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• Complete Beginner to Game Programming and Unreal Engine 4, Looking For Advice [on hold]

  - by onemic

  I am currently a 2nd year programming student(Just finished my first year so I will be starting my second year in September) and have mainly learned C and C++ in my classes. In terms of what I know of C++, I know about general inheritance, polymorphism, overloading operators, iterators, a little bit about templates(only class and function templates) etc. but not of the more advanced topics like linked lists and other sequential containers(containers in general I guess), enumerations, most of the standard library(other than like strings and vectors), and probably a bunch of other stuff I dont even know about yet. I subscribed to Unreal Engine 4 as I was very intrigued by their Unreal Tournament announcement earlier this month, especially after hearing that UE4 is going completely C++. Of course my end goal in doing this programming program is to eventually go into game/graphics programming. Since it's my summer off, I thought what better way then to actually apply some of my skills to a personal project so I actually have a firmer understanding of C++ past what my professors tell me. My questions are this: What would be the best way to start off making a small personal game in UE4 as a project for the summer? What should I be aiming for, especially for someone that is still learning C++? Should I focus on making a simple 2D game rather than a 3D one to get started? Seeing the Flappy Chicken showcase intrigued me because before I thought the UE engine was pretty much pigeonholed into being for FPS games What should my expectations be going into UE4 and a game engine for the first time?(UE4 will be my first foray into making a game) What can I expect to gain from making things in UE4, in terms of making games and in terms of further fleshing out my knowledge of C++? Would you recommend I start off 100% using C++ for scripting or using the visual blueprints? Since I'm not a designer, how would I be able to add objects and designs to my game? For someone at my level is retaining the UE4 subscription worth it or is it better to cancel and resub when I learn enough about UE4 and C++? Lastly is there anything to be gained in terms of knowledge/insight through me looking at the source code for UE4? I opened it in VS2013, but noticed that most of the files were C# files and not cpp's. Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer.

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• More elegant way to avoid hard coding the format of a a CSV file?

  - by dsollen

  I know this is trivial issue, but I just feel this can be more elegant. So I need to write/read data files for my program, lets say they are CSV for now. I can implement the format as I see fit, but I may have need to change that format later. The simply thing to do is something like out.write(For.getValue()+","+bar.getMinValue()+","+fi.toString()); This is easy to write, but obviously is guilty of hard coding and the general 'magic number' issue. The format is hard-coded, requires parsing of the code to figure out the file format, and changing the format requires changing multiple methods. I could instead have my constants specifying the location that I want each variable to be saved in the CSV file to remove some of the 'magic numbers'; then save/load into the an array at the location specified by the constants: int FOO_LOCATION=0; int BAR_MIN_VAL_LOCATION=1; int FI_LOCATION=2 int NUM_ARGUMENTS=3; String[] outputArguments=new String[NUM_ARGUMENTS]; outputArguments[FOO_LOCATION] = foo.getValue(); outputArgumetns[BAR_MIN_VAL_LOCATION] = bar.getMinValue(); outptArguments[FI_LOCATOIN==fi.toString(); writeAsCSV(outputArguments); But this is...extremely verbose and still a bit ugly. It makes it easy to see the format of existing CSV and to swap the location of variables within the file easily. However, if I decide to add an extra value to the csv I need to not only add a new constant, but also modify the read and write methods to add the logic that actually saves/reads the argument from the array; I still have to hunt down every method using these variables and change them by hand! If I use Java enums I can clean this up slightly, but the real issue is still present. Short of some sort of functional programming (and java's inner classes are too ugly to be considered functional) I still have no obvious way of clearly expressing what variable is associated with each constant short of writing (and maintaining) it in the read/write methods. For instance I still need to write somewhere that the FOO_LOCATION specifies the location of foo.getValue(). It seems as if there should be a prettier, easier to maintain, manner for approaching this? Incidentally, I'm working in java at the moment, however, I am interested conceptually about the design approach regardless of language. Some library in java that does all the work for me is definitely welcome (though it may prove more hassle to get permission to add it to the codebase then to just write something by hand quickly), but what I'm really asking is more about how to write elegant code if you had to do this by hand.

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• Our own Daily WTF

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dvroegop/archive/2014/08/20/our-own-daily-wtf.aspxIf you're a developer, you've probably heard of the website the DailyWTF. If you haven't, head on over to http://www.thedailywtf.com and read. And laugh. I'll wait. Read it? Good. If you're a bit like me probably you've been wondering how on earth some people ever get hired as a software engineer. Most of the stories there seem to weird to be true: no developer would write software like that right? And then you run into a little nugget of code one of your co-workers wrote. And then you realize: "Hey, it happens everywhere!" Look at this piece of art I found in our codebase recently: public static decimal ToDecimal(this string input) {     System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture;     var numberFormatInfo = (System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo)cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();     int dotIndex = input.IndexOf(".");     int commaIndex = input.IndexOf(",");     if (dotIndex > commaIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ".";     else if (commaIndex > dotIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ",";     decimal result;     if (decimal.TryParse(input, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Float, numberFormatInfo, out result))         return result;     else         throw new Exception(string.Format("Invalid input for decimal parsing: {0}. Decimal separator: {1}.", input, numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator)); }  Me and a collegue have been looking long and hard at this and what we concluded was the following: Apparently, we don't trust our users to be able to correctly set the culture in Windows. Users aren't able to determine if they should tell Windows to use a decimal point or a comma to display numbers. So what we've done here is make sure that whatever the user enters, we'll translate that into whatever the user WANTS to enter instead of what he actually did. So if you set your locale to US, since you're a US citizen, but you want to enter the number 12.34 in the Dutch style (because, you know, the Dutch are way cooler with numbers) so you enter 12,34 we will understand this and respect your wishes! Of course, if you change your mind and in the next input field you decide to use the decimal dot again, that's fine with us as well. We will do the hard work. Now, I am all for smart software. Software that can handle all sorts of input the user can think of. But this feels a little uhm, I don't know.. wrong.. Or am I too old fashioned?

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• How far should an entity take care of its properties values by itself?

  - by Kharlos Dominguez

  Let's consider the following example of a class, which is an entity that I'm using through Entity Framework. - InvoiceHeader - BilledAmount (property, decimal) - PaidAmount (property, decimal) - Balance (property, decimal) I'm trying to find the best approach to keep Balance updated, based on the values of the two other properties (BilledAmount and PaidAmount). I'm torn between two practices here: Updating the balance amount every time BilledAmount and PaidAmount are updated (through their setters) Having a UpdateBalance() method that the callers would run on the object when appropriate. I am aware that I can just calculate the Balance in its getter. However, it isn't really possible because this is an entity field that needs to be saved back to the database, where it has an actual column, and where the calculated amount should be persisted to. My other worry about the automatically updating approach is that the calculated values might be a little bit different from what was originally saved to the database, due to rounding values (an older version of the software, was using floats, but now decimals). So, loading, let's say 2000 entities from the database could change their status and make the ORM believe that they have changed and be persisted back to the database the next time the SaveChanges() method is called on the context. It would trigger a mass of updates that I am not really interested in, or could cause problems, if the calculation methods changed (the entities fetched would lose their old values to be replaced by freshly recalculated ones, simply by being loaded). Then, let's take the example even further. Each invoice has some related invoice details, which also have BilledAmount, PaidAmount and Balance (I'm simplifying my actual business case for the sake of the example, so let's assume the customer can pay each item of the invoice separately rather than as a whole). If we consider the entity should take care of itself, any change of the child details should cause the Invoice totals to change as well. In a fully automated approach, a simple implementation would be looping through each detail of the invoice to recalculate the header totals, every time one the property changes. It probably would be fine for just a record, but if a lot of entities were fetched at once, it could create a significant overhead, as it would perform this process every time a new invoice detail record is fetched. Possibly worse, if the details are not already loaded, it could cause the ORM to lazy-load them, just to recalculate the balances. So far, I went with the Update() method-way, mainly for the reasons I explained above, but I wonder if it was right. I'm noticing I have to keep calling these methods quite often and at different places in my code and it is potential source of bugs. It also has a detrimental effect on data-binding because when the properties of the detail or header changes, the other properties are left out of date and the method has no way to be called. What is the recommended approach in this case?

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• Draw images with warped triangles on a web server [migrated]

  - by epologee

  The scenario The Flash front end of my current project produces images that a web server needs to combine into a video. Both frame-rate and frame-resolution are sizeable enough that sending an image sequence to the back end is not feasible (in both time and client bandwidth). Instead, we're trying to recreate the image drawing on the back end as well. Correct and slow, or incorrect and fast The problem is that this involves quite a bit of drawing textured triangles, and two solutions we found in Python (here and there) are so inefficient, that the drawing takes about 60 seconds per frame, resulting in a whopping 7,5 hours of processing time for a 30 second clip. Unacceptable. When using a PHP-module to send commands to ImageMagick for image manipulation, the whole process is super fast (tenths of a second per frame), but ImageMagick seems to be unable to draw triangles the way we do it in the front end, so the final results do not match. Unacceptable. What I'm asking here, is if there's someone who would know a way to solve this issue, by any means necessary that would run on a web server. Warping an image Let me explain the process of the front end: Perform a Delaunay calculation on points in an image to get an evenly distributed mesh of triangles. Offset the points/vertices in the mesh, distorting or warping the image. Draw the warped triangles on a new bitmap. We can send the results (coordinates) of steps 1 and 2 to the back end, to then draw the warped triangles and save it to an image on disk (or append as a frame to the video). But that last step is what I need help with. The Question Is there an alternative to ImageMagick that can draw triangles in a bitmap? Is there some other library, like a C library, that would allow us to do this? Or could we achieve this effect more easily by switching back end technologies, like Ruby? (.Net and Java are, unfortunately, not really options right now) Many thanks. EP. P.S. I'd appreciate re-tagging efforts, I don't quite know what labels to put on this question. Thanks!

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• Why can't I install Microsoft Office 2007 in Ubuntu 11.04?

  - by DK new

  I am very new to Ubuntu and only just getting a hang of it, and my questions might sound stupid especially because I am a learner in terms of techie things as well. So because of the nature of work where everyone uses stupid Windows and Microsoft, I need to have access to MS Office 2007/2010 as documents with too many tables or images open all haywire in Libre Office (which has otherwise been great!). I have been reading up about installing MS Office through WINE/PlayonLinux, but have been unsuccessful so far. I downloaded a MS Office 2007 package from Pirate Bay, which I extracted into a folder. I tried numerous different ways to install through WINE and PlayonLinux, but will discuss the one which seems to be getting me somewhere. http://www.webupd8.org/2011/01/how-to-install-microsoft-office-2007-in.html ..... Initially, when I would click on the install button of MS Office, I get a message saying "The install location you selected does not have 1558MB free space. Free up space from the selected install location or choose a different install location". The install location in this case said "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office", which confused me as I don't have drives named as C, Z etc. I went to configure WINE and under the drives tab, created a drive named A with the path location /media/cd025f16-433b-4a90-abb6-bb7a025d0450/. Also the space thing is confusing as I have at least 450GB of unused space on my computer. anyways, when I selected the A drive for installation, the installation starts, but soon I get the following error message, "Office cannot find Office.en-us\OfficeLR.Cab. Browse to a valid installation source" .... The part saying "OfficeLR.Cab" have said different things after the Office bit every time I have made an attempt. When I select the Office.en-us sub-folder or any other folder within the folder where MS Office 2007 is saved, it says "invalid source"! I have been trying to get this sorted since 15hrs now (addictive!) and have learnt loads of things in the process, but have not managed to crack it. It might be something stupidly simple I am not aware off that is stopping it. I would really appreciate some help! Thanks a lot.. Also I am still getting used to the language, so might have many questions Also I am using Ubuntu 11.04 (tag 11.04). Also I think I don't have windows -- when my friend installed Ubuntu on my new laptop which had Windows 7, he was trying to keep windows in a separate partition, but something happened and windows was not there! Looking forward to some support! Again thanks a lot

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• Rending 2D Tile World (With Player In The Middle)

  - by Mick

  What I have at the moment is a series of data structures I'm using, and I would like to render the world onto the screen (just the visible parts). I've actually already done this several times (lots of rewrites), but it's a bit buggy (rounding seems to make the screen jump ever so slightly every x tiles the player walks past). Basically I've been confusing myself heavily on what I feel should be a pretty simple problem... so here I am asking for some help! OK! So I have a 50x50 array holding the tiles of the world. I have the player position as 2 floats, x ([0, 49]) and y ([0, 49]) in that array. I have the application size exactly in pixels (x and y). I have an arbitrary TILE_SIZE static int (based on screen pixels). What I think is heavily confusing me is using a 2d orthogonal projection in opengl which maps (0,0) to the top left of the screen and (SCREEN_SIZE_X, SCREEN_SIZE_Y) to the bottom right of the screen. gl.glMatrixMode(GL.GL_PROJECTION); gl.glLoadIdentity(); glu.gluOrtho2D(0, getActualWidth(), getActualHeight(), 0); gl.glMatrixMode(GL.GL_MODELVIEW); gl.glLoadIdentity(); The map tiles are set so that the (0,0) in the array is the bottom left. And the player has to be in the middle on the screen (SCREEN_SIZE_X/2, SCREEN_SIZE_Y/2). What I've been doing so far is trying to render 1-2 tiles more all around what would be displayed on the screen so that I don't have to worry about figuring out rendering half a tile from the top left, depending where the player is. It seems like such an easy problem but after spending about 40+hours on it rewriting it many times I think I'm at a point where I just can't think clearly anymore... Any help would be appreciated. It would be great if someone can provide some very basic pseudo code on keeping the player in the middle when your projection is mapped to screen coordinates and only rendering basically the tiles that you would be any be see. Thanks!

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• Yet another frustum culling question

  - by Christian Frantz

  This one is kinda specific. If I'm to implement frustum culling in my game, that means each one of my cubes would need a bounding sphere. My first question is can I make the sphere so close to the edge of the cube that its still easily clickable for destroying and building? Frustum culling is easily done in XNA as I've recently learned, I just need to figure out where to place the code for the culling. I'm guessing in my method that draws all my cubes but I could be wrong. My camera class currently implements a bounding frustum which is in the update method like so frustum.Matrix = (view * proj); Simple enough, as I can call that when I have a camera object in my class. This works for now, as I only have a camera in my main game class. The problem comes when I decide to move my camera to my player class, but I can worry about that later. ContainmentType CurrentContainmentType = ContainmentType.Disjoint; CurrentContainmentType = CamerasFrustrum.Contains(cubes.CollisionSphere); Can it really be as easy as adding those two lines to my foreach loop in my draw method? Or am I missing something bigger here? UPDATE: I have added the lines to my draw methods and it works great!! So great infact that just moving a little bit removes the whole map. Many factors could of caused this, so I'll try to break it down. cubeBoundingSphere = new BoundingSphere(cubePosition, 0.5f); This is in my cube constructor. cubePosition is stored in an array, The vertices that define my cube are factors of 1 ie: (1,0,1) so the radius should be .5. I least I think it should. The spheres are created every time a cube is created of course. ContainmentType CurrentContainmentType = ContainmentType.Disjoint; foreach (Cube block in cube.cubes) { CurrentContainmentType = cam.frustum.Contains(cube.cubeBoundingSphere); ///more code here if (CurrentContainmentType != ContainmentType.Disjoint) { cube.Draw(effect); } Within my draw method. Now I know this works because the map disappears, its just working wrong. Any idea on what I'm doing wrong?

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• What You Said: Staying Productive While Working from home

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this week we asked you to share your telecommuting/work-from-home productivity tips. Now we’re back with a tips and tricks roundup; read on to see how your fellow readers stay focused at home. By far and away the most common technique deployed as carefully isolating work from home life. Carol writes: I love working from home and have done so for 6 years now. I have a routine just as if I was going to an office, except my commute is 12 steps. I get ready for work, grab my purse and smart phone and go to up the steps to my office. I maintain a separate phone line and voice mail for work that I cannot answer from anywhere but my work desk. I use call forwarding when I travel so only my office phone number is published. I have VOIP phone service so I can forward calls from the internet if I forget, or need to change where the phone is forwarded. I do have a wired and wireless head set so I can go get a cold drink if on one of those long boring conference calls. I plan my ‘get off from work’ time and try to stick to it, as with any job some days I am late getting off, but it all works out. I make sure my office is for work only, any other computer play time is in a different part of the house on different computer. My office has laptop, dock, couple of monitors, multipurpose printer, fax, scanner, file cabinets – just like the office at a company. I just also happen to have a couple of golden retrievers that come to work with me and usually lay quietly until 5, and yes they know it is 5pm sometimes before I do. For me, one of the biggest concerns when working from home is not being unproductive, but the danger of never stopping work. You could keep going and going because let’s face it – the company will let you do it, so I set myself up to prevent that and maintain a separateness. HTG Explains: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus? How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate “Program Files (x86)” Folder?

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• How to specialize a c++ variadic template?

  - by Serge

  I'm trying to understand c++ variadic templates. I'm not much aware of the correct language to use to explain what I'd like to achieve, so it might be simpler if I provide a bit of code which illustrate what I'd like to achieve. #include <iostream> #include <string> using namespace std; template<int ...A> class TestTemplate1 { public: string getString() { return "Normal"; } }; template<int T, int ...A> string TestTemplate1<2, A...>::getString() { return "Specialized"; } template<typename ...A> class TestTemplate2 { }; int main() { TestTemplate1<1, 2, 3, 4> t1_1; TestTemplate1<1, 2> t1_2; TestTemplate1<> t1_3; TestTemplate1<2> t1_4; TestTemplate2<> t2_1; TestTemplate2<int, double> t2_2; cout << t1_1.getString() << endl; cout << t1_2.getString() << endl; cout << t1_3.getString() << endl; cout << t1_4.getString() << endl; } This throws several errors. error C2333: 'TestTemplate1<::getString' : error in function declaration; skipping function body error C2333: 'TestTemplate1<1,2,3,4::getString' : error in function declaration; skipping function body error C2333: 'TestTemplate1<1,2::getString' : error in function declaration; skipping function body error C2333: 'TestTemplate1<2::getString' : error in function declaration; skipping function body error C2977: 'TestTemplate1' : too many template arguments error C2995: 'std::string TestTemplate1::getString(void)' : function template has already been defined error C3860: template argument list following class template name must list parameters in the order used in template parameter list How can I have a specialized behavior for every TestTemplate1<2, ...> instances like t1_4?

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• TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

  - by BuckWoody

  Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• How do you conquer the challenge of designing for large screen real-estate?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  This question is a bit more subjective, but I'm hoping to get some new perspective. I'm so used to designing for a certain screen size (typically 1024x768) that I find that size to not be a problem. Expanding the size to 1280x1024 doesn't buy you enough screen real estate to make an appreciable difference, but will give me a little more breathing room. Basically, I just expand my "grid size" and the same basic design for the slightly smaller screen still works. However, in the last couple of projects my clients were all using 1080p (1920x1080) screens and they wanted solutions to use as much of that real estate as possible. 1920 pixels across provides just under twice the width I am used to, and the wide screen makes some of my old go to design approaches not to work as well. The problem I'm running into is that when presented with so much space, I'm confronted with some major problems. How many columns should I use? The wide format lends itself to a 3 column split with a 2:1:1 split (i.e. the content column bigger than the other two). However, if I go with three columns what do I do with that extra column? How do I make efficient use of the screen real estate? There's a temptation to put everything on the screen at once, but too much information actually makes the application harder to use. White space is important to help make sense of complex information, but too much makes related concepts look too separate. I'm usually working with web applications that have complex data, and visualization and presentation is key to making sense of the raw data. When your user also has a large screen (at least 24"), some information is out of eye sight and you need to move the pointer a long distance. How do you make sure everything that's needed stays within the visual hot points? Simple sites like blogs actually do better when the width is constrained, which results in a lot of wasted real estate. I kind of wonder if having the text box and the text preview side by side would be a big benefit for the admin side of that type of screen? (1:1 two column split). For your answers, I know almost everything in design is "it depends". What I'm looking for is: General principles you use How your approach to design has changed I'm finding that i have to retrain myself how to work with this different format. Every bump in resolution I've worked through to date has been about 25%: 640 to 800 (25% increase), 800 to 1024 (28% increase), and 1024 to 1280 (25% increase). However, the jump from 1280 to 1920 is a good 50% increase in space--the equivalent from jumping from 640 straight to 1024. There was no commonly used middle size to help learn lessons more gradually.

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• If most of team can't follow the architecture, what do you do?

  - by Chris

  Hi all, I'm working on a greenfields project with two other developers. We're all contractors, and myself and one other just started working on the project while the orginal one has been doing most of the basic framework coding. In the past month, my fellow programmer and I have been just frustrated by the design descisions done by our co-worker. Here's a little background information: The application at face value appeared to be your standard n-layered web application using C# on the 3.5 framework. We have a data layer, business layer and a web interface. But as we got deeper into the project we found some very interesting things that have caused us some troubles. There is a custom data access sqlHelper type base which only accepts dictionary key/valued entries and returns only data tables. There are no entity objects, but there are some massive objects which do everything and then are tossed into session for persitance. The general idea is that the pages (.aspx) don't do anything, while the controls (.ascx) do everything. The general flow is that a client clicks on a button, which goes to a user control base which passes a process request to the 'BLL' class which goes to the page processor, which then goes to a getControlProcessor, which at last actually processes the request. The request itself is made up of a dictionary which is passing a string valued method name, stored procedure name, a control name and possibly a value. All switching of the processing is done by comparing the string values of the control names and method names. Pages are linked together via a common header control that uses a combination of javascript and tables to create a hyperlink effect. And as I found out yesterday, a simple hyperlink between one page and another does not work because of the need to have quite a bit of information in session to determine which control to display on a page. My fellow programmer and I both believe that this is a strange and uncommon approach to web application development. Both of us have been in this business for over five years and neither of us have seen this approach. My question is this, how would we approach our co-worker and voice our concerns and what should we do if he does not want to accept the criteic? We both do not want to insult the work that has been done, but feel that going forward will create a nightmare for development. Thanks for your comments.

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• June 2013 release of SSDT contains a minor bug that you should be aware of

  - by jamiet

  I have discovered what seems, to me, like a bug in the June 2013 release of SSDT and given the problems that it created yesterday on my current gig I thought it prudent to write this blog post to inform people of it. I’ve built a very simple SSDT project to reproduce the problem that has just two tables, [Table1] and [Table2], and also a procedure [Procedure1]: The two tables have exactly the same definition, both a have a single column called [Id] of type integer. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Table1] (     [Id] INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY ) My stored procedure simply joins the two together, orders them by the column used in the join predicate, and returns the results: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[Procedure1] AS     SELECT t1.*     FROM    Table1 t1     INNER JOIN Table2 t2         ON    t1.Id = t2.Id     ORDER BY Id Now if I create those three objects manually and then execute the stored procedure, it works fine: So we know that the code works. Unfortunately, SSDT thinks that there is an error here: The text of that error is: Procedure: [dbo].[Procedure1] contains an unresolved reference to an object. Either the object does not exist or the reference is ambiguous because it could refer to any of the following objects: [dbo].[Table1].[Id] or [dbo].[Table2].[Id]. Its complaining that the [Id] field in the ORDER BY clause is ambiguous. Now you may well be thinking at this point “OK, just stick a table alias into the ORDER BY predicate and everything will be fine!” Well that’s true, but there’s a bigger problem here. One of the developers at my current client installed this drop of SSDT and all of a sudden all the builds started failing on his machine – he had errors left right and centre because, as it transpires, we have a fair bit of code that exhibits this scenario.  Worse, previous installations of SSDT do not flag this code as erroneous and therein lies the rub. We immediately had a mass panic where we had to run around the department to our developers (of which there are many) ensuring that none of them should upgrade their SSDT installation if they wanted to carry on being productive for the rest of the day. Also bear in mind that as soon as a new drop of SSDT comes out then the previous version is instantly unavailable so rolling back is going to be impossible unless you have created an administrative install of SSDT for that previous version. Just thought you should know! In the grand schema of things this isn’t a big deal as the bug can be worked around with a simple code modification but forewarned is forearmed so they say! Last thing to say, if you want to know which version of SSDT you are running check my blog post Which version of SSDT Database Projects do I have installed? @Jamiet

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• Java @Contented annotation to help reduce false sharing

  - by Dave

  See this posting by Aleksey Shipilev for details -- @Contended is something we've wanted for a long time. The JVM provides automatic layout and placement of fields. Usually it'll (a) sort fields by descending size to improve footprint, and (b) pack reference fields so the garbage collector can process a contiguous run of reference fields when tracing. @Contended gives the program a way to provide more explicit guidance with respect to concurrency and false sharing. Using this facility we can sequester hot frequently written shared fields away from other mostly read-only or cold fields. The simple rule is that read-sharing is cheap, and write-sharing is very expensive. We can also pack fields together that tend to be written together by the same thread at about the same time. More generally, we're trying to influence relative field placement to minimize coherency misses. Fields that are accessed closely together in time should be placed proximally in space to promote cache locality. That is, temporal locality should condition spatial locality. Fields accessed together in time should be nearby in space. That having been said, we have to be careful to avoid false sharing and excessive invalidation from coherence traffic. As such, we try to cluster or otherwise sequester fields that tend to written at approximately the same time by the same thread onto the same cache line. Note that there's a tension at play: if we try too hard to minimize single-threaded capacity misses then we can end up with excessive coherency misses running in a parallel environment. Theres no single optimal layout for both single-thread and multithreaded environments. And the ideal layout problem itself is NP-hard. Ideally, a JVM would employ hardware monitoring facilities to detect sharing behavior and change the layout on the fly. That's a bit difficult as we don't yet have the right plumbing to provide efficient and expedient information to the JVM. Hint: we need to disintermediate the OS and hypervisor. Another challenge is that raw field offsets are used in the unsafe facility, so we'd need to address that issue, possibly with an extra level of indirection. Finally, I'd like to be able to pack final fields together as well, as those are known to be read-only.

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• Storing hierarchical template into a database

  - by pduersteler

  If this title is ambiguous, feel free to change it, I don't know how to put this in a one-liner. Example: Let's assume you have a html template which contains some custom tags, like <text_field />. We now create a page based on a template containing more of those custom tags. When a user wants to edit the page, he sees a text field. he can input things and save it. This looks fairly easy to set up. You either have something like a template_positions table which stores the content of those fields. Case: I now have a bit of a blockade keeping things as simple as possible. Assume you have the same tag given in your example, and additionally, <layout> and <repeat> tags. Here's an example how they should be used: <repeat> <layout name="image-left"> <image /> <text_field /> </layout> <layout name="image-right"> <text_field /> <image /> </layout> </repeat> We now have a block which can be repeated, obviously. This means: when creting/editing a page containing such a template block, I can choose between a layout image-left and image-right which then gets inserted as content element (where content for <image /> and <text_field /> gets stored). And because this is inside a <repeat>, content elements from the given layouts can be inserted multiple times. How do you store this? Simply said, this could be stored with the same setup I've wrote in the example above, I just need to add a parent_id or something similiar to maintain a hierarchy. but I think I am missing something. At least the relation between an inserted content element and the origin/insertion point is missing. And what happens when I update the template file? Do I have to give every custom tag that acts as editable part of a template an identifier that matches an identifier in the template to substitue them correctly? Or can you think of a clean solution that might be better?

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• Adding JavaScript to your code dependent upon conditions

  - by DavidMadden

  You might be in an environment where you code is source controlled and where you might have build options to different environments.  I recently encountered this where the same code, built on different configurations, would have the website at a different URL.  If you are working with ASP.NET as I am you will have to do something a bit crazy but worth while.  If someone has a more efficient solution please share. Here is what I came up with to make sure the client side script was placed into the HEAD element for the Google Analytics script.  GA wants to be the last in the HEAD element so if you are doing others in the Page_Load then you should do theirs last. The settings object below is an instance of a class that holds information I collection.  You could read from different sources depending on where you stored your unique ID for Google Analytics. *** This has been formatted to fit this screen. *** if (!IsPostBack) { if (settings.GoogleAnalyticsID != null || settings.GoogleAnalyticsID != string.Empty) { string str = @"//<!CDATA[ var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', '"  + settings.GoogleAnalyticsID + "']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);  (function () {  var ga = document.createElement('script');  ga.type = 'text/javascript';  ga.async = true;  ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol  ? 'https://ssl' :  'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];  s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);})();"; System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl si =  new System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl(); si.TagName = "script"; si.Attributes.Add("type", @"text/javascript"); si.InnerHtml = sb.ToString(); this.Page.Header.Controls.Add(si); } } The code above will prevent the code from executing if it is a PostBack and then if the ID was not able to be read or something caused the settings to be lost by accident. If you have larger function to declare, you can use a StringBuilder to separate the lines. This is the most compact I wished to go and manage readability.

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• Best way to determine surface normal for a group of pixels?

  - by Paul Renton

  One of my current endeavors is creating a 2D destructible terrain engine for iOS Cocos2D (See https://github.com/crebstar/PWNDestructibleTerrain ). It is in an infant stages no doubt, but I have made significant progress since starting a couple weeks ago. However, I have run into a bit of a performance road block with calculating surface normals. Note: For my destructible terrain engine, an alpha of 0 is considered to not be solid ground. The method posted below works just great given small rectangles, such as n < 30. Anything above 30 causes a dip in the frame rate. If you approach 100x100 then you might as well read a book while the sprite attempts to traverse the terrain. At the moment this is the best I can come up with for altering the angle on a sprite as it roams across terrain (to get the angle for a sprite's orientation just take dot product of 100 * normal * (1,0) vector). -(CGPoint)getAverageSurfaceNormalAt:(CGPoint)pt withRect:(CGRect)area { float avgX = 0; float avgY = 0; ccColor4B color = ccc4(0, 0, 0, 0); CGPoint normal; float len; for (int w = area.size.width; w >= -area.size.width; w--) { for (int h = area.size.height; h >= -area.size.height; h--) { CGPoint pixPt = ccp(w + pt.x, h + pt.y); if ([self pixelAt:pixPt colorCache:&color]) { if (color.a != 0) { avgX -= w; avgY -= h; } // end inner if } // end outer if } // end inner for } // end outer for len = sqrtf(avgX * avgX + avgY * avgY); if (len == 0) { normal = ccp(avgX, avgY); } else { normal = ccp(avgX/len, avgY/len); } // end if return normal; } // end get My problem is I have sprites that require larger rectangles in order for their movement to look realistic. I considered doing a cache of all surface normals, but this lead to issues of knowing when to recalculate the surface normals and these calculations also being quite expensive (also how large should the blocks be?). Another smaller issue is I don't know how to properly treat the case when length is = 0. So I am stuck... Any advice from the community would be greatly appreciated! Is my method the best possible one? Or should I rethink the algorithm? I am new to game development and always looking to learn new tips and tricks.

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• How quickly to leave contract-to-hire gig where you don't want to be hired? [closed]

  - by nono

  So you move to a big new city with tons of software development opportunity, having taken a six month contract-to-hire job. The company treats you really well and has a good team and work environment. However, the recruiter assured you when offering the gig that it would be a good position in which you can advance your learning from more senior developers (a primary concern of yours) but you're starting to realize that a job recruiter isn't going to understand that the team in question isn't very up on modern software practices (you start to sympathize with this guy and read his post over and over again: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1586166/career-killer-nhibernate-oop-design-patterns-domain-driven-design-test-driv) and that much of the company's software is very old and very very poorly architected, and the company (like so many others) seems to be only concerned with continually extending the software without investing in any structural improvements. You're absolutely dismayed at how long it takes your team (including) to fulfill simple feature requests (maybe 500-1000% longer than with better designed software that you've worked on in the past), but no one else there seems to think anything of it. You find that the work and the company's business are intensely uninteresting to you, but due to the convoluted design of their various software systems, fulfilling the work will require as much mental engagement as any other development position. You feel a bit naive about not having asked the right questions during your interview process, and for not having anticipated that your team at your former podunk company might possibly be light-years ahead of any team in Big Shiny City, but you know you don't want to stay at this place, and (were it not for your personal, after-hours studying and personal programming efforts) fear that you might actually give a worse interview after completing your 6 months than you did when you started at the place. You read about how hard of a time local companies are having filling their positions with qualified software development candidates. You read all sorts of fabulous sounding job postings online and feel like you're really missing out. In spite of the comfortable environment you feel like you would willingly accept a somewhat more demanding or aggressive lifestyle to feel like you are learning and progressing and producing something meaningful. My questions are: how quickly do you leave and how do you go about giving a polite reason for departing? The contract is written to allow them to "can" you and to allow you to leave with 2 weeks notice. Do you ethically owe the 6 months? Upon taking the position, the company told you they were not interested in candidates who were intending to only stay for 6 months and then leave (you were not intending to bail after 6 months, at that time), so perhaps they might be fine if you split now, knowing that you don't want to stick around for the full time hire?

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• Legal concerns with orchestrating a music submission contest

  - by Amplify91

  My team and I are getting pretty far along in the development of our latest game and have been thinking about audio. We decided to host an audio submission contest where we will offer a little cash and some equity stake in the game as prizes. We are also giving away copies of the game to participants. We hope not only to find audio for our game, but to meet some cool sound artists and promote the game a bit through the process. First of all, is this even a good idea? What are some potential dangers in doing this? Will it even be well received among artists? Secondly, I wrote up some Terms and Conditions in my best legal-speak to try to protect us and clarify how the contest will be run. Are these sufficient to make sure everyone involved is treated fairly and is legally protected? They are as follows: All submissions (The Submission) must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-3.0) By applying a CC-BY-3.0 license, you (The Submitter) expressly give Detour Games (and all members wherein) permission to copy, distribute, transmit, modify, adapt, and make commercial use of The Submission. The Submitter must own all rights to The Submission and be within their rights to license it as specified and submit it. The Submitter claims responsibility for the legality of The Submission. If The Submission is found to infringe on the rights of a person or entity other than those of The Submitter, Detour Games will not be held liable as all responsibility and liability for the legality of The Submission is that of The Submitter's. No more than two free copies of The Game per submitter. All flat cash prizes will only be disbursed pending the success of our first $5,000 Kickstarter campaign. These prizes will be disbursed 30 days after Detour Games receives the Kickstarter funds. All equity prizes (percentage of profits) are defined as the given percent of total profits after costs for a period of one year (12 months) after the release of RAW. These prizes will be disbursed semi-annually. All prize money will be disbursed through either an electronic fund transfer through a service such as PayPal or by a mailed money order. It is The Submitter's responsibility to cooperate with Detour Games in the disbursement of the funds. Detour Games reserves the right to change these Terms and Conditions at any time without notice. By participating in the contest, The Submitter agrees to and accepts all terms and conditions listed. What else could I do (legally) to protect everyone involved?

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• Best system for creating a 2d racing track

  - by tesselode

  I am working a 2D racing game and I'm trying to figure out what is the best way to define the track. At the very least, I need to be able to create a closed circuit with any amount of turns at any angle, and I need vehicles to collide with the edges of the track. I also want the following things to be true if possible (but they are optional): The code is simple and free of funky workarounds and extras I can define all of the parts of the track (such as turns) relative to the previous parts I can predict the exact position of the road at a certain point (that way I can easily and cleanly make closed circuits) Here are my options: Use a set of points. This is my current system. I have a set of turns and width changes that the track is supposed to make over time. I have a point which I transform according to these instructions, and I place a point every 5 steps or so, depending on how precise I want the track to be. These points make up the track. The main problem with this is the discrepancy between the collisions and the way the track is drawn. I won't get into too much detail, but the picture below shows what is happening (although it is exaggerated a bit). The blue lines are what is drawn, the red lines are what the vehicle collides with. I could work around this, but I'd rather avoid funky workaround code. Beizer curves. These seem cool, but my first impression of them is that they'll be a little daunting to learn and are probably too complicated for my needs. Some other kind of curve? I have heard of some other kinds of curves; maybe those are more applicable. Use Box2D or another physics engine. Instead of defining the center of the track, I could use a physics engine to define shapes that make up the road. The downside to this, however, is that I have to put in a little more work to place the checkpoints. Something completely different. Basically, what is the simplest system for generating a race track that would allow me to create closed circuits cleanly, handle collisions, and not have a ton of weird code?

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• ATI Radeon HD7000 Series (Laptop) - Switch Mode Between ATI & Intel Integrated GPU. Stuck on Boot Screen On Intel GPU Selection Mode

  - by Monkey Drone

  Laptop Specs: HP Pavilion G6-2020SE GPUs 1) ATI HD7000 Series 2) Intel Integrated OS Installed: x) Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit) i) ATI Graphics Card Drivers Installed From AMD website. Note: Graphics Card Drivers are Working Fine in 3D Mode. It runs a little Hot as it should since its a GPU. Observation) AMD Catalyst Control Centre Lets me Choose If I want to run the system in HIGH-END (ATI GPU) OR Intel Integrated (Better battery life) While I am on High End GPU Choice, Ubuntu works fine. Problem) But when I switch to Intel Mode in the AMD CCC and reboot the Machine. Ubuntu goes into 'Low Graphics Mode'. The problem is not that it goes into low graphics mode, it is completely expected since I am no longer using the ATI GPU but the integrated Intel GPU. Problem starts with the 'Selection' of the options. During that screen, I have no mouse on the screen (even tried plugging in an external USB mouse) & No Keyboard functionality. Thus I am left completely disabled to choose any option and load into Ubuntu. The Only thing I can do is switch to a terminal and enable ATI GPU through command-line and Ubuntu works Fine again. Is it a bug that there is no mouse/keyboard available to me during the startup of Ubuntu when its launched in Low-Graphics Mode? Any suggestions on how to pass through that? My palms are sweating as I write this down because the ATI GPU is really heating up my laptop. I dont want to boot into Windows or keep it around any longer than necessary. Please advise with help and directions. Sincerely, MonkeyD Edit1: The Answer by Celso has helped me switch to Intel, thus giving me sufficient battery power. Kudos to Celso. Now I can at least use my laptop for the time being without having it burn hair off my skin. I am still looking for answer to my original question of, 'why is lightdm not working properly when I switch to Intel GPU using ATI HD7000 series official drivers provided by AMD'.

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• Criteria for a programming language to be considered "mature"

  - by Giorgio

  I was recently reading an answer to this question, and I was struck by the statement "The language is mature". So I was wondering what we actually mean when we say that "A programming language is mature"? Normally, a programming language is initially developed out of a need, e.g. Try out / implement a new programming paradigm or a new combination of features that cannot be found in existing languages. Try to solve a problem or overcome a limitation of an existing language. Create a language for teaching programming. Create a language that solves a particular class of problems (e.g. concurrency). Create a language and an API for a special application field, e.g. the web (in this case the language might reuse a well-known paradigm, but the whole API must be new). Create a language to push your competitor out of the market (in this case the creator might want the new language to be very similar to an existing one, in order to attract developers to the new programming language and platform). Regardless of what the original motivation and scenario in which a language has been created, eventually some languages are considered mature. In my intuition, this means that the language has achieved (at least one of) its goals, e.g. "We can now use language X as a reliable tool for writing web applications." This is however a bit vague, so I wanted to ask what you consider the most important criteria (if any) that are applied when saying that a language is mature. IMPORTANT NOTE This question is (on purpose) language-agnostic because I am only interested in general criteria. Please write only language-agnostic answers and comments! I am not asking whether any specific "language X is mature" or "which programming languages can be considered mature", or whether "language X is more mature than language Y": please avoid posting any opinions or reference about any specific languages because these are out of the scope of this question. EDIT To make the question more precise, by criteria I mean such things as "tool support", "adoption by the industry", "stability", "rich API", "large user community", "successful application record", "standardization", "clean and uniform semantics", and so on.

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• How to refactor a method which breaks "The law of Demeter" principle?

  - by dreza

  I often find myself breaking this principle (not intentially, just through bad design). However recently I've seen a bit of code that I'm not sure of the best approach. I have a number of classes. For simplicity I've taken out the bulk of the classes methods etc public class Paddock { public SoilType Soil { get; private set; } // a whole bunch of other properties around paddock information } public class SoilType { public SoilDrainageType Drainage { get; private set; } // a whole bunch of other properties around soil types } public class SoilDrainageType { // a whole bunch of public properties that expose soil drainage values public double GetProportionOfDrainage(SoilType soil, double blockRatio) { // This method does a number of calculations using public properties // exposed off SoilType as well as the blockRatio value in some conditions } } In the code I have seen in a number of places calls like so paddock.Soil.Drainage.GetProportionOfDrainage(paddock.Soil, paddock.GetBlockRatio()); or within the block object itself in places it's Soil.Drainage.GetProportionOfDrainage(this.Soil, this.GetBlockRatio()); Upon reading this seems to break "The Law of Demeter" in that I'm chaining together these properties to access the method I want. So my thought in order to adjust this was to create public methods on SoilType and Paddock that contains wrappers i.e. on paddock it would be public class Paddock { public double GetProportionOfDrainage() { return Soil.GetProportionOfDrainage(this.GetBlockRatio()); } } on the SoilType it would be public class SoilType { public double GetProportionOfDrainage(double blockRatio) { return Drainage.GetProportionOfDrainage(this, blockRatio); } } so now calls where it used would be simply // used outside of paddock class where we can access instances of Paddock paddock.GetProportionofDrainage() or this.GetProportionOfDrainage(); // if used within Paddock class This seemed like a nice alternative. However now I have a concern over how would I enforce this usage and stop anyone else from writing code such as paddock.Soil.Drainage.GetProportionOfDrainage(paddock.Soil, paddock.GetBlockRatio()); rather than just paddock.GetProportionOfDrainage(); I need the properties to remain public at this stage as they are too ingrained in usage throughout the code block. However I don't really want a mixture of accessing the method on DrainageType directly as that seems to defeat the purpose altogether. What would be the appropiate design approach in this situation? I can provide more information as required to better help in answers. Is my thoughts on refactoring this even appropiate or should is it best to leave it as is and use the property chaining to access the method as and when required?

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• How do I create weapon attachments?

  - by Tron86

  My question is; I am developing a game for XNA and I am trying to create a weapon attachment for my player model. My player model loads the .md3 format and reads tags for attachment points. I am able to get the tag of my model's hand. And I am also able to get the tag of my weapon's handle. Each tag I am able to get the rotation and position of and this is how I am calculating it: Model.worldMatrix = Matrix.CreateScale(Model.scale) * Matrix.CreateRotationX(-MathHelper.PiOver2) * Matrix.CreateRotationY(MathHelper.PiOver2); Pretty simple, the player model has a scale and its orientation(it loads on its side so I just use a 90 degree X axis rotation, and a Y axis rotation to face away from the camera). I then calculate the torso tag on the lower body, which gives me a local coordinate at the waist. Then I take that matrix and calculate the tag_weapon in the upper body. This gives me the hand position in local space. I also get the rotation matrix from that tag that I store for later use. All this seems to work fine. Now I move onto my weapon: Matrix weaponWorld = Matrix.CreateScale(CurrentWeapon.scale) * Matrix.CreateRotationX(-MathHelper.PiOver2) * TagRotationMatrix * Matrix.CreateTranslation(HandTag.Position) * Matrix.CreateRotationY(PlayerRotation) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(CollisionBody.Position) * You may notice the weapon matrix gets rotated by 90 degress on the X axis as well. This is because they load in on their sides. Once again this seems pretty simple and follows the SRT order I keep reading about. My TagRotation matrix is the hand's rotation. HandTag.Position is its position in local space. CreateRotationY(PlayerRotation) is the player's rotation in world space, and the CollisionBody.Position is the player's world location. Everything seems to be in order, and almost works in game. However when the gun spawns and follows the player's hand it seems to be flipped on an axis every couple frames. Almost like the X or Y axis is being inversed then put right back. Its hard to explain and I am totally stumped. Even removing all my X axis fixes does nothing to solve the problem. Hopefully I explained everything enough as I am a bit new to this! Thanks!

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