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• Hyper-V Deployment Options Best Practices

  - by Erv Walter

  In what circumstances would you choose each of the following deployment options: Hyper-V installed as the bare bones Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V role installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core installation Hyper-V role installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Full Installation For example, I know there are licensing considerations for each option: With Hyper-V on top of a full installation of Enterprise or Data Center edition, you can use Windows Server as a guest OS without needing additional licenses (4 for Enterprise, unlimited for Data Center) With "Windows Hyper-V Server" you have to obtain licenses for each guest OS. But my real question is, are there technical considerations as well? I understand that the Full Installation doesn't perform as well as the other two options, but is there a significant difference between Server Core and "Windows Hyper-V Server"? What are the pros and cons of Hyper-V on Server Core vs "Windows Hyper-V Server" and when would you choose each?

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• Best of OTN - Week of August 10th

  - by CassandraClark-OTN

  Brief pubic service announcement before we get into the OTN community best of content for the week.... Four Bands. Three Epic Nights. Join Oracle for three evenings of entertainment and fun, all during Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne, September 28-October 2, San Francisco. Learn More Architect Community Any discussion of the best of OTN must include the OTN ArchBeat Podcast. Consistently among the top 3 most popular Oracle podcasts, Archbeat focuses on real conversations with community members. Normally I pick the topics and the guest panelists for each program, but now you have a chance to take over that role and become a Guest Producer. In that role you'll pick the discussion topic and the panelists, while I do the all of the grunt work, allowing you to bask in the glory Want to know how to become an OTN ArchBeat Podcast Guest Producer? You'll find the details here: Yes, you can take over the OTN ArchBeat Podcast! And here are two examples of OTN ArchBeat Podcasts produced by community members: Data Warehousing and Oracle Data Integrator, from July 2013, was produced by Oracle ACE Director Gurcan Orhan, and features panelists Uli Bethke , Cameron Lackpour , and Michael Rainey . DevOps, Cloud, and Role Creep, from June 2013, was produced by Oracle ACE Director Ron Batra and features panelists Basheer Khan and Cary Millsap -- OTN Architect Community Manager Bob Rhubart Database Community OTN DBA/DEV Watercooler Blog - Did You Say "JSON Support" in Oracle 12.1.0.2?. -- OTN Database Community Manager Laura Ramsey Java Community The Java Source Blog - walkmod : A Tool to Apply Coding Conventions . Friday Funny: I was worried the #NSA might be spying on me Thanks, @pacohope. -- OTN Java Community Manager Tori Weildt Systems Community The OTN Systems Community HomePage- Find Great Resources for System Admins and Developers. -- OTN Systems Community Manager Rick Ramsey

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• Best practices for SQL Server audit trail

  - by Ducain

  I'm facing a situation today where it would be very beneficial to me and my company if we knew who had logged into SQL and performed some deletions. We have a situation where at least 2 (sometimes 3) people login to SQL using SQL Server Management Studio, and perform various functions. What we need is an audit trail. If someone deletes records (mistakenly or otherwise), I'd like to know what was done. Is there any way to make this happen?

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• Best approach for a clinic database

  - by user18013

  As a practical assignment for the database course I'm taking I've been instructed to create a database for a local clinic, I've meet with the doctors a couple of times and discussed the information that needs to be stored in the database from personal to medical. Now I'm facing a tough decision because I've been given two choices: either to implement the database as a "local website" which only operates inside the clinic via WiFi, or to implement the front-end as a regular desktop application connecting to a shared database. Note: I've a 40 days deadline to deliver the first prototype and meet with my client. My questions are: 1- which approach should I go with given that I've more experience with desktop applications programming than web? 2- if I go with desktop front-ends what would be the best way to synchronize the database between all clients?? I've no experience and having searched for an answer a lot but came up with nothing detailed on this matter. 3- if I go with the web solution which choice would be best PHP & MySQL or ASP.NET & SQL Server or a different combination?? (given that my knowledge in both PHP & ASP.NET are nearly the same).

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• So, whats the best book on C#?

  - by mbcrump

  I see this question several times a day from newbie’s to professionals. I have listed the best C# books that I have read so far.   ECMA-334 C# Language Specification. – FREE book. This is probably the best place to start. Read it backwards and forwards and you can even request a hard copy. Absolute Beginners Guide to C Sharp 2nd Edition – Used this early on and found it very useful even if its game programming. C-Sharp 2.0 - The Complete Reference, 2nd Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2006) – One of the most useful books that is always with me. It contains short example code and is very well written. Dot Net Zero - Charles Petzold  - FREE book and you should definately give it a read. C Sharp in Depth by Jon Skeet -  Probably one of the most in depth books on C Sharp and definitely not for beginners. Jon Skeet knows C# like no other. I would consider this book the Bible of C#. If you understand 50% of this book, you have a good understanding of the language.  CLR via C Sharp 3rd Edition – I just started reading this book and it is another book thats not for beginners. If you really want to understand the CLR then give this book a try. Well, thats it. I hope you enjoy the books as I have spent a lot of time researching different C# books.

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• IIS 7.x Application Pool Best Practices

  - by Eric

  We are about to deploy a bunch of sites to some new servers. I have the following questions about application pools: 1) It seems advisable to have an application pool per website. Are there any caveats to this approach? Can one application pool, for example, hog all the CPU, Memory, Etc...? 2) When should you allow multiple worker processes in an application pool. When should you not? 3) Can private memory limit be used to prevent one application pool from interfering with another? Will setting it too low cause valid requests to recycle the application pool without getting a valid response? 4) What is the difference between private and virtual memory limits? 5) Are there compelling reasons NOT to run one application pool per site? Thanks!

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• What is the best book on Silverlight 4?

  - by mbcrump

  Silverlight/Expression 4 Books! I recently stumbled upon a post asking, “What is the best book on Silverlight 4?” In the age of the internet, it can be hard for anyone searching for a good book to actually find it. I have read a few Silverlight 4/Expression books in 2010 and decided to post the “best of” collection. Instead of reading multiple books, you can cut your list down to whatever category that you fit in. With Silverlight 5 coming soon, now is the time to get up to speed with what Silverlight 4 can offer. Be sure to read the full review at the bottom of each section. For the “Beginner” Silverlight Developer: Both of these books contains very simple applications and will get you started very fast. and Book Review: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Step by Step For the guy/gal that wants to “Master” Expression Blend 4: This is a hands-on kind of book. Victor get you started early on with some sample application and quickly deep dives into Storyboard and other Animations. If you want to learn Blend 4 then this is the place to start. Book Review: Foundation Expression Blend 4 by Victor Gaudioso If you are aiming to learn more about the Business side of Silverlight then check out the following two books: and Finally, For the Silverlight 4 guy/gal that wants to “Master” Silverlight 4, it really boils down to the following two books: and   Book Review: Silverlight 4 Unleashed by Laurent Bugnion Book Review: Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown I can’t describe how much that I’ve actually learned from both of these books. I would also recommend you read these books if you are preparing for your Silverlight 4 Certification. For a complete list of all Silverlight 4 books then check out http://www.silverlight.net/learn/books/ and don’t forget to subscribe to my blog.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• best way to compute vertex normals from a Triangle's list

  - by nkint

  hi i'm a complete newbie in computergraphics so sorry if it's a stupid answer. i'm trying to make a simple 3d engine from scratch, more for educational purpose than for real use. i have a Surface object with inside a Triangle's list. For now i compute normals inside Triangle class, in this way: triangle.computeFaceNormals() { Vec3D u = v1.sub(v3) Vec3D v = v1.sub(v2) Vec3D normal = Vec3D.cross(u,v) normal.normalized() this.n1 = this.n2 = this.n3 = normal } and when building surface: t = new Triangle(v1,v2,v3).computeFaceNormals() surface.addTriangle(t) and i think this is the best way to do that.. isn't it? now.. what about for vertex normals? i've found this simple algorithm: flipcode vertex normal but.. hei this algorithm has.. exponential complexity? (if my memory doesn't fail my computer science background..) (bytheway.. it has 3 nested loops.. i don't think it's the best way to do it..) any suggestion?

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• ZFS and SAN -- best practices?

  - by chris

  Most discussions of ZFS suggest that the hardware RAID be turned off and that ZFS should directly talk to the disks and manage the RAID on the host (instead of the RAID controller). This makes sense on a computer with 2-16 or even more local disks, but what about in an environment with a large SAN? For example, the enterprise I work for has what I would consider to be a modest sized SAN with 2 full racks of disks, which is something like 400 spindles. I've seen SAN shelves that are way more dense than ours, and SAN deployments way larger than ours. Do people expose 100 disks directly to big ZFS servers? 300 disks? 3000 disks? Do the SAN management tools facilitate automated management of this sort of thing?

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• Best arguments for/against introducing ORM technology into a companies dev process

  - by james

  I have started using ORM technology in the last few years. My first exposure was NHibernate. I then moved onto Linq 2 Sql, and Entity Framework. The issue I have however is, there are some organisations where I have found strong opposition to introducing ORM tools. They usually have a number of reasons: they have a lot of built up SQL skills in the team, and are worried about the underlying SQL that ORM's generate. they have DBA's who like to be able to see the SQL an app uses in order that can review it for best practice. they are worried about performance (some people have "heard" the ORM's aren't as performant but have no real proof themselves - there may well be some truth in this! :). So, I'm looking for the best or most convincing arguments that you have put forward FOR the use of ORM tools. Equally, I would be interested in the against arguments too. Note: this is NOT a discussion over which ORM I should use.

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• What's the best structure for a repository?

  - by jpmelos

  I've looked into many open source software repositories, and I've found some common elements and somethings people do in different fashion from one another. For example, every repository has a README file, a INSTALL file, a COPYING file and stuff like that. Other things differ: Some projects, like git, have their source code in the root level, while others have the source code in a src/ folder and others, like the Linux kernel, have the source code spread in different folders in root level, that divide code by areas; Some have their tests in a t/ folder, while others in a tests/ folder, or named otherwise; Some have files about submitting patches and who the maintainers are, and those might be inside some Documentation/ or in the root level. Are there recommendations? A best practice? For example: personally, I don't like the code in the root level, git-fashion. It looks messy and confuses one trying to start as a contributor (especially because they have some code inside folders, and scripts in the root level as well, it's really messy). If I were to start a project of my own and wanted to start right from the start, are there recommendations? Best practices? How can I make a clean and clear structure? Thank you!

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• SQL Authority News – FalafelCON 2014: 2 days with the Best Developers in the World

  - by Pinal Dave

  I love presenting at various forums on various technologies. I am extremely excited that I got invited to speak at Falafel Conference 2014 in San Francisco. I will present two technology sessions on SQL Server. If you are into web development or if you just want to attend a conference with the best of the industry speakers, this may be the right conference for you. What set apart this conference from other conference is technology presented as well as speakers. Usually one has to attend very expensive and high scale event when they have to hear good speakers. At this conference, you will find quite a many industry legends are available to present on the bleeding edge technology. Here are few of the reasons why I believe you should attend this conference: Choose from four tracks covering Web, Mobile development and testing, Sitefinity, and Automated Testing, or attend sessions from all four! Learn from the best developers and testers in the business in an intimate setting. Surround yourself with your peers and the opportunity to network Learn about the latest platforms and technologies including Kendo UI, AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, and more! Here are the details for the sessions which I am going to present at Falafel Conference. Secrets of SQL Server: Database Worst Practices Abstract: Chances are you have heard, or even uttered, this expression. This demo-oriented session will show many examples where database professionals were dumbfounded by their own mistakes, and could even bring back memories of your own early DBA days. The goal of this session is to expose the small details that can be dangerous to the production environment and SQL Server as a whole, as well as talk about worst practices and how to avoid them. Shedding light on some of these perils and the tricks to avoid them may even save your current job. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. We will have a quiz during the session to keep the conversation alive. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Additionally, all attendees of the session will have access to learning material presented in the session. The Unsung Hero Abstract: Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Register Now! I have learned from the Falafel Team that they are running out of tickets and soon they will close the registration.  For next 10 days the price for the registration is only USD 149. Trust me, you can’t get such a world class training and networking opportunity at such a low price. Click to Register Here! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• Best strategy/practices for Dev/Test/Prod Server.

  - by Feryt

  Hi. I have one dedicated server with Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise. I need Web, SQL and Services servers. Is it good idea to use physical server only as Hyper-V manager and for each specific server use one Virtual VHD? Thank you.

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• Best practices for thin-provisioning Linux servers (on VMware)

  - by nbr

  I have a setup of about 20 Linux machines, each with about 30-150 gigabytes of customer data. Probably the size of data will grow significantly faster on some machines than others. These are virtual machines on a VMware vSphere cluster. The disk images are stored on a SAN system. I'm trying to find a solution that would use disk space sparingly, while still allowing for easy growing of individual machines. In theory, I would just create big disks for each machine and use thin provisioning. Each disk would grow as needed. However, it seems that a 500 GB ext3 filesystem with only 50 GB of data and quite a low number of writes still easily grows the disk image to eg. 250 GB over time. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong here? (I was surprised how little I found on the subject with Google. BTW, there's even no thin-provisioning tag on serverfault.com.) Currently I'm planning to create big, thin-provisioned disks - but with a small LVM volume on them. For example: a 100 GB volume on a 500 GB disk. That way I could more easily grow the LVM volume and the filesystem size as needed, even online. Now for the actual question: Are there better ways to do this? (that is, to grow data size as needed without downtime.) Possible solutions include: Using a thin-provisioning friendly filesystem that tries to occupy the same spots over and over again, thus not growing the image size. Finding an easy method of reclaiming free space on the partition (re-thinning?) Something else? A bonus question: If I go with my current plan, would you recommend creating partitions on the disks (pvcreate /dev/sdX1 vs pvcreate /dev/sdX)? I think it's against conventions to use raw disks without partitions, but it would make it a bit easier to grow the disks, if that is ever needed. This is all just a matter of taste, right?

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• Best Architecture for ASP.NET WebForms Application

  - by stack man

  I have written an ASP.NET WebForms portal for a client. The project has kind of evolved rather than being properly planned and structured from the beginning. Consequently, all the code is mashed together within the same project and without any layers. The client is now happy with the functionality, so I would like to refactor the code such that I will be confident about releasing the project. As there seems to be many differing ways to design the architecture, I would like some opinions about the best approach to take. FUNCTIONALITY The portal allows administrators to configure HTML templates. Other associated "partners" will be able to display these templates by adding IFrame code to their site. Within these templates, customers can register and purchase products. An API has been implemented using WCF allowing external companies to interface with the system also. An Admin section allows Administrators to configure various functionality and view reports for each partner. The system sends out invoices and email notifications to customers. CURRENT ARCHITECTURE It is currently using EF4 to read/write to the database. The EF objects are used directly within the aspx files. This has facilitated rapid development while I have been writing the site but it is probably unacceptable to keep it like that as it is tightly coupling the db with the UI. Specific business logic has been added to partial classes of the EF objects. QUESTIONS The goal of refactoring will be to make the site scalable, easily maintainable and secure. 1) What kind of architecture would be best for this? Please describe what should be in each layer, whether I should use DTO's / POCO / Active Record pattern etc. 2) Is there a robust way to auto-generate DTO's / BOs so that any future enhancements will be simple to implement despite the extra layers? 3) Would it be beneficial to convert the project from WebForms to MVC?

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• What's the best way to move cars along roads

  - by David Thielen

  I am implementing car movement game (sort-of like Locomotion). So 60 times a second I have to advance the movement of each car. The problem is I have to look ahead to see if there is a slower car, stop sign, or red light ahead. And then slow down appropiately. I also want to have the cars take time to go from stopped to full speed and again to slow down. I'm not implementing full-blown physics, but just a tick by tick speed up/slow down as that provides most of the realism to match what people expect to see. The best I've come up with is to walk out the full distance the car would travel of it was slowing to a stop and see if anywhere along that path it needed to slow down or stop. And then move it forward appropiately. I am moving the cars 60 times a second so I need this to be fast. And walking out that whole path each tick strikes me as processor intensive. What's the best way to do this?

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• Linux Best Practices

  - by Zac

  I'm a life-long Windows developer switching over to Linux for the first time, and I'm starting off with Ubuntu to ease the learning curve. My new laptop will primarily be a development machine: 6GB RAM, 320 GB HD. I'd like there to be 2 non-root users: (a) Development, which will always be me, and (b) Guest, for anyone else. I assume the root user is added by default, like System Administrator in Windows. (1) I'd like to mount /home to its own partition, but how does this work if I have two user accounts (Development and Guest)? Are there 2 separate /home directories, or do they get shared? Is it possible to allocate more space for Development and only a tiny bit of space for Guest in GRUB2? How?!?! (2) I'm assuming that its okay that all of my development tools (Eclipse & plugins, SVN, JUnit, ant, etc.) and Java will end up getting installed in non-/home directories such as /usr and /opt, but that my Eclipse/SVN workspace will live under my /home directory on a separate partition... any problems, issues, concerns with that? (3) As far as partitioning schemes, nothing too complicated, but not plain Jane either: Boot Partition, 512 MB, in case I want to install other OSes Ubuntu & non-/home file system, 187.5 GB Swap Partition, 12 GB = RAM x 2 /home Partition, 120 GB I don't have any bulky media data (I don't have music or video libraries, this is a lean and mean dev machine) so having 320 GB is like winning the lottery and not knowing what to do with all this space. I figured I'd give a little extra space to the OS/FS partition since I'll be running JEE containers locally and doing a lot of file IO, logging and other memory-instensive operations. Any issues, problems, concerns, suggestions? (4) I was thinking about using ext4; seems to have good filestamping without any space ceiling for me to hit. Any other suggestions for a dev machine? (5) I read somewhere that you need to be careful when you install software as the root user, but I can't remember why. What general caveats do I need to be aware of when doing things (installing packages, making system configurations, etc.) as root vs "Development" user? Thanks!

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• Recommended Practices for Managing httpd.conf for different environments

  - by James Kingsbery

  We have several different environments (developer dekstop, integration, QA, prod) which should have slightly different variants of the same httpd.conf file. As an example, the httpd.conf file configures that httpd should act as a reverse proxy and proxy certain URLs to Jetty, but the hostname of the Jetty instance is different in each environment. Is there a recommended practice for mangaging these kinds of differences? I looked around the apache documentation for the httpd.conf file and I didn't see anything that does what I need.

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• An entry-level programmer's best option [on hold]

  - by user134409

  I am facing a puzzle and I am not sure the best way to make a decision. In my spare time besides playing video games I got around to develop some games, nothing fancy, just small projects to get a better grasp at programming. After I finished college and got my BA in Computer Science, I got a job as web developer at a small firm. The next few months were very stressful as I had no previous experience and tried my best to make up for it. But after 6 months my boss told me I was inefficient and not very independent and let me go. To my credit, the help from the senior was very limited, I did learn a lot but I have learned by myself. For example they told me to do a UI in BackboneJS and I took me a while but I got it working (even if it was poorly designed). But I managed to do it all by myself because my senior was very busy and he did not have time even for my questions. Now I have found a new job again in web development but I am very afraid of what is going to happen next. I am afraid because I don't want to take the job and then be fired again after a couple of months, I get the feeling that this will be very bad on my CV, job hopping is like a red flag. They want to hire me but I am aware that they are working with new technologies and maybe I will end up not coping with it. So the question is: Should a entry-level programmer be better off with a starting job in QA, testing and work his way from there? I did learn allot from my first job but it was a moral blow when they decided to fire me. I do have a low self-esteem and I know my skills as a programmer are not that great. But I like programming and want to get better and I want to have a long career in it so that basically my pickle. Thank you in advance for the answers.

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• Best method to implement a filtered search

  - by j0N45

  I would like to ask you, your opinion when it comes to implement a filtered search form. Let's imagine the following case: 1 Big table with lots of columns It might be important to say that this SQL Server You need to implement a form to search data in this table, and in this form you'll have several check boxes that allow you to costumize this search. Now my question here is which one of the following should be the best way to implement the search? Create a stored procedure with a query inside. This stored procedure will check if the parameters are given by the application and in the case they are not given a wildcard will be putted in the query. Create a dynamic query, that is built accordingly to what is given by the application. I am asking this because I know that SQL Server creates an execution plan when the stored procedure is created, in order to optimize its performance, however by creating a dynamic query inside of the stored procedure will we sacrifice the optimization gained by the execution plan? Please tell me what would be the best approach in your oppinion.

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• Needed inputs for helping hospitals/practices save money on mandatory compliance Policies and Course

  - by Jason Gaya

  Hey, Recently one of my clients came up to me and asked "Is there any way we can save some money on mandatory compliance policies and courses, and I started wondering what can I do? I started creating a calculator to show some savings if they used elearning. I wanted your input to validate that data. How many Policies your practice/hospital need to sign and average number of pages per policy? Also how many employees need to sign these policies? This would be really helpful and once I have this done I will send a copy to you as well...Thank You for all the help and support

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• What is the best approach for deploying apps to companies

  - by Supercell

  What is the best approach for the following scenario: 1) A publicly available app (available in app stores) which is used by end users to make use of services offered by multiple companies. 2) These companies maintain their services also using a mobile app. I'm not sure on how to solve the second part. Having one app for both enduser and admin functionality, secured by username/password doesn't sound like a good idea. This would leave the only option of developing a separate admin application for the companies. What is the best approach to deploy "admin" like mobile apps to companies only, for Android, iOS and Windows Phone? Some additional information: Public App ---- Servers ----- Multiple Company Apps The public app shows all companies offering their services. An end user uses the public app to order something from a specific company. The order is sent to our servers. Our servers send the order to the associated company. This order is displayed on the company's admin app and given the option to accept the order.

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• Best password practices?

  - by sansenya

  for sensitive data, would it be better to have a somewhat long, but memorable password (and hence not totally random) or use a program like keepass to make a super long, random password with the highest possible entropy, and then just write down the password on a piece of paper kept in ones pocket. If that bang on the door comes, then swallow the paper. Which is a better security practice? I'm not in any way a criminal, i just am curious about topics concerning security. Thanks.

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• Cryptography: best practices for keys in memory?

  - by Johan

  Background: I got some data encrypted with AES (ie symmetric crypto) in a database. A server side application, running on a (assumed) secure and isolated Linux box, uses this data. It reads the encrypted data from the DB, and writes back encrypted data, only dealing with the unencrypted data in memory. So, in order to do this, the app is required to have the key stored in memory. The question is, is there any good best practices for this? Securing the key in memory. A few ideas: Keeping it in unswappable memory (for linux: setting SHM_LOCK with shmctl(2)?) Splitting the key over multiple memory locations. Encrypting the key. With what, and how to keep the...key key.. secure? Loading the key from file each time its required (slow and if the evildoer can read our memory, he can probably read our files too) Some scenarios on why the key might leak: evildoer getting hold of mem dump/core dump; bad bounds checking in code leading to information leakage; The first one seems like a good and pretty simple thing to do, but how about the rest? Other ideas? Any standard specifications/best practices? Thanks for any input!

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• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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