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• I receive the error 'grub-install /dev/sda failed' while attempting to install Ubuntu as the computer's only OS.

  - by Liath

  I am attempting to install Ubuntu on a box which was previously running Windows 7. I have also experienced the dreaded "Unable to install GRUB" error. I am not attempting to dual boot. I have previously run a Windows boot disk and removed all existing partitions. If I run the Ubuntu 12.04 install CD and click install after the config screens, I get the error Executing 'grub-install /dev/sda' failed. This is a fatal error. (It is the same error as this question: Unable to install GRUB) All the questions I've read while looking for a solution are related to dual boot. I'm not interested in dual boot, I'm after a clean out the box Ubuntu install. How can I achieve this? (For my sanity, please use very simple instructions when responding. I don't claim to have any talent either for linux or as a sysadmin) Additional details copied from comments dated: 2012-05-29 ~15:19Z After booting from the CD, clicking Try Ubuntu, and then sudo fdisk /dev/sda I get fdisk: unable to seek on /dev/sda: Invalid argument sudo fdisk /dev/sdb gives Device contains neither a valid DOS partiion table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel. Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x15228d1d. Changes will remain in memory only until you decide to write them. After that of course, the previous content won't be recoverable. Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite). Command (m for help): I should add the Live CD desktop is graphically bad. I've got missing parts of programs and the terminal occasionally reflects to the bottom of the screen. But I can't imagine this is related.

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• Recursion in F#

  - by MarkPearl

  Things are slowly coming together – I was able to look at a bit of F# code and intuitively know what it was going to do (yay)… So today I saw a blog post by Bob Palmer on Fibonacci numbers in F# which inspired me to look at bit into recursion. First the C# example… class Program { public static void CountDown(int n) { switch (n) { case 0: Console.WriteLine("End of Count"); break; default: Console.WriteLine(n); CountDown(n-1); break; } } static void Main(string[] args) { CountDown(10); Console.ReadLine(); } }   In F#, the equivalent would look something like this… open System let rec CountDown n = match n with | 0 -> Console.WriteLine("End of Count"); | n -> Console.WriteLine(n); CountDown (n-1); CountDown 10 Console.ReadLine()   Pretty simple stuff. With F# you when making recursive calls you need to explicitly declare that the function is recursive with the “rec” keyword. Otherwise the code is pretty easy to read and self explanatory.

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• What is the simplest way to render video into memory (for drawing to a texture) in .NET?

  - by sebf

  In my project I would like to be able to play back video on surfaces in the world. I intend to do this by having the video frames rendered to a block of memory, then use this to update a texture each frame. Everything is in place - except for the part that actually gets the video. I have looked on Google and found that the video library world is very expansive (and geared towards video processing), and am having trouble finding a suitable one. FFMpeg is very comprehensive, but is an entire suite and would take a good amount of work to integrate. So far the most promising library I've found is the one based on the VLC player libraries - by virtue of it using the same resources as VLC Player it is known to be very capable; it also renders to blocks of memory, but the API (at least of the one on Codeplex) is more of a port of the C++ API rather than a managed wrapper. The 'solution' can be any wrapper/API/library, but with characteristics that make it suitable for use in a rendering engine, namely: Renders the video frame data to memory, so it can be picked up and passed to a texture on the GPU easily. Super simple - all that is needed is a way to load, jump and render a frame programatically - ideally it would use the systems codecs and not require an assortment of plugins. Permissive license (LGPL or more free-er) .NET bindings at least; all the better if it is natively managed Can anyone suggest a lightweight, (.NET) library, that can take a video file, and spit out some frames into a byte[]?

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• Hexagonal Tiles

  - by PATRY

  i'm doing a tactical game (X-Com / Fallout style) for fun. I've decided to use an hexagonal map, but i'm having a graphic problem. My current map display is HUD-like, with only the border of the map cells displayed, without any texture. it's simple and allow for display of different types of informations by varying the color of the border. For exemple the "danger view mode" displays the borders with a color going from green (no damage possible) to red (prob of damage 90%). Now, It's a bit hard to différenciate the kind of tile the player is on. I could put a plain color (green is grass, pale blue is water...), but this is going to limit the possibilities. Thus, i would like to display a texture on my tiles. Since the map are generated, i can not use a picture for the whole map with the HUD over. So, my question is : does any one knows how i could generate the sealess hexagonal textures (algo or plugin), or if there is a site with some hexagonal tiles ?

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• LibGdx, Texture an Object

  - by Gigi10012

  I want to set texture to an Object, this is my playerobject class: private boolean up; private float speed; private float fallacceleration = 20; private float acceleration = 15; private float maxSpeed = 300; SpriteBatch batch; public Player() { x = MyGdxGame.WIDTH - 9*MyGdxGame.WIDTH/10; y = MyGdxGame.HEIGHT - 3 * MyGdxGame.HEIGHT/10; shapex = new float[4]; shapey = new float[4]; radians = 2*MathUtils.PI; batch = new SpriteBatch(); } private void setShape() { //Simple Arrow Shape ...... } public void update(float dt) { setShape(); } public void draw(ShapeRenderer sr) { sr.setColor(0F, 0F, 0F, 1F); sr.begin(ShapeType.Line); //Drawing Shape .............. sr.end(); } What I have to do to add texture to that object? (I'm using LibGdx)

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• How to pass one float as four unsigned chars to shader by glVertexPointAttrib?

  - by Kog

  For each vertex I use two floats as position and four unsigned bytes as color. I want to store all of them in one table, so I tried casting those four unsigned bytes to one float, but I am unable to do that correctly... All in all, my tests came to one point: GLfloat vertices[] = { 1.0f, 0.5f, 0, 1.0f, 0, 0 }; glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glVertexAttribPointer(0, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 2 * sizeof(float), vertices); // VER1 - draws red triangle // unsigned char colors[] = { 0xff, 0, 0, 0xff, 0xff, 0, 0, 0xff, 0xff, 0, 0, // 0xff }; // glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); // glVertexAttribPointer(1, 4, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, GL_TRUE, 4 * sizeof(GLubyte), // colors); // VER2 - draws greenish triangle (not "pure" green) // float f = 255 << 24 | 255; //Hex:0xff0000ff // float colors2[] = { f, f, f }; // glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); // glVertexAttribPointer(1, 4, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, GL_TRUE, 4 * sizeof(GLubyte), // colors2); // VER3 - draws red triangle int i = 255 << 24 | 255; //Hex:0xff0000ff int colors3[] = { i, i, i }; glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(1, 4, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, GL_TRUE, 4 * sizeof(GLubyte), colors3); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 3); Above code is used to draw one simple red triangle. My question is - why do versions 1 and 3 work correctly, while version 2 draws some greenish triangle? Hex values are one I read by marking variable during debug. They are equal for version 2 and 3 - so what causes the difference?

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• Understanding IDAT chunk of PNG file format

  - by DRapp

  From the sample image below, I have a border in yellow just for display purposes only. The actual .png file is a simple black/white image 3 pixels by 3 pixels. I was originally thinking to try as a 2x2, but that would not help trying to interpret low/hi vs hi/low drawing stream. At least this way, I would have two black, one white from the top, or one white, two black from the bottom.. So I read the chunks of data, get to the IDAT chunk, decode that (zlib) and come up with 12 bytes as follows 00 20 00 40 00 80 So, my question, how does the above get broken down into the 3x3 black and white sample... Also, it is saved in palette format and properly recognizes the bit depth of 1 and color palette of 2... color pallet[0] is RGBA all zeros. Palette1 has RGBA of 255, 255, 255, 0 I'll eventually get into the multiple other depth formats later, just wanted to start with what would expect to be the easiest. Part II. Any guidance on handling the other depth formats would help if anything special to be considered especially regarding alpha channel (which I am already looking for in the palette) that might trip me up.

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• How can I improve the "smoothness" of a 2D side-scrolling iPhone game?

  - by MrDatabase

  I'm working on a relatively simple 2D side-scrolling iPhone game. The controls are tilt-based. I use OpenGL ES 1.1 for the graphics. The game state is updated at a rate of 30 Hz... And the drawing is updated at a rate of 30 fps (via NSTimer). The smoothness of the drawing is ok... But not quite as smooth as a game like iFighter. What can I do to improve the smoothness of the game? Here are the potential issues I've briefly considered: I'm varying the opacity of up to 15 "small" (20x20 pixels) textures at a time... Apparently varying the opacity in this manner can degrade drawing performance I'm rendering at only 30 fps (via NSTimer)... Perhaps 2D games like iFighter are rendered at a higher frame rate? Perhaps the game state could be updated at a faster rate? Note the acceleration vales are updated at 100 Hz... So I could potentially update part of the game state at 100 hz All of my textures are PNG24... Perhaps PNG8 would help (due to smaller size etc)

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• Views : ViewControllers, many to one, or one to one?

  - by conor

  I have developed an Android application where, typically, each view (layout.xml) displayed on the screen has it's own corresponding fragment (for the purpose of this question I may refer to this as a ViewController). These views and Fragments/ViewControllers are appropriately named to reflect what they display. So this has the effect of allowing the programmer to easily pinpoint the files associated with what they see on any given screen. The above refers to the one to one part of my question. Please note that with the above there are a few exceptions where very similar is displayed on two views so the ViewController is used for two views. (Using a simple switch (type) to determine what layout.xml file to load) On the flip side. I am currently working on the iOS version of the same app, which I didn't develop. It seems that they are adopting more of a one-to-many (ViewController:View) approach. There appears to be one ViewController that handles the display logic for many different types of views. In the ViewController are an assortment of boolean flags and arrays of data (to be displayed) that are used to determine what view to load and how to display it. This seems very cumbersome to me and coupled with no comments/ambiguous variable names I am finding it very difficult to implement changes into the project. What do you guys think of the two approaches? Which one would you prefer? I'm really considering putting in some extra time at work to refactor the iOS into a more 1:1 oriented approach. My reasoning for 1:1 over M:1 is that of modularity and legibility. After all, don't some people measure the quality of code based on how easy it is for another developer to pick up the reigns or how easy it is to pull a piece of code and use it somewhere else?

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• Strategy for hosting 700+ domains names, each with a static HTML site

  - by jonschlinkert

  I have a portfolio of more than 700 domain names, and ideally I'd like to put up a single-page HTML/CSS/JavaScript webpage for each domain. Is there a system/strategy/workflow that will allow me to: Automate the deployment of new websites, quickly and easily without having to manually initiate each new website in an admin panel. For instance, I've seen dropbox-based solutions that claim to make it simple to setup new websites on your dropbox account, but you still have to set each one up in an admin interface first. It would be so much easier to have a folder naming convention that allowed the user to easily clone/copy/duplicate sites inside their Dropbox App folder (https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23) to create new ones. Sounds interesting, however... It's easy to manage CNAMEs on the registrar-side, but is there a way to quickly associate CNAMEs with new websites (on the hosting side), maybe using the method offered by gh-pages-style (https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-pages)? With GitHub's gh-pages, all you have to do is drop a file called CNAME into your repo, with the domain name you want associated with the repo inside the file. gh-pages isn't a good solution for what I'm doing though unfortunately. I'm also a front-end developer, specializing in rapid web development and "front-end build systems", so I building and maintaining static assets for hundreds of sites is no problem. It's the hosting-side that I really struggle with. Any suggestions?

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• How can I properly create /dev/dvd?

  - by chazomaticus

  Certain programs look for /dev/dvd by default to find DVDs. When I first boot my computer without a DVD inserted, /dev/dvd exists and points to the correct place (/dev/sr0). However, when I insert a DVD, /dev/dvd disappears. I'd like it to stick around so I don't have to navigate to /dev/sr0 in programs that are looking for DVDs. How do I ensure that the /dev/dvd symlink exists and points to the right place? It looks like I can add something to /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules. This site gives a couple of examples, but the 70-persistent-cd.rules file says "add the ENV{GENERATED}=1 flag to your own rules", which isn't part of the examples. The man 7 udev page is impenetrable to me, and I'm not convinced the linked page gives 100% of the information I need. So, what can I do on a modern, Ubuntu 12.04 (or later) system to make /dev/dvd always exist and point to the right device? EDIT: Is it as simple as adding ENV{GENERATED}=1 to the rules in the linked page, something like this: SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sr0", SYMLINK+="dvd", GROUP="cdrom", ENV{GENERATED}=1 Is that the right information for modern Ubuntu? What is ENV{GENERATED} doing there, when it wasn't generated, but hand-written?

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• What is the value of workflow tools?

  - by user16549

  I'm new to Workflow developement, and I don't think I'm really getting the "big picture". Or perhaps to put it differently, these tools don't currently "click" in my head. So it seems that companies like to create business drawings to describe processes, and at some point someone decided that they could use a state machine like program to actually control processes from a line and boxes like diagram. Ten years later, these tools are huge, extremely complicated (my company is currently playing around with WebSphere, and I've attended some of the training, its a monster, even the so called "minimalist" versions of these workflow tools like Activiti are huge and complicated although not nearly as complicated as the beast that is WebSphere afaict). What is the great benefit in doing it this way? I can kind of understand the simple lines and boxes diagrams being useful, but these things, as far as I can tell, are visual programming languages at this point, complete with conditionals and loops. Programmers here appear to be doing a significant amount of work in the lines and boxes layer, which to me just looks like a really crappy, really basic visual programming language. If you're going to go that far, why not just use some sort of scripting language? Have people thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this? Has the lines and boxes thing been taken to an absurd level, or am I just not understanding the value in all this? I'd really like to see arguments in defense of this by people that have worked with this technology and understand why its useful. I don't see the value in it, but I recognize that I'm new to this as well and may not quite get it yet.

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• What is a Coding Dojo?

  - by huwyss

  Recently i found out that there is a thing called "coding dojo". The point behind it is that software developers want to have a space to learn new stuff like processes, methods, coding details, languages, and whatnot in an environment without stress. Just for fun. No competition. No results required. No deadlines.Some days ago I joined the Zurich coding dojo. We were three programmers with different backgrounds.We gave ourselves the task to develop a method that takes an input value and returns its prime factors. We did pair programming and every few minutes we switched positions. We used test driven development. The chosen programming language was Ruby.I haven't really done TDD before. It was pretty interesting to see the algorithm develop following the testcases.We started with the first test input=1 then developed the most simple productive program that passed this very first test. Then we added the next test input=2 and implemented the productive code. We kept adding tests and made sure all tests are passed until we had the general solution.When we improved the performance of our code we saw the value of the tests we wrote before. Of course our first performance improvement broke several tests.It was a very interesting experience to see how other developers think and how they work. I will participate at the dojo again and can warmly recommend it to anyone. There are  coding dojos all over the world.Have fun!

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• TXPAUSE : polite waiting for hardware transactional memory

  - by Dave

  Classic locks are an appropriate tool to prevent potentially conflicting operations A and B, invoked by different threads, from running at the same time. In a sense the locks cause either A to run before B or vice-versa. Similarly, we can replace the locks with hardware transactional memory, or use transactional lock elision to leverage potential disjoint access parallelism between A and B. But often we want A to wait until B has run. In a Pthreads environment we'd usually use locks in conjunction with condition variables to implement our "wait until" constraint. MONITOR-MWAIT is another way to wait for a memory location to change, but it only allows us to track one cache line and it's only available on x86. There's no similar "wait until" construct for hardware transactions. At the instruction-set level a simple way to express "wait until" in transactions would be to add a new TXPAUSE instruction that could be used within an active hardware transaction. TXPAUSE would politely stall the invoking thread, possibly surrendering or yielding compute resources, while at the same time continuing to track the transaction's address-set. Once a transaction has executed TXPAUSE it can only abort. Ideally that'd happen when some other thread modifies a variable that's in the transaction's read-set or write-set. And since we're aborting all writes would be discarded. In a sense this gives us multi-location MWAIT but with much more flexibility. We could also augment the TXPAUSE with a cycle-count bound to cap the time spent stalled. I should note that we can already enter a tight spin loop in a transaction to wait for updates to address-set to cause an abort. Assuming that the implementation monitors the address-set via cache-coherence probes, by waiting in this fashion we actually communicate via the probes, and not via memory values. That is the updating thread signals the waiter via probes instead of by traditional memory values. But TXPAUSE gives us a polite way to spin.

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• Some hint to program a webservice "by subscription"

  - by Eagle

  I have some web sites programmed, I know to do it with python and PHP basically. Normally they are simple web sites, but now I want to provide REST web services but only for allowed users (allowed by me). I saw that a lot of services uses the "KEY" and "SECRET_KEY" concepts, which seems to be what I need (if I understand it right). My suppositions are: If I only do a GET service to retrieve, e.g., all my clients, without anymore, anyone can retrieve my clients without limitations. I will need some KEY generator to provide keys for my allowed users, so they can use my webservices. Only with a KEY is not enough: someone can steal a KEY and supplant my user (and this is the reason because exists a SECRET_KEY, right?). If all this is right, how can I make/use a system like that in my web services? Some open source example? Or maybe there are another easy solutions I'm not considering? My objective is to allow some users to use my web services.

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• Generic rule parser for RPG board game rules - how to do it?

  - by burzum

  I want to build a generic rule parser for pen and paper style RPG systems. A rule can involve usually 1 to N entities 1 to N roles of a dice and calculating values based on multiple attributes of an entity. For example: Player has STR 18, his currently equipped weapon gives him a bonus of +1 STR but a malus of DEX -1. He attacks a monster entity and the game logic now is required to run a set of rules or actions: Player rolls the dice, if he gets for example 8 or more (base attack value he needs to pass is one of his base attributes!) his attack is successfully. The monster then rolls the dice to calculate if the attack goes through it's armor. If yes the damage is taken if not the attack was blocked. Besides simple math rules can also have constraints like applying only to a certain class of user (warrior vs wizzard for example) or any other attribute. So this is not just limited to mathematical operations. If you're familiar with RPG systems like Dungeon and Dragons you'll know what I'm up to. My issue is now that I have no clue how to exactly build this the best possible way. I want people to be able to set up any kind of rule and later simply do an action like selecting a player and a monster and run an action (set of rules like an attack). I'm asking less for help with the database side of things but more about how to come up with a structure and a parser for it to keep my rules flexible. The language of choice for this is php by the way.

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• Is Wordpress more appropriate than Magento/Opencart for site like this?

  - by Alex

  The premise of the site is that a user pays a small fee to advertise an item that they want to sell. Therefore the user is responsible for adding the "products", not the administrator. The product upload will create a product page for that item. This is a rather common framework that I'm sure you're familiar with. My initial thought was that it would be best suited using Magento - mainly because it needs to accept payments - and the products will grow to form a catalog of categorized products. However - there is no concept of a shopping cart. A buyer does not buy the item online, or go to a checkout. They simply look at the product, and contact the seller if they like it. The buyer and seller then take it from there. For this reason, I then begin to suspect that Magento is perhaps too overkill, or just simply not the right CMS if there is on checkout procedure (other than the uploader making a payment) So then I begin to think Wordpress....Hmmm Feature requirements: User's can add content via a form process User's can be directed to a payment gateway For each product listing - a series of photographs shall be displayed, in thumbnail form Zoom capabilities/rotate on the images would be a welcome feature In short - e-commerce CMS, or something more simple?

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• Basic is Best

  - by Eric A. Stephens

  Fellow foodies will recognize the recent movement towards "farm-to-table" restaurants. These venues attempt to simplify their menus and source ingredients as close to the source as possible. I had the opportunity to dine at such a restaurant the other evening. I was gushing about the appetizer to my server when she described the preparation for the item and then punctuated her comments with "basic is best". I reminded my fellow enterprise architect diners there was an architecture lesson in that statement. They rolled their eyes and chuckled. But they also knew I was right. I'm reminded of Frederick Brooks' book The Mythical Man Month and his latest The Design of Design. The former must read book talks about complexity. But he refrains from damning all complexity. The world we live in and enterprises we strive to transform with enterprise architecture are complicated organisms, much like the human body. But sometimes a simple solution is the best approach. Fewer applications (think: portfolio rationalization). Fewer components. Fewer lines of code. Whatever level of abstraction you are working at, less is more. I'm reminded of the enterprise architecture principle "Control Technical Diversity". At one firm I created pithy catch phrases for each principles. I named this one "Less is More". But perhaps another variation is what my server said the other night, "Basic is Best".

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• How do I use an API?

  - by GRardB

  Background I have no idea how to use an API. I know that all APIs are different, but I've been doing research and I don't fully understand the documentation that comes along with them. There's a programming competition at my university in a month and a half that I want to compete in (revolved around APIs) but nobody on my team has ever used one. We're computer science majors, so we have experience programming, but we've just never been exposed to an API. I tried looking at Twitter's documentation, but I'm lost. Would anyone be able to give me some tips on how to get started? Maybe a very easy API with examples, or explaining essential things about common elements of different APIs? I don't need a full-blown tutorial on Stack Overflow; I just need to be pointed in the right direction. Update The programming languages that I'm most fluent in are C (simple text editor usually) and Java (Eclipse). In an attempt to be more specific with my question: I understand that APIs (and yes, external libraries are what I was referring to) are simply sets of functions. Question I guess what I'm trying to ask is how I would go about accessing those functions. Do I need to download specific files and include them in my programs, or do they need to be accessed remotely, etc.?

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• How should I structure moving from overworld to menu system / combat?

  - by persepolis

  I'm making a text-based "Arena" game where the player is the owner of 5 creatures that battle other teams for loot, experience and glory. The game is very simple, using Python and a curses emulator. I have a static ASCII map of an "overworld" of sorts. My character, represented by a glyph, can move about this static map. There are locations all over the map that the character can visit, that break down into two types: 1) Towns, which are a series of menus that will allow the player to buy equipment for his team, hire new recruits or do other things. 2) Arenas, where the player's team will have a "battle" interface with actions he can perform, messages about the fight, etc. Maybe later, an ASCII representation of the fight but for now, just screens of information with action prompts. My main problem is what kind of design or structure I should use to implement this? Right now, the game goes through a master loop which waits for keyboard input and then moves the player about the screen. My current thinking is this: 1) Upon keyboard input, the Player coordinates are checked against a list of Location objects and if the Player coords match the Location coords then... 2) ??? I'm not sure if I should then call a seperate function to initiate a "menu" or "combat" mode. Or should I create some kind of new GameMode object that contains a method itself for drawing the screen, printing the necessary info? How do I pass my player's team data into this object? My main concern is passing around the program flow into all these objects. Should I be calling straight functions for different parts of my game, and objects to represent "things" within my game? I was reading about the MVC pattern and how this kind of problem might benefit - decouple the GUI from the game logic and user input but I have no idea how this applies to my game.

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• Entry level engineer question regarding memory mangement

  - by Ealianis

  It has been a few months since I started my position as an entry level software developer. Now that I am past some learning curves (e.g. the language, jargon, syntax of VB and C#) I'm starting to focus on more esoteric topics, as to write better software. A simple question I presented to a fellow coworker was responded with "I'm focusing on the wrong things." While I respect this coworker I do disagree that this is a "wrong thing" to focus upon. Here was the code (in VB) and followed by the question. Note: The Function GenerateAlert() returns an integer. Dim alertID as Integer = GenerateAlert() _errorDictionary.Add(argErrorID, NewErrorInfo(Now(), alertID)) vs... _errorDictionary.Add(argErrorID, New ErrorInfo(Now(), GenerateAlert())) I originally wrote the ladder and rewrote it with the "Dim alertID" so that someone else might find it easier to read. But here was my concern and question. "Should one write this with the Dim AlertID, it would in fact take up more memory; finite but more, and should this method be called many times could it lead to an issue? How will .NET handle this object AlertID. Outside of .NET should one manually dispose of the object after use (near the end of the sub)." I want to ensure I become a knowledgeable programmer that does not just rely upon garbage collection. Am I over thinking this? Am I focusing on the wrong things?

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• How to Effectively Create Bullet Patterns

  - by SoulBeaver

  I'm currently creating a top-down shooter like Touhou. The most important factor of the game is that there are many diverse patterns and ways at which bullets are generated and shot at the player, see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Nb5Ohbt1Sg#start=0:60;end=9:53; At the moment, I'm using a class "Pattern" which has a series of steps on moving and shooting. However, I feel this method is quite laborous as I have to create a new Pattern for each attack and perhaps new Bullet classes that will implement a certain behavior. This question received a comment suggesting I should look into BulletML for easy creation and storage of bullets with a specific pattern. It looks decent, but it led me to wonder, what other solutions do you have that I should take into consideration? Update My current design is as follows: An example of an implemented pattern: My GigasPattern first executes a teleport which moves Alice to a certain point (X, Y) on the screen. After this is completed, the pattern starts using the Mover to move the sprite around (whereas teleporting has separate effects and animation). These are of no concern, really, as they are quite simple. The Shooter also creates various Attacks, which are classes again that the Shooter can use to create various patterns of bullets, much like the one in the question I posted. Once the Mover has reached it's destination, both it and the shooter stop and return to an inactive state. The pattern completes, is removed by the AI and a new one gets chosen.

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• How do you handle animations that are for transitioning between states?

  - by yaj786

  How does one usually handle animations that are for going between a game object's states? For example, imagine a very simple game in which a character can only crouch or stand normally. Currently, I use a custom Animation class like this: class Animation{ int numFrames; int curFrame; Bitmap spriteSheet; //... various functions for pausing, returning frame, etc. } and an example Character class class Character{ int state; Animation standAni; Animation crouchAni; //... etc, etc. } Thus, I use the state of the character to draw the necessary animation. if(state == STATE_STAND) draw(standAni.updateFrame()); else if(state == STATE_CROUCH) draw(crouchAni.updateFrame()); Now I've come to the point where I want to draw "in-between" animations, because right now the character will just jump immediately into a crouch instead of bending down. What is a good way to handle this? And if the way that I handle storing Animations in the Character class is not a good way, what is? I thought of creating states like STATE_STANDING_TO_CROUCHING but I feel like that may get messy fast.

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• Correcting Lighting in Stencil Reflections

  - by Reanimation

  I'm just playing around with OpenGL seeing how different methods of making shadows and reflections work. I've been following this tutorial which describes using GLUT_STENCIL's and MASK's to create a reasonable interpretation of a reflection. Following that and a bit of tweaking to get things to work, I've come up with the code below. Unfortunately, the lighting isn't correct when the reflection is created. glPushMatrix(); plane(); //draw plane that reflection appears on glColorMask(GL_FALSE, GL_FALSE, GL_FALSE, GL_FALSE); glDepthMask(GL_FALSE); glEnable(GL_STENCIL_TEST); glStencilFunc(GL_ALWAYS, 1, 0xFFFFFFFF); glStencilOp(GL_REPLACE, GL_REPLACE, GL_REPLACE); plane(); //draw plane that acts as clipping area for reflection glColorMask(GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE); glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); glStencilFunc(GL_EQUAL, 1, 0xFFFFFFFF); glStencilOp(GL_KEEP, GL_KEEP, GL_KEEP); glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glPushMatrix(); glScalef(1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f); glTranslatef(0,2,0); glRotatef(180,0,1,0); sphere(radius, spherePos); //draw object that you want to have a reflection glPopMatrix(); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDisable(GL_STENCIL_TEST); sphere(radius, spherePos); //draw object that creates reflection glPopMatrix(); It looked really cool to start with, then I noticed that the light in the reflection isn't correct. I'm not sure that it's even a simple fix because effectively the reflection is also a sphere but I thought I'd ask here none-the-less. I've tried various rotations (seen above the first time the sphere is drawn) but it doesn't seem to work. I figure it needs to rotate around the Y and Z axis but that's not correct. Have I implemented the rotation wrong or is there a way to correct the lighting?

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• Calculating the correct particle angle in an outwards explosion

  - by Sun

  I'm creating a simple particle explosion but am stuck in finding the correct angle to rotate my particle. The effect I'm going for is similar to this: Where each particle is going outwards from the point of origin and at the correct angle. This is what I currently have: As you can see, each particle is facing the same angle, but I'm having a little difficulty figuring out the correct angle. I have the vector for the point of emission and the new vector for each particle, how can I use this to calculate the angle? Some code for reference: private Particle CreateParticle() { ... Vector2 velocity = new Vector2(2.0f * (float)(random.NextDouble() * 2 - 1), 2.0f * (float)(random.NextDouble() * 2 - 1)); direction = velocity - ParticleLocation; float angle = (float)Math.Atan2(direction.Y, direction.X); ... return new Particle(texture, position, velocity, angle, angularVelocity, color, size, ttl, EmitterLocation); } I am then using the angle created as so in my particles Draw method: spriteBatch.Draw(Texture, Position, null, Color, Angle, origin, Size, SpriteEffects.None, 0f);

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