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• MMO Data Persistence Question

  - by JasonG

  I wanted to ask a question regarding data persistence strategies for an MMO. I have some experience in the games industry with social synchronous games. At Zynga, we stored static proto data in XML on both the client and the server and stored instance/runtime data in membase. For clarity sake, proto data for a Potion would be PotionName or MaxCharges, while runtime/instance data would be something like ChargesRemaining. So basically, if a player picks up a potion the instance is (via prediction) created from XML data on the client, the request gets sent to the server where the instance is created from XML and then added to membase. Is the same strategy that would be used for soemthing like an MMO? Would it be feasible to have static proto data in some kind of in-memory no-sql database on both client and server with instance data being stored on the server in a more enterprise level database? Or should all data (proto/instance) be stored on the server and the client gets everything from server? I know a lot of this might on certain game requirements, however, i'm basically looking for some general opinion/best practices here if there are any.

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• Friday Fun: Play Air Hockey in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you like the challenge of fast-paced games? Then get ready to put yourself to the test with the Air Hockey extension for Google Chrome during company time. Air Hockey in Action There are two ways that you can play Air Hockey…either using the drop-down window or opening the game in a new tab. For our example we chose to play in a new tab. Before starting the game you can choose the difficulty level, to enable/disable the sound, and/or to go to full screen if desired. Note: Screenshot of “Full Screen” version shown below. While playing you really have to stay on top of things…the computer player will beat you rather quickly if you do not. Hustle hustle hustle! With a little bit of practice it does become easier but even the “Easy Level” on this game will keep you busy. If the normal size game screen seems just a bit small you can easily get a larger version using the “Full Screen Link” below the game window. Whether your browser is non-maximized as shown here or totally maximized it will fill the entire browser window area. Conclusion If you like fast paced games then the Air Hockey extension certainly fits that criteria and will keep you on your toes. Make sure and keep the sound off while playing during Friday afternoon though! Links Download the Air Hockey extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Play Tetris in Google ChromeFriday Fun: Play MineSweeper in Google ChromeFriday Fun: Play 3D Rally Racing in Google ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserPlay a Webpage Display Prank in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar Manage Photos Across Different Social Sites With Dropico Test Drive Windows 7 Online Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site

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• Clientside anticheating in multiplayer game 1vs1

  - by garnav

  I'm developing a simple card game, where there will be a matchmaking system that will put you against another human player. This will be the only game mode available, a 1vs1 against another human, no AI. I want to prevent cheating as much as possible. I have already read a lot of similar questions here and I already know that I cannot trust the client and I have to make all verifications server side. I intend to have a server (need one for the matchmaking anyway) and I intend to make some verifications server side but if I want to check everything server side this makes my server to be able to keep track of the state of all current games and check every action, and I don't have the money/infrastructure to support that server. My idea is to make clients check and verify some of the actions made by their opponent* and if they find some illegal action notify the possible cheating to the server and make the server verify it. This will still require my server to keep track of all current games, but it will save resources only checking some things that cannot be checked at client side(like card order in the deck) and only checking other things when they are actually wrong. *(only those they can check with out allowing themselves cheating! for example:they can't check if the played card was in hand cos that will need them to know all cards in hand) Summing up, my questions are: is this a viable approach? will I actually save resources doing this or the extra complexity in the server and client for exchanging this messages is not worth it? do you know any game that has successfully or unsuccessfully tried a similar approach? Thanks all for reading and answering

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• The Raspberry Pi Now Has Its Own App Store

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computer with an ARM processor, now has its own appstore where Raspberry Pi hobbyists and developers can share their creations in a one-stop location accessible to all Raspberry Pi users. In today’s press release about the store, the Raspberry Pi Foundation writes: We’ve been amazed by the variety of software that people have written for, or ported to, the Raspberry Pi. Today, together with our friends at IndieCity and Velocix, we’re launching the Pi Store to make it easier for developers of all ages to share their games, applications, tools and tutorials with the rest of the community. The Pi Store will, we hope, become a one-stop shop for all your Raspberry Pi needs; it’s also an easier way into the Raspberry Pi experience for total beginners, who will find everything they need to get going in one place, for free. The store runs as an X application under Raspbian, and allows users to download content, and to upload their own content for moderation and release. At launch, we have 23 free titles in the store, ranging from utilities like LibreOffice and Asterisk to classic games like Freeciv and OpenTTD and Raspberry Pi exclusive Iridium Rising. We also have one piece of commercial content: the excellent Storm in a Teacup from Cobra Mobile. For more information about the store, including how to install the app store on your Pi, check out the full press release here. To get started browsing the store, hit up the link below. Secure Yourself by Using Two-Step Verification on These 16 Web Services How to Fix a Stuck Pixel on an LCD Monitor How to Factory Reset Your Android Phone or Tablet When It Won’t Boot

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• Amazon Upgrades FreeTime; More Content for the Kid-Friendly Walled Garden

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this year Amazon introduced FreeTime, a walled garden area intended to provide a kids-only app gallery on the Kindle Fire. It was up to parents to populate the content but now, with the recent update, Amazon brings together unlimited books, movies, games, and apps. Intended for children ages 3-8 the upgraded service eschews the you-pick-it-all approach and goes with a hand-curated collection of games, educational apps, books and more. In addition to the pile of hand-curated content, FreeTime also has built in time limits and individual profiles for different children. Every Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ user can try out the service for thirty days without charge. After the thirty day trial the subscription price is $4.99 per month ($2.99 for Prime members). Hit up the link below to check out the full description of the service. Amazon FreeTime [Amazon] Our Geek Trivia App for Windows 8 is Now Available Everywhere How To Boot Your Android Phone or Tablet Into Safe Mode HTG Explains: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus?

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• 2D graphics - why use spritesheets?

  - by Columbo

  I have seen many examples of how to render sprites from a spritesheet but I havent grasped why it is the most common way of dealing with sprites in 2d games. I have started out with 2d sprite rendering in the few demo applications I've made by dealing with each animation frame for any given sprite type as its own texture - and this collection of textures is stored in a dictionary. This seems to work for me, and suits my workflow pretty well, as I tend to make my animations as gif/mng files and then extract the frames to individual pngs. Is there a noticeable performance advantage to rendering from a single sheet rather than from individual textures? With modern hardware that is capable of drawing millions of polygons to the screen a hundred times a second, does it even matter for my 2d games which just deal with a few dozen 50x100px rectangles? The implementation details of loading a texture into graphics memory and displaying it in XNA seems pretty abstracted. All I know is that textures are bound to the graphics device when they are loaded, then during the game loop, the textures get rendered in batches. So it's not clear to me whether my choice affects performance. I suspect that there are some very good reasons most 2d game developers seem to be using them, I just don't understand why.

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• How to Use and Customize Google Chrome Web Apps

  - by The Geek

  Google announced their new Chrome Web Store today, with loads of web sites and games that can be installed as applications in your browser, synced across every PC, and customized to launch the way you want them to. Here’s how it all works. Note: this guide really isn’t aimed at expert geeks, though you’re more than welcome to leave your thoughts in the comments. What Are Chrome Web Apps Again? The new Chrome Web Apps are really nothing more than regular web sites, optimized for Chrome and then wrapped up with a pretty icon and installed in your browser. Some of these sites, especially web-based games, can also be purchased through the Chrome Web Store for a small fee, though the majority of services are free Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 7: Design and Typography Fun and Colorful Firefox Theme for Windows 7 Happy Snow Bears Theme for Chrome and Iron [Holiday] Download Full Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun Game for Free Scorched Cometary Planet Wallpaper Quick Fix: Add the RSS Button Back to the Firefox Awesome Bar Dropbox Desktop Client 1.0.0 RC for Windows, Linux, and Mac Released

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• Suitability of ground fog using layered alpha quads?

  - by Nick Wiggill

  A layered approach would use a series of massive alpha-textured quads arranged parallel to the ground, intersecting all intervening terrain geometry, to provide the illusion of ground fog quite effectively from high up, looking down, and somewhat less effectively when inside the fog and looking toward the horizon (see image below). Alternatively, a shader-heavy approach would instead calculate density as function of view distance into the ground fog substrate, and output the fragment value based on that. Without having to performance-test each approach myself, I would like first to hear others' experiences (not speculation!) on what sort of performance impact the layered alpha texture approach is likely to have. I ask specifically due to the oft-cited impacts of overdraw (not sure how fill-rate bound your average desktop system is). A list of games using this approach, particularly older games, would be immensely useful: if this was viable on pre DX9/OpenGL2 hardware, it is likely to work fine for me. One big question is in regards to this sort of effect: (Image credit goes to Lume of lume.com) Notice how the vertical fog gradation is continuous / smooth. OTOH, using textured quad layers, I can only assume that layers would be mighty obvious when walking through them -- the more sparse they were, the more obvious this would be. This is in contrast to where fog planes are aligned to face the player every frame, where this coarseness would be much less obvious.

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• Open source clone for Starcraft

  - by sinekonata

  Two questions about a SC:Broodwar clone. Is there one yet? How likely is legal pursuit? Since almost all games I usually play now have an FOS alternative from alpha to way polished, I was wondering why can't I find one for SC, one of the biggest titans of the gaming community? So my first question is, is there a game that was made with the intention to emulate SC? Is it that I didn't look well enough? Could it really be that no one tackled what seems like a small effort compared to the creation of a game engine like Spring or games like Rigs of Rod or Minetest? And since SC is not being maintained at all shouldn't the incentive to see a bug free modable balanced version huge? What am I not getting here? In the event that there is none, is it a legal problem? Could it be that people expect Blizzard to release sources themselves? Or that developers don't see the point in having SC mechanics without the patented lore and aesthetics? And the trickier question, if I were to make SC an open source game, a total clone of it for the purposes of maintenance, modability, etc. Would Blizzard really sue a team of developer fans that just do them a favour knowing they don't lose any money from Korea broadcasts? Or would they do it not to set precedents. So thanks for reading all that, hope I'm not the only one to think it's weird that no one talks about it. See you.

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• Need help in determing what, if any, tools can be used to create a free Flash game

  - by ReaperOscuro

  Yes I proudly -and sadly- declare that I am a complete nincompoop when it comes to Flash, and I have been fishing around the big wide web for information. The reason for this is that I have been contracted to create a game(s) for a website -the usual flash-based games caveat. Please I do not mean things like by those gaming generator websites, I mean small yet professional games- but the caveat, as always, is that impossible dream: it needs to be done all for free. The budget...well imagine it as not there. Annoyingly is that I am a game designer yes, but with a ridiculously tight deadline I haven't got much time to re-learn (ah the heady days of programming at uni) everything by the end of March, so I'd like to ask some people who know their stuff rather than keep looking at a gazillion different things. This is my understanding: with the flash sdk you can create a game, albeit you need to be pretty programming savvy. FlashDevelop helps there -yet I am not entirely sure how. Yet even FD says to use Flash for the animation/graphics. Yes its undeniably powerful but as I said there is the unattainable demand of no money. The million dollar question: what, if any, tools can I use to create a free flash game?

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• Alternatives to a leveling system

  - by Bane

  I'm currently designing a rough prototype of a mecha fighting game. These are the basics I came up with: Multiplayer (matchmaking for up to 10 people, for now) Browser based (HTML5) 2D (<canvas>) Persistent (as in, players have accounts and don't have to use a new mech each time they start a match) Players earn money upon destroying another mech, which is used to buy parts (guns, armor, boosters, etc) Simplicity (both of the game itself, and of the development of said game) No "leveling" (as in, players don't get awarded with XP) The last part is bothering me. At first, I wanted to have players gain experience points (XP) when destroying other mechs, but gaining two things at once (money and XP) seemed to be in conflict with my last point, which is simplicity. If I were to have a leveling system, that would require additional development. But, the biggest problem is that I simply couldn't fit it anywhere! Adding levels would require adding meaning to these levels, and most of the things that I hoped to achieve could already be achieved with the money mechanic I introduced. So I decided to drop leveling off completely. That, in turn, removed a fairly popular and robust mean of progression in games from my game (not that I would use it well anyway). Is there another way of progression in games, aside from leveling and XP points, that wouldn't get rendered redundant by my money mechanic, would be somehow meaningful (even on a symbolic level), and wouldn't be in conflict with my last point, which is simplicity?

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• Windows Phone 7 Series &ndash; First Developer Information

  - by Nikita Polyakov

  The official developer story for Windows Phone 7 Series was finally announced at MIX10. You can review the recording of the Keynote at http://live.visitmix.com, also all the sessions will be available within 24hours of their posting. There is extensive list of presentations for Windows Phone listed here. You can start playing with these tools today! Official Silverlight site for Mobile Development: http://silverlight.net/getstarted/devices/windows-phone/  Channel 9 has a training information here: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Learn/Windows-Phone-7-Series-Training/ Ok, and for the ones in the hurry, direct link: Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP                      Here is the overview summary of the announcements: End-to-End Mobile Development Platform: By combining Silverlight for rich internet applications and the XNA Framework for game development, developers and designers will be able to build visually stunning and immersive applications and games on the Windows Phone 7 Series. Free Windows Phone Developer Tools: Microsoft has released a free comprehensive tool support package for Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 Series, available for download. Expression Blend for Windows Phone and a preview of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone will be also included as part of the download. Windows Phone Marketplace: Microsoft made available a new merchandising tool that will enable developers and designers to bring applications and games to market and increase the discoverability of applications with customers while supporting one-time credit card purchases, mobile operator billing and advertising-funded applications.

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• Too sell or give for free

  - by QAH

  Hello everyone! I am currently making a game that I was originally planning to sell. It is a simple 2D arcade style game for the PC. I've seen many indie games become popular and generate revenue from advertisements, but the game itself remains free. I need some advice on whether or not I should sell my game, release it for free with advertisements, or ask for donations and keep the game free. I feel that my game is fun, but of course the graphics aren't tip top because I am a programmer, not an artist. I just take screenshots of 3D models I get from Turbosquid and crop around it to make a sprite. Also, and I could be very wrong about this, it seems that there are more legal issues surrounding selling a game than making it free and generating revenue from advertisement, or asking for donations. If I am wrong, someone please correct me. Also, I am very interested in generating some revenue for my work, but that isn't at the very top of my list. I am in my last year of high school, soon to be going to college, and I am going to major in computer science/software engineering. So I am trying to gain some preliminary experience at home by coding stuff every day. One way of getting this experience is by making this game. So what do you think? What route should I take? What has worked well with other indie games? Thanks in advance.

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• What are some good examples of exuberant in-game instructions for telling the player to repeatedly smash a button?

  - by Michael

  What are some good examples of exuberant in-game instructions for telling the player to repeatedly and quickly press a button or perform an action? I'm especially interested in examples in retro games (e.g., from the NES, SNES, and 1980-90s arcade eras), and I would love to see examples with text, graphics, or both. To illustrate, here are a few examples of the type of instructions that I'm thinking of: Smash the A button to lift something heavy! Toggle the joystick back and forth to break free! Quickly press the button to build power in a meter! I'm working on a 2D iOS game with retro-style pixel art, and there's a point where I want the player to quickly tap on a sprite to complete an action. I have a serviceable starting point -- the word "TAP" flashing with an arrow repeatedly moving downward beneath it: But it still doesn't feel quite right. I would love to see some actual examples from the golden days of 2D gaming to use as reference material. I know examples abound, but I'm just struggling to think of any concrete ones at the moment. Can you think of any examples of this type of thing in old games?

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• Ruby: implementing alpha-beta pruning for tic-tac-toe

  - by DerNalia

  So, alpha-beta pruning seems to be the most efficient algorithm out there aside from hard coding (for tic tac toe). However, I'm having problems converting the algorithm from the C++ example given in the link: http://www.webkinesia.com/games/gametree.php #based off http://www.webkinesia.com/games/gametree.php # (converted from C++ code from the alpha - beta pruning section) # returns 0 if draw LOSS = -1 DRAW = 0 WIN = 1 @next_move = 0 def calculate_ai_next_move score = self.get_best_move(COMPUTER, WIN, LOSS) return @next_move end def get_best_move(player, alpha, beta) best_score = nil score = nil if not self.has_available_moves? return false elsif self.has_this_player_won?(player) return WIN elsif self.has_this_player_won?(1 - player) return LOSS else best_score = alpha NUM_SQUARES.times do |square| if best_score >= beta break end if self.state[square].nil? self.make_move_with_index(square, player) # set to negative of opponent's best move; we only need the returned score; # the returned move is irrelevant. score = -get_best_move(1-player, -beta, -alpha) if (score > bestScore) @next_move = square best_score = score end undo_move(square) end end end return best_score end the problem is that this is returning nil. some support methods that are used above: WAYS_TO_WIN = [[0, 1, 2], [3, 4, 5], [6, 7, 8], [0, 3, 6], [1, 4, 7], [2, 5, 8],[0, 4, 8], [2, 4, 6]] def has_this_player_won?(player) result = false WAYS_TO_WIN.each {|solution| result = self.state[solution[0]] if contains_win?(solution) } return (result == player) end def contains_win?(ttt_win_state) ttt_win_state.each do |pos| return false if self.state[pos] != self.state[ttt_win_state[0]] or self.state[pos].nil? end return true end def make_move(x, y, player) self.set_square(x,y, player) end

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• Introducing Deep Fried Devcast

  - by Matt Christian

  I've been working on a new podcast for the game development community called the Deep Fried Devcast.  Currently we are in pre-production but should have some episodes up in the near future.  Here is a quick FAQ about the show: What is the Deep Fried Devcast? The Deep Fried Devcast is a bi-weekly show all about game development.  The show will feature developer interviews, a focus on the technical aspects of game development (programming, technical design), the business of team game development (time management, project management), and other areas focused around the actual development of games. Wait, no game design?  No game discussions?! Calm down, calm down.  Although the focus of the podcast is on the technical aspects of game dev, there will be episodes and content focused on all areas of the gaming industry, including discussion on design, story, recent game releases, games we've been playing, etc...  Anything could show up in the Deep Fried Devcast and nothing is off limits. How can I help? We're always looking for new content ideas, emails, and anything you want to send us (within some kind of reason!).  You can even be a guest host if you want!  Email us at: deepfrieddevcast [AT] gmail [DOT] com Where's the podcast?! We're still recording it!  Don't worry, it will be up soon.  Keep an eye on www.deepfrieddevcast.com for the latest updates (that will be up soon too!).

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• Should I go with OpenGL to see my future in Game Development industry? [closed]

  - by Priyank

  Possible Duplicate: Should I continue studying OpenGL or just switch to DirectX to give me a better chance of landing a job in the game industry? I tried Google but found quite old articles, so I am in search of an answer in context to year 2012. Hi all, I don't know if you will consider this question appropriate for this community but I am constantly searching for a perfect answer. What I have seen is that most of the games that are released these days are DirectX 1x based. Except for few games like Starcraft or Diablo which don't have high end graphics are using OpenGL. So I have few questions to ask. The platforms i would like to target are PC (windows), Xbox 360 and PS3 (must). Should I go with learning OpenGL to see my future in game development industry? Or should I shift to Directx? If I learn OpenGL first, will it be difficult to learn direcx then? Which API is most suitable for indie development? Which one of the two API's are better from coder's (programmer's) point of view? Like OOP and style of coding. Is openGL being cross platform should be the only reason to choose it over Directx? Even when vendors are not providing enough stable drivers for it. Thanks in advance. I have read this post, but I have few questions. Should I continue studying OpenGL or just switch to DirectX to give me a better chance of landing a job in the game industry?

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• How to protect your real time online shooter from potential bots

  - by Zaky German

  I'm looking to create a multiplayer top down shooter. While i've read about different topics, i can see them i've got some real challenges ahead, but i'm all up for it. One thing i can't understand is how am i supposed to be protecting the game from people who try to create bots? What i mean is, as far as i understand, it's impossible to protect the network traffic in a way that players won't be able to create programs that listen to what's going on and understand it. So what worries me is that people can create bots that listen to the current location of rival players, and send communication that mimic as if the player is shooting in the exact "perfect" location to win that match. So what kind of techniques are used to protect real time games from such bots? Also i'd like to mention that i've tried searching for discussions (as this sounds like something many people struggle with), but couldn't find anything about it specifically, only as a part of broader questions about networking in real time games. If i should have looked harder feel free to put me in my place :) Thanks alot!

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• E3 Booth Babes Display a Painful Lack of Video Game Knowledge [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you thought a prerequisite for manning a booth at an electronics expo was a passing knowledge of the electronics and games you were promoting, you were wrong. In the above video Chloe Dykstra puts a set of “booth babes” from the E3 2011 conference to the test by asking them simple questions about video games both new and old. If you’re a gaming fan and you can watch this video without laughing out loud you’ve got an iron will (or you’re shaking your head in disbelief that someone could work a gaming convention and not know the answers to these questions). We won’t lie, we were shaking our head when the one model admitted that she’d worked at GameStop for a year and still didn’t know any of the answers. What questions would you put on list? How about “Finish this sentence: ‘Your Princess is in another…’”, “Dimension?”. 5HP: Booth Babe Edition – E3 2011 [YouTube via Kotaku] How To Encrypt Your Cloud-Based Drive with BoxcryptorHTG Explains: Photography with Film-Based CamerasHow to Clean Your Dirty Smartphone (Without Breaking Something)

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• Examples of 2D side-scrollers that achieve open non-linear feel?

  - by Milosz Falinski

  I'm working on a 2.5D platformer prototype that aims for an open feel while maintaining familiar core mechanics. Now, there's some obvious challenges with creating a non constricted feel in a spatially constricted environment. What I'm interested in, is examples of how game designers deal with the "here's a level, beat the bad guys/puzzles to get to the next level" design that seems so natural to most platformers (eg. Mario/Braid/Pid/Meat Boy to name a few). Some ideas for achieving openness I've come across include: One obvious successful example is Terraria, which achieves openness simply through complexity and flexibility of the game-system Another example that comes to mind is Cave Story. Game is non-linear, offers multiple choices and side-stories Mario, Rayman and some other 'classics' with a top-down level selection. I actually really dislike this as it never did anything for me emotionally and just seems like a bit of a lazy way to do things. Note: I've not actually had much experience with most of the 'classical' console platformers, apart from the obvious Marios/Zeldas/Metroids, since I've grown up on adventure games. By that I mean, it's entirely possible that I simply missed some games that solve the problem really well and are by some considered obvious 'classics'.

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• Is there any simple game that involves psychological factors?

  - by Roman

  I need to find a simple game in which several people need to interact with each other. The game should be simple for an analysis (it should be simple to describe what happens in the game, what players did). Because of the last reason, the video games are not appropriate for my purposes. I am thinking of a simple, schematic, strategic game where people can make a limited set of simple moves. Moreover, the moves of the game should be conditioned not only by a pure logic (like in chess or go). The behavior in the game should depend on psychological factors, on relations between people. In more details, I think it should be a cooperation game where people make their decisions based on mutual trust. It would be nice if players can express punishment and forgiveness in the game. Does anybody knows a game that is close to what I have described above? ADDED I need to add that I need a game where actions of players are simple and easy to formalize. Because of that I cannot use verbal games (where communication between players is important). By simple actions I understand, for example, moves on the board from one position to another one, or passing chips from one player to another one and so on.

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• In the days of modern computing, in 'typical business apps' - why does performance matter?

  - by Prog

  This may seem like an odd question to some of you. I'm a hobbyist Java programmer. I have developed several games, an AI program that creates music, another program for painting, and similar stuff. This is to tell you that I have an experience in programming, but not in professional development of business applications. I see a lot of talk on this site about performance. People often debate what would be the most efficient algorithm in C# to perform a task, or why Python is slow and Java is faster, etc. What I'm trying to understand is: why does this matter? There are specific areas of computing where I see why performance matters: games, where tens of thousands of computations are happening every second in a constant-update loop, or low level systems which other programs rely on, such as OSs and VMs, etc. But for the normal, typical high-level business app, why does performance matter? I can understand why it used to matter, decades ago. Computers were much slower and had much less memory, so you had to think carefully about these things. But today, we have so much memory to spare and computers are so fast: does it actually matter if a particular Java algorithm is O(n^2)? Will it actually make a difference for the end users of this typical business app? When you press a GUI button in a typical business app, and behind the scenes it invokes an O(n^2) algorithm, in these days of modern computing - do you actually feel the inefficiency? My question is split in two: In practice, today does performance matter in a typical normal business program? If it does, please give me real-world examples of places in such an application, where performance and optimizations are important.

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• Using unordered_multimap as entity and component storage

  - by natebot13

  The Setup I've made a few games (more like animations) using the Object Oriented method with base classes for objects that extend them, and objects that extend those, and found I couldn't wrap my head around expanding that system to larger game ideas. So I did some research and discovered the Entity-Component system of designing games. I really like the idea, and thoroughly understood the usefulness of it after reading Byte54's perfect answer here: Role of systems in entity systems architecture. With that said, I have decided to create my current game idea using the described Entity-Component system. Having basic knowledge of C++, and SFML, I would like to implement the backbone of this entity component system using an unordered_multimap without classes for the entities themselves. Here's the idea: An unordered_mulitmap stores entity IDs as the lookup term, while the value is an inherited Component object. Examlpe: ____________________________ |ID |Component | ---------------------------- |0 |Movable | |0 |Accelable | |0 |Renderable | |1 |Movable | |1 |Renderable | |2 |Renderable | ---------------------------- So, according to this map of objects, the entity with ID 0 has three components: Movable, Accelable, and Renderable. These component objects store the entity specific data, such as the location, the acceleration, and render flags. The entity is simply and ID, with the components attached to that ID describing its attributes. Problem I want to store the component objects within the map, allowing the map have full ownership of the components. The problem I'm having, is I don't quite understand enough about pointers, shared pointers, and references in order to get that set up. How can I go about initializing these components, with their various member variables, within the unordered_multimap? Can the base component class take on the member variables of its child classes, when defining the map as unordered_multimap<int, component>? Requirements I need a system to be able to grab an entity, with all of its' attached components, and access members from the components in order to do the necessary calculations and reassignments for position, velocity, etc. Need a clarification? Post a comment with your concerns and I will gladly edit or comment back! Thanks in advance! natebot13

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• The best way to structure/design game code

  - by Edward

  My question is quite broad and related to the 2D game code design/architecture/structure. Usually the main game consists of the main loop where you update & render your world states. However, it's recommended for many purposes to separate rendering from the game-logic and so on. I am kinda confused about the whole situation. Many game engines/libs/sdks don't follow separation schema. They propagate a way where you define some scenes/stages and they contain some objects and the scene/stage controls the user input and so on. For example, in cocos2d(-x) and libgdx (stage2d) the games are usually done the way that the update logic happens at the same time/place as rendering. Also, the propagated way is to have a structure where an object knows how to draw itself - which is not a separation of updating & rendering. The same with Flash based games, they are usually done the way when an object (class) contains a swf or a texture and some data and holds some update logic itself, or updated from main Scene. And again this object already knows how to draw itself via "addChild". Also, some people recommend to use MVC pattern, which will require to completely obey the structure of those engines/libs/sdks. Maybe I am overthinking everything, but I am totally confused. I would be grateful if somebody could point me to a correct direction with the game code structures. What is your way of doing things in libgdx/cocos2d/flash?

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• Broad topics needed for teaching game development

  - by livingtech

  I am going to be doing a presentation on game development to an iPhone user group in the near(ish) future. My audience are iPhone developers, but not necessarily very experienced ones, and this is meant to be an introduction. My question is, what broad topics are needed to understand game development? I acknowledge that this is fairly subjective, but I really am hoping for a comprehensive list of high-level topics that apply to a broad enough swath of games that anyone interested in the topic SHOULD know about them. I would be ecstatic with some pointers to any resources that attempt to make a list such as this this. (I have looked, but my google-fu is failing me tonight.) Here's what I have so far: The Game Loop a sub-note about event driven games 2D Animation sprites/texture maps 3D Animation importance of frameworks modeling software Particles and particle effects hit detection AI Obviously I will not be covering all these topics with any depth, more like simply defining them so that after my talk, the audience will (hopefully) be able to wrap their heads around how any given game might be developed. What am I missing?

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