so limiting max altitude is not possible. I thought about some way to stretch terrain to always cover whole bottom side of the skybox cube, but that doesn't feel right and I don't even know how would I calculate new terrain dimensions every frame. Here are some screenshot of games where you can clearly see the problem: (oops, I cannot post images yet) darker brown is the skybox bottom here: http://i.stack.imgur.com/iMsAf.png untextured brown is the skybox bottom here: http://i.stack.imgur.com/9oZr7.png

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  • 2D animations frames vs 3D animation for small indie project: timing considerations

    - by mm24
    pretty lame question but was wondering.. I am developing a 2D game using Cocos2D for iOS. The art work till now is all 2D (is a shooter game) but some of the characters would benefit of complex animations (eg. 20 frames). I feel a bit stupid because I came across only now that there is the chance to do 3D to 2D frames exporting and then to use them in Cocos2D. The thing that put me off on 3D gaming at first was that it takes more than one person in a team to do so properly (Illustrator, 3D modeller, 3D animator and programmer). Now I feel a bit stupid because having a 3D model I could do and modify the poses whenever I wanted (I should ask to the 3D animator which I guess would be time expensive). Instead now is me and two illustrators (as I require many frames per character). Is my impression that it would have been much longer right or not? Are there any other project management considerations that can be done on this? Sorry if for some this might be trivial but is my first "indie game developer experience".

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  • dynamic 2d texture creation in unity from script

    - by gman
    I'm coming from HTML5 and I'm used to having the 2D Canvas API I can use to generate textures. Is there anything similar in Unity3D? For example, let's say at runtime I want to render a circle, put 3 initials in the middle and then take the result and put that in a texture. In HTML5 I'd do this var initials = "GAT"; var textureWidth = 256; var textureHeight = 256; // create a canvas var c = document.createElement("canvas"); c.width = textureWidth; c.height = textureHeight; var ctx = c.getContext("2d"); // Set the origin to the center of the canvas ctx.translate(textureWidth / 2, textureHeight / 2); // Draw a yellow circle ctx.fillStyle = "rgb(255,255,0)"; // yellow ctx.beginPath(); var radius = (Math.min(textureWidth, textureHeight) - 2) / 2; ctx.arc(0, 0, radius, 0, Math.PI * 2, true); ctx.fill(); // Draw some black initials in the middle. ctx.fillStyle = "rgb(0,0,0)"; ctx.font = "60pt Arial"; ctx.textAlign = "center"; ctx.fillText(initials, 0, 30); // now I can make a texture from that var tex = gl.createTexture(); gl.bindTexture(gl.TEXTURE_2D, tex); gl.texImage2D(gl.TEXTURE_2D, 0, gl.RGBA, gl.RGBA, gl.UNSIGNED_BYTE, c); gl.generateMipmap(gl.TEXTURE_2D); I know I can edit individual pixels in a Unity texture but is there any higher level API for drawing to texture in unity?

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  • How AlphaBlend Blendstate works in XNA 4 when accumulighting light into a RenderTarget?

    - by cubrman
    I am using a Deferred Rendering engine from Catalin Zima's tutorial: His lighting shader returns the color of the light in the rgb channels and the specular component in the alpha channel. Here is how light gets accumulated: Game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(LightRT); Game.GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Transparent); Game.GraphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.AlphaBlend; // Continuously draw 3d spheres with lighting pixel shader. ... Game.GraphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque; MSDN states that AlphaBlend field of the BlendState class uses the next formula for alphablending: (source × Blend.SourceAlpha) + (destination × Blend.InvSourceAlpha), where "source" is the color of the pixel returned by the shader and "destination" is the color of the pixel in the rendertarget. My question is why do my colors are accumulated correctly in the Light rendertarget even when the new pixels' alphas equal zero? As a quick sanity check I ran the following code in the light's pixel shader: float specularLight = 0; float4 light4 = attenuation * lightIntensity * float4(diffuseLight.rgb,specularLight); if (light4.a == 0) light4 = 0; return light4; This prevents lighting from getting accumulated and, subsequently, drawn on the screen. But when I do the following: float specularLight = 0; float4 light4 = attenuation * lightIntensity * float4(diffuseLight.rgb,specularLight); return light4; The light is accumulated and drawn exactly where it needs to be. What am I missing? According to the formula above: (source x 0) + (destination x 1) should equal destination, so the "LightRT" rendertarget must not change when I draw light spheres into it! It feels like the GPU is using the Additive blend instead: (source × Blend.One) + (destination × Blend.One)

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  • Split a 2D scene in layers or have a z coordinate

    - by Bane
    I am in the process of writing a 2D game engine, and a dilemma emerged. Let me explain the situation... I have a Scene class, to which various objects can be added (Drawable, ParticleEmitter, Light2D, etc), and as this is a 2D scene, things will obviously be drawn over each other. My first thought was that I could have basic add and remove methods, but I soon realized that then there would be no way for the programmer to control the order in which things were drawn. So I can up with two options, each with its pros and cons. A) Would be to split the scene in layers. By that I mean instead of having the scene be a container of objects, have it be a container of layers, which are in turn the containers of objects. B) Would require to have some kind of z-coordinate, and then have the scene sorted so objects with lower z get drawn first. Option A is pretty solid, but the problem is with the lights. In what layer do I add it? Does it work cross-layer? On all bottom layers? And I still need the Z coordinate to calculate the shadow! Option B would require me to change all my code from having Vector2D positions, to some kind of class that inherits from Vector2D and adds a z coordinate to it (I don't want it to be a Vector3D because I still need all the same methods the 2D kind has, just with .z clamped on). Am I missing something? Is there an alternative to these methods? I'm working in Javascript, if that makes a difference.

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  • How can player actions be "judged morally" in a measurable way?

    - by Sebastien Diot
    While measuring the player "skills" and "effort" is usually easy, adding some "less objective" statistics can give the player supplementary goals, especially in a MUD/RPG context. What I mean is that apart from counting how many orcs were killed, and gems collected, it would be interesting to have something along the line of the traditional Good/Evil, Lawful/Chaotic ranking of paper-based RPG, to add "dimension" to the game. But computers cannot differentiate good/evil effectively (nor can humans in many cases), and if you have a set of "laws" which are precise enough that you can tell exactly when the player breaks them, then it generally makes more sense to actually prevent them from doing that action in the first place. One example could be the creation/destruction axis (if players are at all allowed to create/build things), possibly in the form of the general effect of the player actions on "ecology". So what else is there left that can be effectively measured and would provide a sense of "moral" for the player? The more axis I have to measure, the more goals the player can have, and therefore the longer the game can last. This also gives the players more ways of "differentiating" themselves among hordes of other players of the same "class" and similar "kit".

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  • Static "LoD" hack opinions

    - by David Lively
    I've been playing with implementing dynamic level of detail for rendering a very large mesh in XNA. It occurred to me that (duh) the whole point of this is to generate small triangles close to the camera, and larger ones far away. Given that, rather than constantly modifying or swapping index buffers based on a feature's rendered size or distance from the camera, it would be a lot easier (and potentially quite a bit faster), to render a single "fan" or flat wedge/frustum-shaped planar mesh that is tessellated into small triangles close to the near or small end of the frustum and larger ones at the far end, sort of like this (overhead view) (Pardon the gap in the middle - I drew one side and mirrored it) The triangle sizes are chosen so that all are approximately the same size when projected. Then, that mesh would be transformed to track the camera so that the Z axis (center vertical in this image) is always aligned with the view direction projected into the XZ plane. The vertex shader would then read terrain heights from a height texture and adjust the Y coordinate of the mesh to match a height field that defines the terrain. This eliminates the need for culling (since the mesh is generated to match the viewport dimensions) and the need to modify the index and/or vertex buffers when drawing the terrain. Obviously this doesn't address terrain with overhangs, etc, but that could be handled to a certain extent by including a second mesh that defines a sort of "ceiling" via a different texture. The other LoD schemes I've seen aren't particularly difficult to implement and, in some cases, are a lot more flexible, but this seemed like a decent quick-and-dirty way to handle height map-based terrain without getting into geometry manipulation. Has anyone tried this? Opinions?

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  • How can I make the camera return to the beginning of the terrain when it reaches the end?

    - by wbaccari
    How can I make the camera return to the beginning of the terrain when it reaches the end? I tried using the ICameraSceneNode*-setPosition(). if (camera->getPosition().X>1200.f) camera->setPosition(vector3df(1.f,1550.f,camera->getPosition().Z)); if (camera->getPosition().X<0.f) camera->setPosition(vector3df(1199.f,1550.f,camera->getPosition().Z)); if (camera->getPosition().Z>1200.f) camera->setPosition(vector3df(camera->getPosition().X,1550.f,1.f)); if (camera->getPosition().Z<0.f) camera->setPosition(vector3df(camera->getPosition().X,1550.f,1199.f)); It seems to work fine with a flat terrain (one shade of grey in heightmap) but it starts to produce a strange behavior as soon as i try to add some hills. Edit: The setPosition() call seems to perform a translation of the camera toward the new position, therefore the camera stops at the first obstacle it encounters on its way.

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  • Huge procedurally generated 'wilderness' worlds

    - by The Communist Duck
    I'm sure you all know of games like Dwarf Fortress - massive, procedural generated wilderness and land. Something like this, taken from this very useful article. However, I was wondering how I could apply this to a much larger scale; the scale of Minecraft comes to mind (isn't that something like 8x the size of the Earth's surface?). Pseudo-infinite, I think the best term would be. The article talks about fractal perlin noise. I am no way an expert on it, but I get the general idea (it's some kind of randomly generated noise which is semi-coherent, so not just random pixel values). I could just define regions X by X in size, add some region loading type stuff, and have one bit of noise generating a region. But this would result in just huge amounts of islands. On the other extreme, I don't think I can really generate a supermassive sheet of perlin noise. And it would just be one big island, I think. I am pretty sure Perlin noise, or some noise, would be the answer in some way. I mean, the map is really nice looking. And you could replace the ascii with tiles, and get something very nice looking. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks. :D

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