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• Moving objects colliding when using unalligned collision avoidance (steering)

  - by James Bedford

  I'm having trouble with unaligned collision avoidance for what I think is a rare case. I have set two objects to move towards each other but with a slight offset, so one of the objects is moving slightly upwards, and one of the objects is moving slightly downwards. In my unaligned collision avoidance steering algorithm I'm finding the points on the object's forward line and the other object's forward line where these two lines are the closest. If these closest points are within a collision avoidance distance, and if the distance between them is smaller than the two radii of the two object's bounding spheres, then the objects should steer away in the appropriate direction. The problem is that for my case, the closest points on the lines are calculated to be really far away from the actual collision point. This is because the two forward lines for each object are moving away from each other as the objects pass. The problem is that because of this, no steering takes place, and the two objects partially collide. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can correctly calculate the point of collision? Perhaps by somehow taking into account the size of the two objects?

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• XNA for life!

  - by George Clingerman

  Or until my arm falls off at least…. I’ve been meaning to get a new tattoo for quite a while. And I wanted it to be geeky and to represent some memorable milestone in my life. So I was thinking, mulling over some various ideas, sketching some things out. And then it hit me. XNA. Specifically the XNA logo. It’s super geeky (so geeky I’ll probably have to explain to 90% of the people that say it what it even means) and I’m not sure that anything has been so memorable and made such a change in my life as XNA. Cheesy but true. When the XNA framework came out, thing started happening quickly. I stumbled into a geek community and started going to code camps, MSDN events, code-a-thons. I got an XNA MVP award. Met huge geek idols in my life (like Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman) and just really started getting integrated into this fantastic development community. Then to add to all of that I became part of this fantastic XNA community. It’s really just been one of the best things to ever happen to me and I’m having the time of my life right now. So sure, it’s permanent. Sure Microsoft could cancel XNA, rebrand it to Flimmer Flammer or some other name. Sure my arms are going to be wrinkly and flabby when I’m older and for sure I’m going to have to explain to people over and over again just what in the world “xna” means. But you know what, every time I look at that tattoo and every time I’m telling somebody what xna means, I’m going to remember all these awesome things that have happened to me. All the tremendous things I’m seeing people do with the XNA framework and more importantly all the stories and friendships I’ve formed in the XNA community. And I think that deserves a little permanent recognition.

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• Game programming basics under Windows

  - by dreta

  I've been trying to learn some Windows programming using the Win32 API. Now, i'm used to working with the OS layer being abstracted away, mostly thanks to libraries like SFML or Allegro. Could you guys help me out and tell me if i'm thinking right here. The place for my gameloop is where i'm reading the messages? while (TRUE) { if (PeekMessage (&msg, NULL, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE)) { if (msg.message == WM_QUIT) break ; TranslateMessage (&msg) ; DispatchMessage (&msg) ; } else { //my game loop goes here } } Now the slightly bigger issue, that is, drawing. Do i run my drawing where i normaly do it, inside the game loop after the game logic? Or do i do it when WM_PAIN is being called and just call InvalidateRect (hwnd, NULL, TRUE); when i want to draw? This does feel weird, the WM_PAINT is a queued message, so i don't know for sure when it'll be called. So if i wanted to avoid this, do i just get the device handle inside the game loop and only ValidateRect (hwnd, NULL); in the WM_PAINT case (beside the ValidateRect (hwnd, NULL); called after drawing in the game loop)? Actually, now that i think about it, do i even need WM_PAINT in this situation or can i skip it and let DefWindowProc handle it (does it validate the screen if WM_PAINT isn't processed)? If this is any important, i'm setting up my code for OpenGL.

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• New Responsibilities

  - by Robert May

  With the start of the new year, I’m starting new responsibilities at Veracity. One responsibility that is staying constant is my love and evangelism of Agile.  In fact, I’ll be spending more time ensuring that all Veracity teams are performing agile, Scrum specifically, in a consistent manner so that all of our clients and consultants have a similar experience. Imagine, if you will, working for a consulting company on a project.  On that project, the project management style is Waterfall in iterations.  Now you move to another project and in that project, you’re doing real Scrum, but in both cases, you were told that what you were doing was Scrum.  Rather confusing.  I’ve found, however, that this happens on many teams and many projects.  Most companies simply aren’t disciplined enough to do Scrum.  Some think that being Agile means not being disciplined.  The opposite is true! So, my goals for Veracity are to make sure that all of our consultants have a consistent feel for Scrum and what it is and how it works and then to make sure that on the projects they’re assigned to, Scrum is appropriately applied for their situation.  This will help keep them happier, but also make switching to other projects easier and more consistent.  If we aren’t doing the project management on the project, we’ll help them know what good Agile practices should look like so that they can give good advice to the client, and so that if they move to another project, they have a consistent feel. I’m really looking forward to these new duties. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum

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• Collision with half semi-circle

  - by heitortsergent

  I am trying to port a game I made using Flash/AS3, to the Windows Phone using C#/XNA 4.0. You can see it here: http://goo.gl/gzFiE In the flash version I used a pixel-perfect collision between meteors (it's a rectangle, and usually rotated) that spawn outside the screen, and move towards the center, and a shield in the center of the screen(which is half of a semi-circle, also rotated by the player), which made the meteor bounce back in the opposite direction it came from, when they collided. My goal now is to make the meteors bounce in different angles, depending on the position it collides with the shield (much like Pong, hitting the borders causes a change in the ball's angle). So, these are the 3 options I thought of: -Pixel-perfect collision (microsoft has a sample(http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/tutorial/collision_2d_perpixel_transformed)) , but then I wouldn't know how to change the meteor angle after the collision -3 BoundingCircle's to represent the half semi-circle shield, but then I would have to somehow move them as I rotate the shield. -Farseer Physics. I could make a shape composed of 3 lines, and use that as the collision object for the shield. Is there any other way besides those? Which would be the best way to do it(it's aimed towards mobile devices, so pixel-perfect is probably not a good choice)? Most of the time there's always a easier/better way than what we think of...

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• Modelling work-flow plus interaction with a database - quick and accessible options

  - by cjmUK

  I'm wanting to model a (proposed) manufacturing line, with specific emphasis on interaction with a traceability database. That is, various process engineers have already mapped the manufacturing process - I'm only interested in the various stations along the line that have to talk to the DB. The intended audience is a mixture of project managers, engineers and IT people - the purpose is to identify: points at which the line interacts with the DB (perhaps going so far as indicating the Store Procs called at each point, perhaps even which parameters are passed.) the communication source (PC/Handheld device/PLC) the communication medium (wireless/fibre/copper) control flow (if leak test fails, unit is diverted to repair station) Basically, the model will be used as a focus different groups on outstanding tasks; for example, I'm interested in the DB and any front-end app needed, process engineers need to be thinking about the workflow and liaising with the PLC suppliers, the other IT guys need to make sure we have the hardware and comms in place. Obviously I could just improvise in Visio, but I was wondering if there was a particular modelling technique that might particularly suit my needs or my audience. I'm thinking of a visual model with supporting documentation (as little as possible, as much as is necessary). Clearly, I don't want something that will take me ages to (effectively) learn, nor one that will alienate non-technical members of the project team. So far I've had brief looks at BPMN, EPC Diagrams, standard Flow Diagrams... and I've forgotten most of what I used to know about UML... And I'm not against picking and mixing... as long as it is quick, clear and effective. Conclusion: In the end, I opted for a quasi-workflow/dataflow diagram. I mapped out the parts of the manufacturing process that interact with the traceability DB, and indicated in a significantly-simplified form, the data flows and DB activity. Alongside which, I have a supporting document which outlines each process, the data being transacted for each process (a 'data dictionary' of sorts) and details of hardware and connectivity required. I can't decide whether is a product of genius or a crime against established software development practices, but I do think that is will hit the mark for this particular audience.

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• Inheritance vs composition in this example

  - by Gerenuk

  I'm wondering about the differences between inheritance and composition examined with concrete code relevant arguments. In particular my example was Inheritance: class Do: def do(self): self.doA() self.doB() def doA(self): pass def doB(self): pass class MyDo(Do): def doA(self): print("A") def doB(self): print("B") x=MyDo() vs Composition: class Do: def __init__(self, a, b): self.a=a self.b=b def do(self): self.a.do() self.b.do() x=Do(DoA(), DoB()) (Note for composition I'm missing code so it's not actually shorter) Can you name particular advantages of one or the other? I'm think of: composition is useful if you plan to reuse DoA() in another context inheritance seems easier; no additional references/variables/initialization method doA can access internal variable (be it a good or bad thing :) ) inheritance groups logic A and B together; even though you could equally introduce a grouped delegate object inheritance provides a preset class for the users; with composition you'd have to encapsule the initialization in a factory so that the user does have to assemble the logic and the skeleton ... Basically I'd like to examine the implications of inheritance vs composition. I heard often composition is prefered, but I'd like to understand that by example. Of course I can always start with one and refactor later to the other.

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• Is it possible to to have all pre-unity effects in latest ubuntu?

  - by iamserious

  I've been an Ubuntu dilettante for a long, long time. It is not my primary OS but I've always had it on all my laptops and desktop machines for over 8 years now. What I really, really like(d) about ubuntu (or linux, for that matter) was the effects - desktop cube, wobbly windows and other such "cool" effects. Needless to say, I was heartbroken with Unity. I gave it the benefit of doubt and tried to like it, tried to love it. Stuck with it for over a year. But I recently came to the conclusion that unity is really not for me. I want my old ubuntu back, with all it's eye candy effects. I tried messing around with ccsm but it only seemed to make the matters worse. Now, I could just install the old version of ubuntu - but getting my bamboo pen and Nvidia to work with it is a son of a.. anyway, the point is, old version of ubuntu is outdated to work with my newer machines. I'd rather have a new version of ubuntu but without unity- I don't know what the eye candy stuff is called - and so my question is this - Is it possible to rid ubuntu of unity and get all the eye candy stuff and if it is not possible, can you please advice me what other linux supports all the effects, please? I've searched high and low for unity alternatives but didn't find any satisfactory solutions; so I think my question is mainly about what other linux flavour is better suited for the task - sorry if it is out of topic.

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• Using AdSense to show ads to logged-in users

  - by John

  I know that you can grant authorization permissions to Google AdSense so that it can 'log in' and see what other logged in users can see (e.g. in a private forum), so that the ads it displays are better targetted. Extending this principle further: I am making a site which will show completely different content for each individual user (i.e. not 'common' content like a forum in which everybody sees essentially the same thing). You could think of this content as similar to the way each Facebook user has a different news feed, but it is the 'same' page. Complicating things further, the URLs for this site will be simple, e.g. '/home' and '/somepage', and will not usually include unique identifiers to differentiate between users (e.g. '/home?user=32i42'). My questions are: Is creating an account purely for AdSense to log in to the site with worth it in this case, seeing as it will be seeing it's own 'personalized' version and not any other user's? More importantly: is that against the Google AdSense Terms of Service? (I can't seem to figure that one out) How would you go about this problem?

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• 14.04 LTS Unity no longer boots after last 94 MB update

  - by Harryg123

  I am running 14.04 LTS, Unity, on an HP Pavillion 15, 4GBRAM, 750 GB hdd, I-5 machine, with AMD 8600M graphics card built in. I have disabled the dash and all Ubuntu spyware. I have been faithfully loading all updates as they appear. This morning it asked for a 94 MB update (bringing kernel to .27, I think. Now, I can boot, get to login screen, but it freezes after that. Keyboard doesn't work at that point, but mouse does. I booted into recovery mode, tried to run in generic graphics mode, -- system again froze. I also pressed [esc] during boot, but saw nothing strange; then text disappeared and was replaced by login screen. I am not a hobbyist; this is a production machine and I have a lot of work to do today. Having a standard software update render my machine completely useless... sigh. Perhaps the simplest thing to do would be to revert to the previous configuration. How do I do that? I can boot into recovery mode. But I have no idea how to proceed. TIA for all help. -Harry

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• Distributed Development Tools -- (Version control and Project Management)

  - by Macy Abbey

  I've recently become responsible for choosing which source control and project management software to use for a company that employs me. Currently it uses Jira (project management) and Subversion (version control). I know there are many other options out there -- the ones I know about are all in this article http://mashable.com/2010/07/14/distributed-developer-teams/ . I'm leaning towards recommending they just stay with what they have as it seems workable and any change would have to be worth the cost of switching to say github/basecamp or some other solution. Some details on the team: It's a distributed development shop. Meetings of the whole team in one room are rare. It's currently a very small development team (three developers). The project management software is used by developers and a product manager or two. What are you experiences with version control and project management web applications? Are there any you would recommend and you think are worth the switching cost of time to learn new services / implementing the change? Edit: After educating myself further on the options it appears DVCS offer powerful benefits that may be worth investing in now as opposed to later in the company's lifetime when the switching cost is higher: I'm a Subversion geek, why I should consider or not consider Mercurial or Git or any other DVCS?

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• Customer retention - why most companies have it wrong

  - by Michel Adar

  At least in the US market it is quite common for service companies to offer an initially discounted price to new customers. While this may attract new customers and robe customers from competitors, it is my argument that it is a bad strategy for the company. This strategy gives an incentive to change companies and a disincentive to stay with the company. From the point of view of the customer, after 6 months of being a customer the company rewards the loyalty by raising the price. A better strategy would be to reward customers for staying with the company. For example, by lowering the cost by 5% every year (compound discount so it does never get to zero). This is a very rational thing to do for the company. Acquiring new customers and setting up their service is expensive, new customers also tend to use more of the common resources like customer service channels. It is probably true for most companies that the cost of providing service to a customer of 10 years is lower than providing the same service in the first year of a customer's tenure. It is only logical to pass these savings to the customer. From the customer point of view, the competition would have to offer something very attractive, whether in terms of price or service, in order for the customer to switch. Such a policy would give an advantage to the first mover, but would probably force the competitors to follow suit. Overall, I would expect that this would reduce the mobility in the market, increase loyalty, increase the investment of companies in loyal customers and ultimately, increase competition for providing a better service. Competitors may even try to break the scheme by offering customers the porting of their tenure, but that would not work that well because it would disenchant existing customers and would be costly, assuming that it is costlier to serve a customer through installation and first year. What do you think? Is this better than using "save offers" to retain flip-floppers?

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• Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. This post seams almost redundant as I had no problems, but I think that is as valuable to other thinking of installing the Service Pack as all the problems that we sometimes get. As per Brian's post I am Installing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1 first and indeed as this is a single server local deployment I need to install both. If I only install one it will leave the other product broken. Figure: Hopefully this will be more uneventful It takes a little while for your system to be checked to see what components need updating. On my main computer this was pretty quick, but on the laptop it took some time. Figure: There are a lot of components to update With this update also comes an update to .NET as well as many other components. Figure: I downloaded the full 1.5GB’s, but you could do a web install It depends on how good you internet connection is to how long it would take to download, but as I am now in the US I decided not to trust the internet connection speeds. It took around 30-40 minutes to download the full thing which is a little slow. Figure: I did not need to download, but that would increase the install time So on my main computer again this was fast, but again on my netbook this took a little while. Figure: The actual install took around 30-40 minutes (2 hours on netbook) I was pretty impressed with the speed of the install, and as Team Explore is now out of the box with Visual Studio 2010 I don’t get the problem of the SP being installed before Team Explorer and having a disjointed experience Figure: As I suspected, no problems with the install Figure: Checking in Visual Studio shows that all the servicing points were successful This was an easy experience even if the SP was over 1.5GB’s to download Hopefully I will be discovering things that work better for a good while to come, as well as not seeing holes in the product that I had no encountered yet. What were your experiences of installing Visual Studio 2010 Service pack 1?

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• How to cover the widest range of computers when publishing?

  - by DevilWithin

  When you plan a game, or even when you already made a game, and its time to publish, you wonder how much of your audience is covered by the game technology demands. I'm directing this essentialy to casual games, as I constantly see people having old laptops and being unable to replace them. Laptops with integrated cards whose OpenGL version doesn't even support textures larger than 1024x1024. These people may be avid gamers as well, and a reasonable share of the audience to consider giving them the chance to play casual games, once they cannot play any blockbusters. As I've seen happening, a very "noticeable" example is Angry Birds. It's gameplay is merely casual (I think nobody disagrees here) and still, it uses so high resolution textures that at least OpenGL 2.0 or around is needed, which blocks away a lot of people. So, the actual question is: what is a good tradeoff for this issue? Would it be better to just sacrifice the texture resolution for everyone, but have more supported hardware? Would it be better to keep the high quality and just slice the textures into smaller ones, sacrificing the performance a little bit? What else? Any ideas about this topic are welcome for discussion.

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• How Do I Log Into CertView?

  - by Brandye Barrington

  On November 15, 2012, Oracle Certification exam results became available directly from Oracle's certification portal, CertView. This change requires candidates to authenticate their CertView accounts before being able to access their exam results. The Oracle Certification team has developed a series of videos to help candidates through this new process.  Check back often as we will be highlighting these videos over the coming weeks. You can find all the information you will need on this new process along with relevant questions and answers on our website. As always, you can contact Oracle Certification Support if you need assistance. YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED More Information FAQ: Receiving Exam Scores FAQ: How To Get Exam Results FAQ: Accessing Exam Results in CertView FAQ: How Will I Know When My Exam Results Are Available? FAQ: What If I Don't Get An Exam Results Email Alert? FAQ: How To Download and Print Exam Score Reports FAQ: What If I Think My Exam Results Are Wrong In CertView? FAQ: Is Oracle Changing The Way That Exams Are Scored?

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• Complexity of defense AI

  - by Fredrik Johansson

  I have a non-released game, and currently it's only possible to play with another human being. As the game rules are made up by me, I think it would be great if new players could learn basic game play by playing against an AI opponent. I mean it's not like Tennis, where the majority knows at least the fundamental rules. On the other hand, I'm a bit concerned that this AI implementation can be quite complex. I hope you can help me with an complexity estimation. I've tried to summarize the gameplay below. Is this defense AI very hard to do? Basic Defense Game Play Player Defender can move within his land, i.e. inside a random, non-convex, polygon. This land will also contain obstacles modeled as polygons, that Defender has to move around. Player Attacker has also a land, modeled as another such polygon. Assume that Defender shall defend against Attacker. Attacker will then throw a thingy towards Defender's land. To be rewarded, Attacker wants to hit Defender's land, and Defender will want to strike away the thingy from his land before it stops to prevent Attacker from scoring. To feint Defender, Attacker might run around within his land before the throw, and based on these attacker movements Defender shall then continuously move to the best defense position within his land.

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• Encrypt SSD or not?

  - by JamesBradbury

  My desktop machine is running Ubuntu 12.04 (and will probably stay with it until the next LTS). I've got a new 120GB SSD on the way as my existing 420GB spinning disk. If it makes any difference I'll be dual-booting with Windows 7 across both disks too. I've read some helpful answers here about /home setup and enabling TRIM, which I intend to follow. So most of my /home will be on the SSD, with only photos, videos and music on the spinning disk. The question is, when I reinstall Ubuntu from CD or USB, whether I should encrypt the SSD? Specifically: I'm reading that drive wear isn't much of an issue with modern SSDs as they last decades even if you spam them. Is this true? How big a performance reduction will encrypting cause (I have an i7 Sandybridge, so I guess it can cope)? Is it more important from a security point of view to encrypt an SSD? I think I read somewhere that it may be hard to reliably wipe data. By all means answer even if you only know about one of those things.

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• Sharing business logic between server-side and client-side of web application?

  - by thoughtpunch

  Quick question concerning shared code/logic in back and front ends of a web application. I have a web application (Rails + heavy JS) that parses metadata from HTML pages fetched via a user supplied URL (think Pinterest or Instapaper). Currently this processing takes place exclusively on the client-side. The code that fetches the URL and parses the DOM is in a fairly large set of JS scripts in our Rails app. Occasionally want to do this processing on the server-side of the app. For example, what if a user supplied a URL but they have JS disabled or have a non-standard compliant browser, etc. Ideally I'd like to be able to process these URLS in Ruby on the back-end (in asynchronous background jobs perhaps) using the same logic that our JS parsers use WITHOUT porting the JS to Ruby. I've looked at systems that allow you to execute JS scripts in the backend like execjs as well as Ruby-to-Javascript compilers like OpalRB that would hopefully allow "write-once, execute many", but I'm not sure that either is the right decision. Whats the best way to avoid business logic duplication for apps that need to do both client-side and server-side processing of similar data?

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• Antenna Aligner Part 8: It's Alive!!!

  - by Chris George

  Finally the day has come, Antenna Aligner v1.0.1 has been uploaded to the AppStore and . "Waiting for review" .. . fast forward 7 days and much checking of emails later WOO HOO! Now what? So I set my facebook page to go live  https://www.facebook.com/AntennaAligner, and started by sending messages to my mates that have iphones! Amazingly a few of them bought it! Similarly some of my colleagues were also kind enough to support me and downloaded it too! Unfortunately the only way I knew they had bought is was from them telling me, as the iTunes connect data is only updated daily at about midday GMT. This is a shame, surely they could provide more granular updates throughout the day? Although I suppose once an app has been out in the wild for a while, daily updates are enough. It would, however, be nice to get a ping when you make your first sale! I would have expected more feedback on my facebook page as well, maybe I'm just expecting too much, or perhaps I've configured the page wrong. The new facebook timeline layout is just confusing, and I'm not sure it's all public, I'll check that! So please take a look and see what you think! I would love to get some more feedback/reviews/suggestions... Oh and watch out for the Android version coming soon!

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• Using Behavior Trees and Events together

  - by weichsem

  I am beginning to work with behavior trees and am unsure how events should be handled within the tree. Lets say we have a space game where the player is dogfighting with a handful of other ships, some friendly some not. The player destroys a ship and the rest of the hostile ships should then start to retreat. How was should the shipWasDestroyed event effect the other ship's behavior trees so that they start running the retreat behavior? One way I could think of doing this is have all the conditions I care about be high level nodes that effectively state change the ship. This would mean I'd have to check all of these state change conditions on every frame the behavior tree was run, even if they are very rare occurrences. I'd prefer not doing this for performance and complexity reasons. From looking at the Halo papers on behavior trees it seems that they handled this by dynamically placing nodes into the tree when the event occurred. It seems like calculating where the new node should go could be problematic depending on the current state of the running behavior. How is this normally handled?

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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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• About online game servers and how to handle data

  - by TreantBG

  So my question isn't about what technology to use or how to do this or that, but a more general question. I'm currently developing a action third person shooter. With elements of RPG - weapon,armor upgrades and items. Players will be able to create new games or join old ones. So my question is how to create the game server that players will play in. I have two ideas on my mind. The player who made the game is the server. All data passes trough him and he send this data to the server updating the database of the players with their XP points kills/deaths score and other. Or my host machine is the server, the player who made the game just will open new instance on my host and will be like client. And all players send their input data to the host, the host updates the game and send response back to client for any new changes like where is the enemy and other. And if i choose option 1 is there a chance the host to change the game content and manipulate the game results? (I think there is but i'm not sure) And if i choose option 2 isn't that raising the response time and potentially the game lag? or maybe there is another option?

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• Android: how do I switch between game scenes in a game? Any tutorials?

  - by Flavio

  I am trying to create a simple game using the Android SDK without using AndEngine (or any other game engine). I have plenty of experience designing games from the past, but I'm having lots of trouble trying to use the Android SDK to make my game. By far my biggest hurdle right now is switching between views. That is, for example, going from the menu to the first level, etc. I am using a traditional model I learned (I think it's called a scene stack or something?) in which you push the current scene onto a stack and the game's main loop runs the top item of the stack. This model seems non-trivial to implement in the Android SDK, mostly because Android seems to be picky about which thread instantiates which view. My issue is that I want the first level to show up when you press a button on the main menu, but when I instantiate the first level (the level class extends SurfaceView and implements SurfaceHolder.Callback) I get a runtime error complaining that the thread that runs the main menu can't instantiate this class. Something about calling Looper.prepare(). I figured at this point I was probably doing things wrong. I'm not sure how to specifically phrase my issue into a question, so maybe I should leave it as either 1) Does anybody know a good way (or the 'proper' way) to switch between scenes in an Android game? or 2) Are there any tutorials out there which show how to create a game that doesn't take place entirely in one scene? (I have googled for a while to no avail... maybe someone else knows of one?) Thanks!

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• As a developer, how do I learn sales? [closed]

  - by Dan Abramov

  I quit the company I was working for to pursuit an opportunity as a startup, and I believe in our product. I'm sure it's going to be great if we attract some customers first to keep going. (I don't want funding.) Our product is targeted at private schools and courses, and helps organize the mess other LMSs introduce. The problem is, our team is basically just me and I have very little idea about sales and marketing. I can do reasonably good copywriting but I'm sure I can do better—and being nervous or too techy in a real world conversation with the client doesn't help. I want to get better, in fact, a lot better at negotiating with clients and pitching my product. I did look for some “sales articles” on the web, and a lot of what I found is plain bullshit on SEO-engineered websites promoting books or $5000 courses. What I need instead is a developer's perspective on how to sale a product you think is great. What are typical programmer's mistakes and misconceptions about sales, and how to avoid them? How do you evolve into a reasonably great salesman? I can't believe it's in the mindset and unlearnable. Your own experience, combined with great articles available on the web is most welcome. To Future Readers The question got closed because it is not a good fit for this site. I found some helpful tips in a similar question asked on a sister StackExchange site about startups: I'm a terrible salesperson. What can I do about it?

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• Why isn't there a typeclass for functions?

  - by Steve314

  I already tried this on Reddit, but there's no sign of a response - maybe it's the wrong place, maybe I'm too impatient. Anyway... In a learning problem I've been messing around with, I realised I needed a typeclass for functions with operations for applying, composing etc. Reasons... It can be convenient to treat a representation of a function as if it were the function itself, so that applying the function implicitly uses an interpreter, and composing functions derives a new description. Once you have a typeclass for functions, you can have derived typeclasses for special kinds of functions - in my case, I want invertible functions. For example, functions that apply integer offsets could be represented by an ADT containing an integer. Applying those functions just means adding the integer. Composition is implemented by adding the wrapped integers. The inverse function has the integer negated. The identity function wraps zero. The constant function cannot be provided because there's no suitable representation for it. Of course it doesn't need to spell things as if it the values were genuine Haskell functions, but once I had the idea, I thought a library like that must already exist and maybe even using the standard spellings. But I can't find such a typeclass in the Haskell library. I found the Data.Function module, but there's no typeclass - just some common functions that are also available from the Prelude. So - why isn't there a typeclass for functions? Is it "just because there isn't" or "because it's not so useful as you think"? Or maybe there's a fundamental problem with the idea? The biggest possible problem I've thought of so far is that function application on actual functions would probably have to be special-cased by the compiler to avoid a looping problem - in order to apply this function I need to apply the function application function, and to do that I need to call the function application function, and to do that...

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