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  • Transformation matrix that maps a window

    - by gbhall
    I'm currently learning OpenGL at uni, and they give us questions to help us learn (these are not worth anything), however I'm stuck on this one question and would have to travel over an hour and a half to uni for an answer. How do I do this question? Please include as many steps as you can, I want to be able to follow exactly how to do this. Find the transformation that maps a window whose lower left corner is at (1,1) and upper right corner is at (3,5) onto: The entire device screen whose dimension is (600, 500) A viewport that has lower left corner at (100,100) and upper right corner at (400,400) Edit: Damn sorry I should have added I am meant to find the matrix, so no code.

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  • Drawing text from update method in XNA

    - by Sigh-AniDe
    I am having a problem drawing the "Game Over!" text once the user is on the last tile. This is what I have: The Update and drawText methods are in a class named turtle: public void Update(float scalingFactor, int[,] map, SpriteBatch batch, SpriteFont font) { if (isMovable(mapX, mapY - 1, map)) { position.Y = position.Y - (int)scalingFactor; angle = 0.0f; Program.form.direction = ""; if (mapX == 17 && mapY == 1)// This is the last tile(Tested) { Program.form.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red; drawText(batch, font); } } } public void drawText(SpriteBatch spritebatch, SpriteFont spriteFont) { textPosition.X = 200; // a vector2 textPosition.Y = 200; spritebatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.BackToFront, BlendState.AlphaBlend); spritebatch.DrawString(spriteFont, "Game Over!!!", textPosition, Color.Red); spritebatch.End(); } This update is in the Game1 class: protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); turtle.Update(scalingFactor, map, spriteBatch, font); base.Update(gameTime); } I have also added the font content to LoadContent: font = Content.Load<SpriteFont>("fontType"); What am I doing wrong? Why does the text not want to show on game completion? If I call the turtle.draw() in the main Draw method. The "Game Over" text stays on screen from the beggining. What am I missing? Thanks

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  • What's the difference between Canvas and WebGL?

    - by gadr90
    I'm thinking about using CAAT as a part of a HTML5 game engine. One of it's features is the ability to render to Canvas and WebGL without changing anything in the client code. That is a good thing, but I haven't found precisely: what are the differences between those two technologies? I would specially like to know the differences of Canvas and WebGL in the following regards: Framerate Desktop browser support Mobile browser support Futureproofability (TM)

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  • What are the maths behind 'Raiden 2' purple laser?

    - by Aybe
    The path of the laser is affected by user input and enemies present on the screen. Here is a video, at 5:00 minutes the laser in question is shown : Raiden II (PS) - 1 Loop Clear - Part 2 UPDATE Here is a test using Inkscape, ship is at bottom, the first 4 enemies are targeted by the plasma. There seems to be a sort of pattern. I moved the ship first, then the handle from it to form a 45° angle, then while trying to fit the curve I found a pattern of parallel handles and continued so until I reached the last enemy. Update, 5/26/2012 : I started an XNA project using beziers, there is still some work needed, will update the question next week. Stay tuned ! Update : 5/30/2012 : It really seems that they are using Bézier curves, I think I will be able to replicate/imitate a plasma of such grade. There are two new topics I discovered since last time : Arc length, Runge's phenomenon, first one should help in having a linear movement possible over a Bézier curve, second should help in optimizing the number of vertices. Next time I will put a video so you can see the progress 8-)

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  • Grid pathfinding with a lot of entities

    - by Vee
    I'd like to explain this problem with a screenshot from a released game, DROD: Gunthro's Epic Blunder, by Caravel Games. The game is turn-based and tile-based. I'm trying to create something very similar (a clone of the game), and I've got most of the fundamentals done, but I'm having trouble implementing pathfinding. Look at the screenshot. The guys in yellow are friendly, and want to kill the roaches. Every turn, every guy in yellow pathfinds to the closest roach, and every roach pathfinds to the closest guy in yellow. By closest I mean the target with the shortest path, not a simple distance calculation. All of this without any kind of slowdown when loading the level or when passing turns. And all of the entities change position every turn. Also (not shown in screenshot), there can be doors that open and close and change the level's layout. Impressive. I've tried implementing pathfinding in my clone. First attempt was making every roach find a path to a yellow guy every turn, using a breadth-first search algorithm. Obviously incredibly slow with more than a single roach, and would get exponentially slower with more than a single yellow guy. Second attempt was mas making every yellow guy generate a pathmap (still breadth-first search) every time he moved. Worked perfectly with multiple roaches and a single yellow guy, but adding more yellow guys made the game slow and unplayable. Last attempt was implementing JPS (jump point search). Every entity would individually calculate a path to its target. Fast, but with a limited number of entities. Having less than half the entities in the screenshot would make the game slow. And also, I had to get the "closest" enemy by calculating distance, not shortest path. I've asked on the DROD forums how they did it, and a user replied that it was breadth-first search. The game is open source, and I took a look at the source code, but it's C++ (I'm using C#) and I found it confusing. I don't know how to do it. Every approach I tried isn't good enough. And I believe that DROD generates global pathmaps, somehow, but I can't understand how every entity find the best individual path to other entities that move every turn. What's the trick? This is a reply I just got on the DROD forums: Without having looked at the code I'd wager it's two (or so) pathmaps for the whole room: One to the nearest enemy, and one to the nearest friendly for every tile. There's no need to make a separate pathmap for every entity when the overall goal is "move towards nearest enemy/friendly"... just mark every tile with the number of moves it takes to the nearest target and have the entity chose the move that takes it to the tile with the lowest number. To be honest, I don't understand it that well.

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  • How does flash store (represent) movieclips and sprites?

    - by humbleBee
    When we draw any object in flash and convert it into a movieclip or a sprite, how is it stored or represented in flash. I know in vector art it is stored or represented as line segments using formulae. Is there any way to get the vertices of the shape that was drawn? For example, lets say a simple rectangle is drawn and is converted to a movieclip. Is there anyway to obtain the vertices and the line segments from the sprite? So that its shape is obtained. Enough information should be obtained so that the shape can be replicated. That's the key - replication. In simple terms, where does flash store information about a shape that has been drawn so that we can obtain it and attempt to replicate the shape ourselves?

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  • How To Smoothly Animate From One Camera Position To Another

    - by www.Sillitoy.com
    The Question is basically self explanatory. I have a scene with many cameras and I'd like to smoothly switch from one to another. I am not looking for a cross fade effect but more to a camera moving and rotating the view in order to reach the next camera point of view and so on. To this end I have tried the following code: firstCamera.transform.position.x = Mathf.Lerp(firstCamera.transform.position.x, nextCamer.transform.position.x,Time.deltaTime*smooth); firstCamera.transform.position.y = Mathf.Lerp(firstCamera.transform.position.y, nextCamera.transform.position.y,Time.deltaTime*smooth); firstCamera.transform.position.z = Mathf.Lerp(firstCamera.transform.position.z, nextCamera.transform.position.z,Time.deltaTime*smooth); firstCamera.transform.rotation.x = Mathf.Lerp(firstCamera.transform.rotation.x, nextCamera.transform.rotation.x,Time.deltaTime*smooth); firstCamera.transform.rotation.z = Mathf.Lerp(firstCamera.transform.rotation.z, nextCamera.transform.rotation.z,Time.deltaTime*smooth); firstCamera.transform.rotation.y = Mathf.Lerp(firstCamera.transform.rotation.y, nextCamera.transform.rotation.y,Time.deltaTime*smooth); But the result is actually not that good.

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  • Seek Steering Behavior with Target Direction for Group of Fighters

    - by SebastianStehle
    I am implementing steering algorithms with group management for spaceships (fighters). I select a leader and assign the target positions for the other spaceships based on the target position of the leader and an offset. This works well. But when my spaceships arrive they all have a different direction. I want them to keep to look in the same direction (target - start). I also want to combine this behavior with a minimum turning radius that is based on the speed. The only idea I have is to calculate a path for each spaceship with an point before the target position, so the ships have some time left to turn into the right position. But I dont know if this is a good idea. I guess there will be a lot of rare cases where this can cause a problem. So the question is, if anybody knows how to solve this problem and has some (simple code) or pseudocode for me or at least some good explanation.

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  • Coarse Collision Detection in highly dynamic environment

    - by Millianz
    I'm currently working a 3D space game with A LOT of dynamic objects that are all moving (there is pretty much no static environment). I have the collision detection and resolution working just fine, but I am now trying to optimize the collision detection (which is currently O(N^2) -- linear search). I thought about multiple options, a bounding volume hierarchy, a Binary Spatial Partitioning tree, an Octree or a Grid. I however need some help with deciding what's best for my situation. A grid seems unfeasible simply due to the space requirements and cache coherence problems. Since everything is so dynamic however, it seems to be that trees aren't ideal either, since they would have to be completely rebuilt every frame. I must admit I never implemented a physics engine that required spatial partitioning, do I indeed need to rebuild the tree every frame (assuming that everything is constantly moving) or can I update the trees after integrating? Advice is much appreciated - to give some more background: You're flying a space ship in an asteroid field, and there are lots and lots of asteroids and some enemy ships, all of which shoot bullets. EDIT: I came across the "Sweep an Prune" algorithm, which seems like the right thing for my purposes. It appears like the right mixture of fast building of the data structures involved and detailed enough partitioning. This is the best resource I can find: http://www.codercorner.com/SAP.pdf If anyone has any suggestions whether or not I'm going in the right direction, please let me know.

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  • Mesh with quads to triangle mesh

    - by scape
    I want to use Blender for making models yet realize some of the polygons are not triangles but contain quads or more (example: cylinder top and bottom). I could export the the mesh as a basic mesh file and import it in to an openGL application and workout rendering the quads as tris, but anything with more than 4 vert indices is beyond me. Is it typical to convert the mesh to a triangle-based mesh inside blender before exporting it? I actually tried this through the quads_convert_to_tris method within a blender py script and the top of the cylinder does not look symmetrical. What is typically done to render a loaded mesh as a tri?

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  • Better way to generate enemies of different sub-classes

    - by KDiTraglia
    So lets pretend I have an enemy class that has some generic implementation and inheriting from it I have all the specific enemies of my game. There are points in my code that I need to check whether an enemy is a specific type, but in Java I have found no easier way than this monstrosity... //Must be a better way to do this if ( enemy.class.isAssignableFrom(Ninja.class) ) { ... } My partner on the project saw these and changed them to use an enum system instead public class Ninja extends Enemy { //EnemyType is an enum containing all our enemy types public EnemyType = EnemyTypes.NINJA; } if (enemy.EnemyType = EnemyTypes.NINJA) { ... } I also have found no way to generate enemies on varying probabilities besides this for (EnemyTypes types : enemyTypes) { if ( (randomNext = (randomNext - types.getFrequency())) < 0 ) { enemy = createEnemy(types.getEnemyType()); break; } } private static Enemy createEnemy(EnemyType type) { switch (type) { case NINJA: return new Ninja(new Vector2D(rand.nextInt(getScreenWidth()), 0), determineSpeed()); case GORILLA: return new Gorilla(new Vector2D(rand.nextInt(getScreenWidth()), 0), determineSpeed()); case TREX: return new TRex(new Vector2D(rand.nextInt(getScreenWidth()), 0), determineSpeed()); //etc } return null } I know java is a little weak at dynamic object creation, but is there a better way to implement this in a way such like this for (EnemyTypes types : enemyTypes) { if ( (randomNext = (randomNext - types.getFrequency())) < 0 ) { //Change enemyTypes to hold the classes of the enemies I can spawn enemy = types.getEnemyType().class.newInstance() break; } } Is the above possible? How would I declare enemyTypes to hold the classes if so? Everything I have tried so far as generated compile errors and general frustration, but I figured I might ask here before I completely give up to the huge mass that is the createEveryEnemy() method. All the enemies do inherit from the Enemy class (which is what the enemy variable is declared as). Also is there a better way to check which type a particular enemy that is shorter than enemy.class.isAssignableFrom(Ninja.class)? I'd like to ditch the enums entirely if possible, since they seem repetitive when the class name itself holds that information.

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  • How do I apply skeletal animation from a .x (Direct X) file?

    - by Byte56
    Using the .x format to export a model from Blender, I can load a mesh, armature and animation. I have no problems generating the mesh and viewing models in game. Additionally, I have animations and the armature properly loaded into appropriate data structures. My problem is properly applying the animation to the models. I have the framework for applying the models and the code for selecting animations and stepping through frames. From what I understand, the AnimationKeys inside the AnimationSet supplies the transformations to transform the bind pose to the pose in the animated frame. As small example: Animation { {Armature_001_Bone} AnimationKey { 2; //Position 121; //number of frames 0;3; 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000;;, 1;3; 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.005524;;, 2;3; 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.022217;;, ... } AnimationKey { 0; //Quaternion Rotation 121; 0;4; -0.707107, 0.707107, 0.000000, 0.000000;;, 1;4; -0.697332, 0.697332, 0.015710, 0.015710;;, 2;4; -0.684805, 0.684805, 0.035442, 0.035442;;, ... } AnimationKey { 1; //Scale 121; 0;3; 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000;;, 1;3; 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000;;, 2;3; 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000;;, ... } } So, to apply frame 2, I would take the position, rotation and scale from frame 2, create a transformation matrix (call it Transform_A) from them and apply that matrix the vertices controlled by Armature_001_Bone at their weights. So I'd stuff TransformA into my shader and transform the vertex. Something like: vertexPos = vertexPos * bones[ int(bfs_BoneIndices.x) ] * bfs_BoneWeights.x; Where bfs_BoneIndices and bfs_BoneWeights are values specific to the current vertex. When loading in the mesh vertices, I transform them by the rootTransform and the meshTransform. This ensures they're oriented and scaled correctly for viewing the bind pose. The problem is when I create that transformation matrix (using the position, rotation and scale from the animation), it doesn't properly transform the vertex. There's likely more to it than just using the animation data. I also tried applying the bone transform hierarchies, still no dice. Basically I end up with some twisted models. It should also be noted that I'm working in openGL, so any matrix transposes that might need to be applied should be considered. What data do I need and how do I combine it for applying .x animations to models?

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  • 2D XNA C#: Texture2D Wrapping Issue

    - by Kieran
    Working in C#/XNA for a Windows game: I'm using Texture2D to draw sprites. All of my sprites are 16 x 32. The sprites move around the screen as you would expect, by changing the top X/Y position of them when they're being drawn by the spritebatch. Most of the time when I run the game, the sprites appear like this: and when moved, they move as I expect, as one element. Infrequently they appear like this: and when moved it's like there are two sprites with a gap in between them - it's hard to describe. It only seems to happen sometimes - is there something I'm missing? I'd really like to know why this is happening. [Edit:] Adding Draw code as requested: This is the main draw routine - it first draws the sprite to a RenderTarget then blows it up by a scale of 4: protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { // Draw to render target GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget); GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); Texture2D imSprite = null; spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.FrontToBack, null, SamplerState.PointWrap, null, null); ManSprite.Draw(spriteBatch); base.Draw(gameTime); spriteBatch.End(); // Draw render target to screen GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); imageFrame = (Texture2D)renderTarget; GraphicsDevice.Clear(ClearOptions.Target | ClearOptions.DepthBuffer, Color.DarkSlateBlue, 1.0f, 0); spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.FrontToBack, null, SamplerState.PointClamp, null, null); spriteBatch.Draw(imageFrame, new Vector2(0, 0), null, Color.White, 0, new Vector2(0, 0), IM_SCALE, SpriteEffects.None, 0); spriteBatch.End(); } This is the draw routine for the Sprite class: public virtual void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { spriteBatch.Draw(Texture, new Vector2(PositionX, PositionY), null, Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, Scale, SpriteEffects.None, 0.3f); }

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  • Sprites, Primitives and logic entity as structs

    - by Jeffrey
    I'm wondering would it be considered acceptable: The window class is responsible for drawing data, so it will have a method: Window::draw(const Sprite&); Window::draw(const Rect&); Window::draw(const Triangle&); Window::draw(const Circle&); and all those primitives + sprites would be just public struct. For example Sprite: struct Sprite { float x, y; // center float origin_x, origin_y; float width, height; float rotation; float scaling; GLuint texture; Sprite(float w, float h); Sprite(float w, float h, float a, float b); void useTexture(std::string file); void setOrigin(float a, float b); void move(float a, float b); // relative move void moveTo(float a, float b); // absolute move void rotate(float a); // relative rotation void rotateTo(float a); // absolute rotation void rotationReset(); void scale(float a); // relative scaling void scaleTo(float a); // absolute scaling void scaleReset(); }; So instead of having each primitive to call their draw() function, which is a little bit off topic for their object, I let the Window class handle all the OpenGL stuff and manipulate them as simple objects that will be drawn later on. Is this pattern used? Does it have any cons against it's primitives-draw-themself pattern? Are there any other related patterns?

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  • New way of integrating Openfeint in Cocos2d-x 0.12.0

    - by Ef Es
    I am trying to implement OpenFeint for Android in my cocos2d-x project. My approach so far has been creating a button that calls a static java method in class Bridge using jnihelper functions (jnihelper only accepts statics). Bridge has one singleton attribute of type OFAndroid, that is the class dynamically calling the Openfeint Api methods, and every method in the bridge just forwards it to the OFAndroid object. What I am trying to do now is to initialize the openfeint libraries in the main java class that is the one calling the static C++ libraries. My problem right now is that the initializing function void com.openfeint.api.OpenFeint.initialize(Context ctx, OpenFeintSettings settings, OpenFeintDelegate delegate) is not accepting the context parameter that I am giving him, which is a "this" reference to the main class. Main class extends from Cocos2dxActivity but I don't have any other that extends from Application. Any suggestions on fixing it or how to improve the architecture? EDIT: I am trying a new solution. Make the bridge class into an Application child, is called from Main object, initializes OpenFeint when created and it can call the OpenFeint functions instead of needing an additional class. The problem is I still get the error. 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at android.content.ContextWrapper.getPackageManager(ContextWrapper.java:85) 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at com.openfeint.internal.OpenFeintInternal.validateManifest(OpenFeintInternal.java:885) 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at com.openfeint.internal.OpenFeintInternal.initializeWithoutLoggingIn(OpenFeintInternal.java:829) 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at com.openfeint.internal.OpenFeintInternal.initialize(OpenFeintInternal.java:852) 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at com.openfeint.api.OpenFeint.initialize(OpenFeint.java:47) 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at nurogames.fastfish.NuroFeint.onCreate(NuroFeint.java:23) 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at nurogames.fastfish.FastFish.onCreate(FastFish.java:47) 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1069) 03-30 14:39:22.661: E/AndroidRuntime(9029): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2751)

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  • Sounds to describe the weather?

    - by Matthew
    I'm trying to think of sounds that will help convey the time of day and weather condition. I'm not even sure of all the weather conditions I would consider, and some are obvious. Like if it's raining, the sound of rain. But then I'm thinking, what about for a calm day? If it's morning time, I could do birds chirping or something. Night time could be an owl or something. What are some good combinations of sounds/weather/time to have a good effect?

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  • Orthographic unit translation mismatch on grid (e.g. 64 pixels translates incorrectly)

    - by Justin Van Horne
    I am looking for some insight into a small problem with unit translations on a grid. Setup 512x448 window 64x64 grid gl_Position = projection * world * position; projection is defined by ortho(-w/2.0f, w/2.0f, -h/2.0f, h/2.0f); This is a textbook orthogonal projection function. world is defined by a fixed camera position at (0, 0) position is defined by the sprite's position. Problem In the screenshot below (1:1 scaling) the grid spacing is 64x64 and I am drawing the unit at (64, 64), however the unit draws roughly ~10px in the wrong position. I've tried uniform window dimensions to prevent any distortion on the pixel size, but now I am a bit lost in the proper way in providing a 1:1 pixel-to-world-unit projection. Anyhow, here are some quick images to aide in the problem. I decided to super-impose a bunch of the sprites at what the engine believes is 64x offsets. When this seemed off place, I went about and did the base case of 1 unit. Which seemed to line up as expected. The yellow shows a 1px difference in the movement. Vertices It would appear that the vertices going into the vertex shader are correct. For example, in reference to the first image the data looks like this in the VBO: x y x y ---------------------------- tl | 0.0 24.0 64.0 24.0 bl | 0.0 0.0 -> 64.0 0.0 tr | 16.0 0.0 80.0 0.0 br | 16.0 24.0 80.0 24.0 With that said, all I am left to believe is that I am munging up my actual projection. So, I am looking for any insight into maintaining the 1:1 pixel-to-world-unit projection.

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  • UDK ParticleSystem Problem

    - by EmAdpres
    I use below code to create my particles ( in fact, I don't know any other way.) spawnedParticleComponents = WorldInfo.MyEmitterPool.SpawnEmitter(ParticleSystem'ParticleName', Location, Rotator ); spawnedParticleComponents.setTranslation(newLocation); ... And unfortunately, I spawn many particles in game. When I play my game, after some time, I see Exceeded max active pooled emitters! Warning in console . To solve the problem, first, I tried spawnedParticleComponents.DeactivateSystem();, But it doesn't help. Then I try WorldInfo.MyEmitterPool.ClearPoolComponents(false);, But it doesn't either . :( How can I destroy many spawned particles and avoid this warning ?

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  • When does depth testing happen?

    - by Utkarsh Sinha
    I'm working with 2D sprites - and I want to do 3D style depth testing with them. When writing a pixel shader for them, I get access to the semantic DEPTH0. Would writing to this value help? It seems it doesn't. Maybe it's done before the pixel shader step? Or is depth testing only done when drawing 3D things (I'm using SpriteBatch)? Any links/articles/topics to read/search for would be appreciated.

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  • Unable to create xcode project again from unity

    - by Engr Anum
    I am using unity 4.5.3. I already created/built xcode project from unity. However, there were some strange linking errors I was unable to solve, so I decided to delete my xcode project and rebuilt it again from unity. Unfortunately, whenever I try to build the project, just empty project folder is created. There is nothing inside it. I don't know why it is happening. Please tell me how can I create xcode project again. May be I am missing small thing. Thanks.

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  • Pack of resources in one big file with XNA

    - by Cristian
    Is it possible to pack all the little .xnb files into one big file? Given the level of abstraction of the XNA Framework I though this would come out of the box but I can't find any well integrated solution. So far the best candidate is XnaZip but in addition to having to compile the resources in a post-build event, and a little trouble porting the game to XBOX I have to rename all the references to resources I have already implemented.

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  • Balancing game difficulty against player progression

    - by Raven Dreamer
    It seems that the current climate of games seems to cater to an obvious progression of player power, whether that means getting a bigger, more explosive gun in Halo, leveling up in an RPG, or unlocking new options in Command and Conquer 4. Yet this concept is not exclusive to video or computer games -- even in Dungeons and Dragons players can strive to acquire a +2 sword to replace the +1 weapon they've been using. Yet as a systems designer, the concept of player progression is giving me headache after headache. Should I balance around the players exact capabilities and give up on a simple linear progression? (I think ESIV:Oblivion is a good example of this) Is it better to throw the players into an "arms race" with their opponents, where if the players don't progress in an orderly manner, it is only a matter of time until gameplay is unbearably difficult? (4th Edition DnD strikes me as a good example of this) Perhaps it would make most sense to untether the core gameplay mechanics from progression at all -- give them flashier, more interesting (but not more powerful!) ways to grow?

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  • How do game engines implement certain features?

    - by Milo
    I have always wondered how modern game engines do things such as realistic water, ambient occluded lighting, eye adaptation, global illumination, etc. I'm not so much interested in the implementation details, but more on what part of the graphics API such as D3D or OpenGL allow adding such functionality. The only thing I can think of is shaders, but I do not think just shaders can do all that. So really what I'm asking is, what functions or capabilities of graphics APIs enable developers to implement these types of features into their engines? Thanks

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  • Will a polled event system cause lag for a server?

    - by Milo
    I'm using a library called ENet. It is a reliable UDP library. The way it works is a polled event system like this: ENetEvent event; /* Wait up to 1000 milliseconds for an event. */ while (enet_host_service (client, & event, 1000) > 0) { switch (event.type) { case ENET_EVENT_TYPE_CONNECT: printf ("A new client connected from %x:%u.\n", event.peer -> address.host, event.peer -> address.port); /* Store any relevant client information here. */ event.peer -> data = "Client information"; break; case ENET_EVENT_TYPE_RECEIVE: printf ("A packet of length %u containing %s was received from %s on channel %u.\n", event.packet -> dataLength, event.packet -> data, event.peer -> data, event.channelID); /* Clean up the packet now that we're done using it. */ enet_packet_destroy (event.packet); break; case ENET_EVENT_TYPE_DISCONNECT: printf ("%s disconected.\n", event.peer -> data); /* Reset the peer's client information. */ event.peer -> data = NULL; } } It waits up to 1000 milliseconds for an event. If I'm hosting say 75 event driven card games and a lobby on the same thread as this code, will it cause any problems. If my understanding is correct, the process will simply sleep until there is an event, when there is one, it will process the event then come back here where potentially 5 or so events have queued up since so enet_host_services would return right away and not cause lag. I have been advised not to use multiple threads, will that be alright like this? Thanks

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  • Node.js Lockstep Multiplayer Architecture

    - by Wakaka
    Background I'm using the lockstep model for a multiplayer Node.js/Socket.IO game in a client-server architecture. User input (mouse or keypress) is parsed into commands like 'attack' and 'move' on the client, which are sent to the server and scheduled to be executed on a certain tick. This is in contrast to sending state data to clients, which I don't wish to use due to bandwidth issues. Each tick, the server will send the list of commands on that tick (possibly empty) to each client. The server and all clients will then process the commands and simulate that tick in exactly the same way. With Node.js this is actually quite simple due to possibility of code sharing between server and client. I'll just put the deterministic simulator in the /shared folder which can be run by both server and client. The server simulation is required so that there is an authoritative version of the simulation which clients cannot alter. Problem Now, the game has many entity classes, like Unit, Item, Tree etc. Entities are created in the simulator. However, for each class, it has some methods that are shared and some that are client-specific. For instance, the Unit class has addHp method which is shared. It also has methods like getSprite (gets the image of the entity), isVisible (checks if unit can be seen by the client), onDeathInClient (does a bunch of stuff when it dies only on the client like adding announcements) and isMyUnit (quick function to check if the client owns the unit). Up till now, I have been piling all the client functions into the shared Unit class, and adding a this.game.isServer() check when necessary. For instance, when the unit dies, it will call if (!this.game.isServer()) { this.onDeathInClient(); }. This approach has worked pretty fine so far, in terms of functionality. But as the codebase grew bigger, this style of coding seems a little strange. Firstly, the client code is clearly not shared, and yet is placed under the /shared folder. Secondly, client-specific variables for each entity are also instantiated on the server entity (like unit.sprite) and can run into problems when the server cannot instantiate the variable (it doesn't have Image class like on browsers). So my question is, is there a better way to organize the client code, or is this a common way of doing things for lockstep multiplayer games? I can think of a possible workaround, but it does have its own problems. Possible workaround (with problems) I could use Javascript mixins that are only added when in a browser. Thus, in the /shared/unit.js file in the /shared folder, I would have this code at the end: if (typeof exports !== 'undefined') module.exports = Unit; else mixin(Unit, LocalUnit); Then I would have /client/localunit.js store an object LocalUnit of client-side methods for Unit. Now, I already have a publish-subscribe system in place for events in the simulator. To remove the this.game.isServer() checks, I could publish entity-specific events whenever I want the client to do something. For instance, I would do this.publish('Death') in /shared/unit.js and do this.subscribe('Death', this.onDeathInClient) in /client/localunit.js. But this would make the simulator's event listeners list on the server and the client different. Now if I want to clear all subscribed events only from the shared simulator, I can't. Of course, it is possible to create two event subscription systems - one client-specific and one shared - but now the publish() method would have to do if (!this.game.isServer()) { this.publishOnClient(event); }. All in all, the workaround off the top of my head seems pretty complicated for something as simple as separating the client and shared code. Thus, I wonder if there is an established and simpler method for better code organization, hopefully specific to Node.js games.

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