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  • I&rsquo;m sorry RPGs, it&rsquo;s not you, it&rsquo;s me: The birth of my game idea

    - by George Clingerman
    One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on.   The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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  • ActiveX component can't create Object Error? Check 64 bit Status

    - by Rick Strahl
    If you're running on IIS 7 and a 64 bit operating system you might run into the following error using ASP classic or ASP.NET with COM interop. In classic ASP applications the error will show up as: ActiveX component can't create object   (Error 429) (actually without error handling the error just shows up as 500 error page) In my case the code that's been giving me problems has been a FoxPro COM object I'd been using to serve banner ads to some of my pages. The code basically looks up banners from a database table and displays them at random. The ASP classic code that uses it looks like this: <% Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" Response.Write(banner.GetBanner(-1)) %> Originally this code had no specific error checking as above so the ASP pages just failed with 500 error pages from the Web server. To find out what the problem is this code is more useful at least for debugging: <% ON ERROR RESUME NEXT Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") Response.Write(err.Number & " - " & err.Description) banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" Response.Write(banner.GetBanner(-1)) %> which results in: 429 - ActiveX component can't create object which at least gives you a slight clue. In ASP.NET invoking the same COM object with code like this: <% dynamic banner = wwUtils.CreateComInstance("wwBanner.aspBanner") as dynamic; banner.cBANNERFILE = "wwsitebanners"; Response.Write(banner.getBanner(-1)); %> results in: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {B5DCBB81-D5F5-11D2-B85E-00600889F23B} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)). The class is in fact registered though and the COM server loads fine from a command prompt or other COM client. This error can be caused by a COM server that doesn't load. It looks like a COM registration error. There are a number of traditional reasons why this error can crop up of course. The server isn't registered (run regserver32 to register a DLL server or /regserver on an EXE server) Access permissions aren't set on the COM server (Web account has to be able to read the DLL ie. Network service) The COM server fails to load during initialization ie. failing during startup One thing I always do to check for COM errors fire up the server in a COM client outside of IIS and ensure that it works there first - it's almost always easier to debug a server outside of the Web environment. In my case I tried the server in Visual FoxPro on the server with: loBanners = CREATEOBJECT("wwBanner.aspBanner") loBanners.cBannerFile = "wwsitebanners" ? loBanners.GetBanner(-1) and it worked just fine. If you don't have a full dev environment on the server you can also use VBScript do the same thing and run the .vbs file from the command prompt: Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" MsgBox(banner.getBanner(-1)) Since this both works it tells me the server is registered and working properly. This leaves startup failures or permissions as the problem. I double checked permissions for the Application Pool and the permissions of the folder where the DLL lives and both are properly set to allow access by the Application Pool impersonated user. Just to be sure I assigned an Admin user to the Application Pool but still no go. So now what? 64 bit Servers Ahoy A couple of weeks back I had set up a few of my Application pools to 64 bit mode. My server is Server 2008 64 bit and by default Application Pools run 64 bit. Originally when I installed the server I set up most of my Application Pools to 32 bit mainly for backwards compatibility. But as more of my code migrates to 64 bit OS's I figured it'd be a good idea to see how well code runs under 64 bit code. The transition has been mostly painless. Until today when I noticed the problem with the code above when scrolling to my IIS logs and noticing a lot of 500 errors on many of my ASP classic pages. The code in question in most of these pages deals with this single simple COM object. It took a while to figure out that the problem is caused by the Application Pool running in 64 bit mode. The issue is that 32 bit COM objects (ie. my old Visual FoxPro COM component) cannot be loaded in a 64 bit Application Pool. The ASP pages using this COM component broke on the day I switched my main Application Pool into 64 bit mode but I didn't find the problem until I searched my logs for errors by pure chance. To fix this is easy enough once you know what the problem is by switching the Application Pool to Enable 32-bit Applications: Once this is done the COM objects started working correctly again. 64 bit ASP and ASP.NET with DCOM Servers This is kind of off topic, but incidentally it's possible to load 32 bit DCOM (out of process) servers from ASP.NET and ASP classic even if those applications run in 64 bit application pools. In fact, in West Wind Web Connection I use this capability to run a 64 bit ASP.NET handler that talks to a 32 bit FoxPro COM server which allows West Wind Web Connection to run in native 64 bit mode without custom configuration (which is actually quite useful). It's probably not a common usage scenario but it's good to know that you can actually access 32 bit COM objects this way from ASP.NET. For West Wind Web Connection this works out well as the DCOM interface only makes one non-chatty call to the backend server that handles all the rest of the request processing. Application Pool Isolation is your Friend For me the recent incident of failure in the classic ASP pages has just been another reminder to be very careful with moving applications to 64 bit operation. There are many little traps when switching to 64 bit that are very difficult to track and test for. I described one issue I had a couple of months ago where one of the default ASP.NET filters was loading the wrong version (32bit instead of 64bit) which was extremely difficult to track down and was caused by a very sneaky configuration switch error (basically 3 different entries for the same ISAPI filter all with different bitness settings). It took me almost a full day to track this down). Recently I've been taken to isolate individual applications into separate Application Pools rather than my past practice of combining many apps into shared AppPools. This is a good practice assuming you have enough memory to make this work. Application Pool isolate provides more modularity and allows me to selectively move applications to 64 bit. The error above came about precisely because I moved one of my most populous app pools to 64 bit and forgot about the minimal COM object use in some of my old pages. It's easy to forget. To 64bit or Not Is it worth it to move to 64 bit? Currently I'd say -not really. In my - admittedly limited - testing I don't see any significant performance increases. In fact 64 bit apps just seem to consume considerably more memory (30-50% more in my pools on average) and performance is minimally improved (less than 5% at the very best) in the load testing I've performed on a couple of sites in both modes. The only real incentive for 64 bit would be applications that require huge data spaces that exceed the 32 bit 4 gigabyte memory limit. However I have a hard time imagining an application that needs 4 gigs of memory in a single Application Pool :-). Curious to hear other opinions on benefits of 64 bit operation. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM   ASP.NET  FoxPro  

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  • Add an Opera Style Status Bar to Firefox

    - by Asian Angel
    Anyone who has used Opera will be familiar with the information presented for the webpage that is currently loading in the browser (i.e. number of images loaded). If you would like to have that same functionality in Firefox then join us as we look at the Extended Statusbar extension. Before Here is the default setup for Firefox…not a lot of information available to indicate exactly how much of the webpage has already loaded versus what has not. For some people this is enough but what if you like more details? Extended Statusbar in Action You may be curious about the information that the Extended Statusbar extension will provide. The information includes: Percentage of the webpage loaded The number of images loaded Bytes downloaded Average download speed The load time After emptying the cache we once again reloaded the HTG homepage. The default style/mode is “Classic Style” and the “webpage load information” will be displayed within your “Status Bar” as shown here. The information available after the webpage finished loading in “Classic Style”. If you prefer “Slim Mode” this is how your “Status Bar” should look afterwards…very condensed. For those preferring the “New Style” a temporary addition will appear above your regular “Status Bar” and disappear just a few seconds after the webpage has fully loaded (unless changed in the “Settings”). Settings The “Settings” are set up in two different ways. For those who prefer to use the “Classic Style & Slim Mode” these are the options available to you. If you prefer the “New Style” then you will have a whole different set of options available. Notice that you can exclude certain webpages and set a custom style if desired. Conclusion If you have been wanting to add Opera style webpage loading information to your “Status Bar” then you should definitely give this extension a try. Links Download the Extended Statusbar extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Move the Progress Bar to the Tabs in FirefoxSet the Speed Dial as the Opera Startup PageAuto-Hide Your Cluttered Firefox Status Bar ItemsSimplify Text Copying & Pasting in Firefox with AutoCopyScan Files for Viruses Before You Download With Dr.Web 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 If it were only this easy SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver

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  • Flash game size and distribution between asset types

    - by EyeSeeEm
    I am currently developing a Flash game and am planning on a large amount of graphics and audio assets, which has led to some questions about Flash game size. By looking at some of the popular games on NG, there seem to be many in the 5-10Mb and a few in the 10-25Mb range. I was wondering if anyone knew of other notable large-scale games and what their sizes were, and if there have been any cases of games being disadvantaged because of their size. What is a common distribution of game size between code, graphics and audio? I know this can vary strongly, but I would like to hear your thoughts on an average case for a high-quality game.

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  • Developing with Fluid UI – The Fluid Home Page

    - by Dave Bain
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} The first place to start with Fluid UI is with the Fluid Home Page. Sometimes it’s referred to as the landing page, but it’s formally called the Fluid Home Page. It’s delivered with PeopleTools 8.54, and the nice thing about it is, it’s a component. That’s one thing you’ll discover with Fluid UI. Fluid UI is built int PeopleTools with Fluid UI. The Home Page is a component, the tiles or grouplets are group boxes, and the search and prompt pages are just pages. It makes it easy to find things, customize and brand the applications (and of course to see what’s going on) when you can open it in AppDesigner. To see what makes a component fluid, let’s start with the Fluid Home Page. It’s a component called PT_LANDINGPAGE. You can open it in AppDesigner and see what’s unique and different about Fluid UI. If you open the Component Properties dialog, you’ll see a new tab called Fluid On the Component Properties Fluid tab you’ll see the most important checkbox of all, Fluid Mode. That is the one flag that will tell PeopleSoft if the component is Fluid (responsive, dynamic layout) or classic (pixel perfect). Now that you know it’s a single flag, you know that a component can’t be both Fluid UI and Classic at the same time, it’s one or the other. There are some other interesting fields on this page. The Small Form Factor Optimized field tells us whether or not to display this on a small device (think smarphone). Header Toolbar Actions offer standard options that are set at the component level so you have complete control of the components header bar. You’ll notice that the PT_LANDINGPAGE has got some PostBuild PeopleCode. That’s to build the grouplets that are used to launch Fluid UI Pages (more about those later). Probably not a good idea to mess with that code! The next thing to look at is the Page Definition for the PT_LANDINGPAGE component. When you open the page PT_LANDINGPAGE it will look different than anything you’ve ever seen. You’re probably thinking “What’s up with all the group boxes”? That is where Fluid UI is so different. In classic PeopleSoft, you put a button, field, group, any control on a page and that’s where it shows up, no questions asked. With Fluid UI, everything is positioned relative to something else. That’s why there are so many containers (you know them as group boxes). They are UI objects that are used for dynamic positioning. The Fluid Home Page has some special behavior and special settings. The first is in the Web Profile Configuration settings (Main Menu->PeopleTools->Web Profile->Web Profile Configuration from the main menu). There are two checkboxes that control the behavior of Fluid UI. Disable Fluid Mode and Disable Fluid On Desktop. Disable Fluid Mode prevents any Fluid UI component from being run from this installation. This is a web profile setting for users that want to run later versions of PeopleTools but only want to run Classic PeopleSoft pages. The second setting, Disable Fluid On Desktop allows the Fluid UI to be run on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, but prevents Fluid UI from running on a desktop computer. Fluid UI settings are also make in My Personalizations (Main Menu->My Personalizations from the Main Menu), in the General Options section. In that section, each user has the choice to determine the home page for their desktop and for tablets. Now that you know the Fluid UI landing page is just a component, and the profile and personalization settings, you should be able to launch one. It’s pretty easy to add a menu using Structure and Content, just make sure the proper security is set up. You’ll have to run a Fluid UI supported browser in order to see it. Latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and IE will do. Check the certification page on MOS for all the details. When you open the first Fluid Landing Page, there’s not much there. Not to worry, we’ll get some content on it soon. Take a moment to navigate around and look at some of the header actions that were set up from the component properties. The home button takes you back to the classic system. You won’t see any notifications and the personalization doesn’t have any content to add. The NavBar icon on the top right has a lot of content, including a Navigator and Classic home. Spend some time looking through what’s available. Stay tuned for more. Next up is adding some content. Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:8.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:107%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Legal responsibility for emebedding code

    - by Tom Gullen
    On our website we have an HTML5 arcade. For each game it has an embed this game on your website copy + paste code box. We've done the approval process of games as strictly and safely as possible, we don't actually think it is possible to have any malicious code in the games. However, we are aware that there's a bunch of people out there smarter than us and they might be able to exploit it. For webmasters wanting to copy + paste our games on their websites, we want to warn them that they are doing it at their own risk - but could we be held responsible if say for instance a malicious game was hosted on an important website and it stole their users credentials and cause them damage? I'm wondering if having an HTML comment in the copy + paste code saying "Use at your own risk" is sufficient.

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  • Is having several desktop environments on one account bad?

    - by Joseph_carp
    I have gnome classic, cinnamon, unity, gnome 3, and KDE installed on my only user account because I enjoy a little change from time to time (although my favorite is gnome classic) so I installed all of these desktop environments. I heard from a friend that it could potentially cause some problems. I was also told that it would be okay if I created a separate account for each environment, but I don't want to if I don't have to. Any help is much appreciated, thank you.

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  • Deterministic replay in a modern game

    - by cloudraven
    I am doing a study in modern games graphics, and as part of the study it would be really helpful to be able to replay a sequence in the game multiple times. For example, recording a series of inputs to get the exact video sequences, but being able to replay them in different computers or different graphics configurations. I want to do this study with a couple of existing commercial games with sophisticated graphics (something released in the last 1 or 2 years if possible). I was thinking on hooking with detours or something similar, calls to time() or srand() to fix all pseudo-number generated results. It would be ideal to have a general solution that works with any game. Since admittedly that is pretty ambitious, I would be happy just having 2 or 3 games in which it is known that I can get deterministic output for a given input. In the end, I will be comparing video output, so I want to avoid noise generated by differences on each execution caused by non-determinism. Any sugestions?

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  • How is game development different from other software development?

    - by Davy8
    For a solid general purpose software developer, what specifically is different about game development, either fundamentally or just differences in degree? I've done toy games like Tic-tac-toe, Tetris, and a brute-force sudoku solver (with UI) and I'm now embarking on a mid-sized project (mid-sized for being a single developer and not having done many games) and one thing I've found with this particular project is that separation of concerns is a lot harder since everything affects state, and every object can interact with every other object in a myriad of ways. So far I've managed to keep the code reasonably clean for my satisfaction but I find that keeping clean code in non-trivial games is a lot harder than it is for my day job. The game I'm working on is turn-based and the graphics are going to be fairly simple (web-based, mostly through DOM manipulation) so real time and 3d work aren't really applicable to me, but I'd still be interested in answers regarding those if they're interesting. Mostly interested in general game logic though. P.S. Feel free to retag this, I'm not really sure what tags are applicable.

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  • Python or HTML5/JS for game development on 2014 [on hold]

    - by AlexKvazos
    So I've decided to give game development a go. I have experience on php/html/css/sql/js(jquery) so learning a new language shouldn't be as hard. I was reading that python and javascript are both nice for simple 2d non-intensive games. I found that python has this library/engine called PyGame but I realized that it was last updated 4 years ago. People still use this? And for javascript, I found libraries like 'pixi.js', 'melon.js' and 'cocos2d'. My goal is to make 2D games that would require the same performance as terraria, realm of the mad god, castle crashers.. and all those types of games. Taking into consideration, that I do want an updated library, what language of this two would be best to choose and what library to grab for it? Thanks in advance, sorry if question is broad. Let me know and I can edit to add more.

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  • 3d environments and managing them on iOS

    - by alJaree
    I would like to start learning 3d game development and currently only develop 2d games. A few basic questions I am interested in are: What is used to create the 3d environments? Are they all done in e.g. Maya, Lightwave, 3d modeling software? What is the output format for these models and how are they manipulated in iOS? Is it all done using openGL(GL ES on iOS)? e.g a monster needs to be spawned in the game world. What coordinates are used? Are the concepts the same as 2d in terms of collision on the coordinates and movement on the coordinates of the game world? How are 3d games managed in iOS on the low available memory. (e.g. FPS games) Lastly, Can someone please recommend a good book that is up to date and can be applied to todays techniques. Thanks

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  • Clickworthy tweets, the sequel&hellip;

    - by Chris Williams
    Twitter moves fast, and if you don’t stay on top of it, you can miss a lot. I don’t follow a ton of people, but I combine it with topic searches. Here are a few things I’ve found that are worth your time and attention, especially if you’re into video games… development or playing: The 15 Greatest Sci-Fi/Horror Games for the Commodore 64 - http://moe.vg/bovATG  (via @jlist)  Practical Tactics for Dealing with Haters! - http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/05/18/tim-ferriss-scam-practical-tactics-for-dealing-with-haters/ (via @The_Zman) Assassin’s Creed 2 + $10 Video Game Credit + $5 MP3 Credit - $24.99 on Amazon.com – http://amzn.to/bvRI9h (via @Assassin10k) Make Small Good – A design article about not trying to compete with ginormous AAA multimillion dollar titles. - http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AlexanderBrandon/20100518/5067/Make_Small_Good.php (via @Kei_tchan) (CW: Excellent article, I do this a lot in my roguelike games!) Purposes for Randomization in Game Design – http://bit.ly/cAH7PG  (via @gamasutra)

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  • Multiplayer Game Listen Servers: Ensuring Integrity

    - by Ankit Soni
    I'm making a simple multiplayer game of Tic Tac Toe in Python using Bridge (its an RPC service built over a message queue - RabbitMQ) and I'd like to structure it so that the client and the server are just one file. When a user runs the game, he is offered a choice to either create a game or join an existing game. So when a user creates a game, the program will create the game and also join him as a player to the game. This is basically a listen server (as opposed to a dedicated server) - a familiar concept in multiplayer games. I came across a really interesting question while trying to make this - how can I ensure that the player hosting the game doesn't tamper with it (or atleast make it difficult)? The player hosting the game has access to the array used to store the board etc., and these must be stored in the process' virtual memory, so it seems like this is impossible. On the other hand, many multiplayer games use this model for LAN games.

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  • Choose at GRUB menu whether NVidia driver should be used

    - by RobinJ
    For some games, I need the nvidia-current driver, but when it's enabled, I can't get my work done as it messes up everything. So is there a way I can get two options in my GRUB menu? One wich will load my operating system with the nvidia-current drivers, and one which will use the default non-proprietary one? It seems a bit stupid to me to have 2 Ubuntu installations (one for games, one for the rest). But I can't get my daily work done with the Nvidia drivers enabled as it messes up some applications, randomly freezes the system, etc. But I still want to be able to play some games. If there's a way to just load and unload the nvidia-current driver with a script or something, that would also be welcome.

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  • How to design a leaderboard?

    - by PeterK
    This sounds like an easy thing but when i considering the following Many players Some have played many games and some just started Different type of statistics ...on what information should the actual ranking be based on. I am planning to display the board in a UITableView so there is limited space available per player. However, I am not bound to the UITableView if there is a better solution. This is a quiz game and the information i am currently capturing per player is: #games played totally #games played per game type (current version have only one game type) #questions answered #correct answers Maybe i should include additional information. I have been thinking about having a leaderboard property page where the player can decide on what basis the leaderboard should display information but would like to avoid the complexity in that. However, if that is needed i will do it. Anyone that can give me some advice on how to design the presentation of this would be highly appreciated?

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  • What do you use to bundle / encrypt data?

    - by David McGraw
    More and more games are going the data driven route which means that there needs to be a layer of security around easy manipulation. I've seen it where games completely bundle up their assets (audio, art, data) and I'm wondering how they are managing that? Are there applications / libraries that will bundle and assist you with managing the assets within? If not is there any good resources that you would point to for packing / unpacking / encryption? This specific question revolves around C++, but I would be open to hear how this is managed in C#/XNA as well. Just to be clear -- I'm not out to engineer a solution to prevent hacking. At the fundamental level we're all manipulating 0's and 1's. But, we do want to keep the 99% of people that play the game from simply modifying XML files that are used to build the game world. I've seen plenty of games bundle all of their resources together. I'm simply curious about the methods they're using.

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  • General solution to solve different sports results in different languages

    - by sq2
    I currently have some code that checks if squash and tennis scores are valid, both in javascript and PHP. This results in 4 blocks of code existing, 2 languages * 2 sports, which does not scale well should any extra sports come around, or extra languages... How can one describe the valid scores of games via a settings/text file, so that each language can parse them and apply these rules. I'm stumped with the strange tie break situations in tennis should it reach 6-6 in a set, and also infinite play off in the final set should it reach 2 sets all. ie: tennis = { "format": [ { "name": "sets" "min": 3, "max": 5, "winby": 1 }, { "name": "games" "min": 6, "max": 7, "winby": 2 } ] } squash = { "format": [ { "name": "games" "min": 3, "max": 5, "winby": 1 }, { "name": "points" "min": 15, "max": 0, "winby": 2 } ] }

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  • 3D Modeling Software for Programmer [closed]

    - by Pathachiever11
    I've recently learned how to make games for Unity3d, and now I want to start making games! I can't wait to start! However, before I can make 3D games, I need to learn 3D modeling for character design, level design, and some animation. What is the easiest 3D modeling software, compatible with Unity3d? I do not want to spend too much time learning the software. From what I've heard, Blender is a bit complicated to use. Maya and 3dsMax seem very powerful. Could someone point me in the right direction? I don't want to spend a lot of time learning. I know its not that easy, but you guys have experience, you guys probably know out of all which one is easier and powerful. Could you recommend a software? Many Thanks!

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  • Managing time for success in the industry? [closed]

    - by nvillec
    So about a year ago I decided to pursue programming, specifically game development, as a career. I've always been a pretty avid gamer, from chucking turnips at Shy Guys' faces in the 90s, to downing Heroic Deathwing last week. Just recently though, I've been spending a LOT of time playing games and it's starting to show in my programming classes. Yesterday after a discouraging exam, I put my foot down and vowed to myself to keep the gaming:coding ratio in favor of the one that will hopefully pay the bills later on. I realize that knowing games well is a key part of being a good developer, but as I've been recently shown, there's a threshold of pixelated indulgence that must not be crossed if I'm ever going to land my dream job. I'm assuming many of you are quite enthusiastic about games as well. What advice would you give an aspiring programmer regarding time management? Thanks!! (Also, I'm brand new to Stack Exchange...if this belongs somewhere else, I'm happy to move it)

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  • my application icon won't show in Ubuntu 12.04 session fallback mode

    - by Nelson Teixeira
    I have a Python application that shows a systray icon, but it just won't appear in Ubuntu 12.04 session fallback mode (Gnome Classic WITH effects). It appears in 10.04, and in 12.04 with Unity. The problem is just in Gnome Classic. I've already set: gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']" and I installed indicator-applet-complete but Alt-Win-right click won't work Anyone has any idea what can be wrong ?

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  • Be the first in the UK to leanr about Windows Mobile 7

    - by simonsabin
    Register Now for UK Tech Days: Windows Phone 7 Series https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-GB&eventid=1032442961   Come and join us to learn how to build applications and games for Windows Phone 7 Series.   Be amongst the first in the UK to learn how to build applications and games for Windows Phone 7 Series. We’ll introduce you to the development platform and show you how to work with the Windows Phone 7 Series development tools.  Each session will ramp up your knowledge and help you become skilled in developing games and apps for Windows Phone 7.   This will be a fun and practical day of detailed Windows Phone 7 Series development sessions covering the new Windows Phone 7 Series specification, applications technologies and services.  

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  • 5 Tips and Tricks to Get the Most Out of Steam

    - by Chris Hoffman
    If you’re a PC gamer, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Valve’s Steam and use it regularly. Steam includes a variety of cool features that you might not notice if you’re just using it to install and launch games. These tips will help you take advantage of an SSD for faster game loading times, browse the web from within a game, download games remotely, create backup copies of your games, and use strong security features. HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me? HTG Explains: How Windows 8′s Secure Boot Feature Works & What It Means for Linux Hack Your Kindle for Easy Font Customization

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  • Cookie/money/point clicker game origin?

    - by gavenkoa
    I can't find myself origin of Clicker like games. It's where the goal is to gain points through clicks and acquired enhancement. There's only one strategy in the game - deciding how efficiently spend point on enhancement (see formulas). I've seen many games like this, but it seems that most don't have a home page or have an unknown publisher. Some well known games of this type: Candy Box Cookie Clicker Cow Clicker Who is first implemented this idea (not only clicking but with investment model - when player must decide what improve to faster gather points)?

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  • The true cost to get my XNA game on XBox?

    - by Fëanor
    There seem to be many hurdles to get ones game onto Xbox, so far I have uncovered: You need Visual Studio (once your game becomes commercial you cannot use Express - but have to pay for professional). $1000+ You then buy a XBox to find you also need a harddrive - so buy a Xbox harddrive too. $400 You need to buy XBox Gold LIVE subscription. $70 You need to buy AppHub Creators Club subscription $100 Then after all that I cannot even find the place on my XBox to download Indie games?!!! Seriously WTF - after doing all this I could have come proficient in WebGL and done it all for free... Before I go all the way down this path (hole) are there any other hidden hurdels before I can publish my game? UPDATE: "Indie Games are not available in Australia, due to the requirement for all games to be rated by the Australian Classification Board, and the prohibitive expenses involved."....... im going to have to break something....

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  • Start Game Programming [on hold]

    - by vishalpamnani
    I am 23 and working as a Software Developer. Though my work is entirely based on Java and Advanced Java, I know a very little and all my interest is in developing games. I want to make a my career in Gaming Industry as a Game Programmer. I am not able to figure out the starting step to start with Game Programming. I have zero knowledge with developing games and never ever tried a tiniest of game. Please suggest me from where to start. Which programming language to start with? What should be my practice? What references to use? What type of games to begin with? BTW my preferable language would be C++ ~Thanks

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