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• How to choose how to store data?

  - by Eldros

  Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. - Chinese Proverb I could ask what kind of data storage I should use for my actual project, but I want to learn to fish, so I don't need to ask for a fish each time I begin a new project. So, until I used two methods to store data on my non-game project: XML files, and relational databases. I know that there is also other kind of database, of the NoSQL kind. However I wouldn't know if there is more choice available to me, or how to choose in the first place, aside arbitrary picking one. So the question is the following: How should I choose the kind of data storage for a game project? And I would be interested on the following criterion when choosing: The size of the project. The platform targeted by the game. The complexity of the data structure. Added Portability of data amongst many project. Added How often should the data be accessed Added Multiple type of data for a same application Any other point you think is of interest when deciding what to use. EDIT I know about Would it be better to use XML/JSON/Text or a database to store game content?, but thought it didn't address exactly my point. Now if I am wrong, I would gladely be shown the error in my ways.

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• Good starting platform for a teenage games programmer

  - by gkrogers

  My son (15) has decided that he wants to pursue a career as a games programmer. I've said that he should get started now with a simple game. He has no programming experience yet, but I am a programmer (business apps, not games) so I can teach him programming, but what would be a good platform for him to start on? Initially I'm looking for something that can provide quick results, to keep his enthusiasm up. What would you suggest?

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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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• Need the co-ordinates of innerPolygon

  - by user960567

  Let say I have this diagram, Given that i have all the co-ordinates of outer polygon and the distance between inner and outer polygon is d is also given. How to calculate the inner polygon co-ordinates? Edit: I was able to solved the issue by getting the mid-points of all lines. From these mid-points I can move d distance, So I can get three points. No I have 3 points and 3 slopes. From this, I can get three new equations. Simultaneously, solving the equation get the 3 points.

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• Including Microsoft.XNA.Framework.Input.Touch in a project?

  - by steven_desu

  So after running through tutorials by both Microsoft and www.xnadevelopment.com I feel very confident in my ability to get to work on my first game using the XNA Framework. I've manipulated sprites, added audio, changed game states, and even went a step further to apply the knowledge I had and figure out how to make animations and basic 2-dimensional physics (including impulses, force, acceleration, and speed calculations) But then shortly into the project I hit a curious bump that I've been unable to figure out. In wanting to implement menus, pause screens, and several different aspects of play (a "pre-level" prep screen, the level itself, and a screen after the level to review how well you did) I took a look at Microsoft's Game State Management sample. I understood the concept, although it was admittedly quite a lot to take in. Not wanting to recreate the entire concept by scratch (after all- what purpose would that serve?) I tried copying and pasting the sample code into my own ScreenManager class (as well as InputState and GameScreen classes) to try and borrow their ingenuity. When I did this, however, my project stopped compiling. I was getting the following error: The type or namespace name 'Touch' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input' (are you missing an assembly reference?) Having read through their sample code already, I realized that this namespace and every function and class within it could be safely ripped from the code without losing functionality. It's a namespace simply for integrating with touchscreen devices (presumably Windows Phone 7, but maybe also tablets). But then I began to wonder- how come Microsoft's sample compiled but mine didn't? I copied their code exactly so there must be a setting somewhere that I need to change in Visual Studio in order to correct this. I tried creating a new project as a Windows Phone 7 game rather than a Windows game, however that only forced it to compile to a Windows Phone emulator and denied me the ability to change the resolution and other features which I clearly had the power to do in the sample code. So my question is simple - how do I properly use the namespace Microsoft.XNA.Framework.Input.Touch?

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• On Screen Coin Animation

  - by Siddharth

  am working with side scrolling skater game. I want to perform coin animation such that as player collect coin it moves upside and attach with currency sprite. My main character and coin present in game scene and currency sprite present in HUD layer. This situation creates problem for me. Directly I can not apply modifier to coin because it is side scrolling game so based on main character speed it reaches at different position. That I have checked. So that I have to generate other coin at same position at game layer coin has, in HUD layer and move upward to it. But I didn't able to get its y position correct though I can able to get x position correctly. Many time main character goes downward so it get minus value many time. I also tried following code float[] position = GameHUD.this .convertSceneCoordinatesToLocalCoordinates(GameManager .getInstance().getCoinX(), GameManager.getInstance() .getCoinY()); But I am getting same coordinate as I provide. No difference in that so please some one provide me guidance in that. Because I am near to complete my game. EDIT: Here game layer and hud layer is totally different. Actual coin present in game layer which player has to collect and at same position I want to generate another coin in hud layer to perform some animation. It is recommended to generate coin in hud layer because through that only I can able to complete my target.

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• Implementing traffic conditions in TORCS

  - by user1837811

  I am working on a project about "Effects of Traffic conditions and Track Complexity on Car Driving Behavior". Is it possible to implement traffic in TORCS, or should I use another car simulator? By the word "traffic" I mean there are cars running on both tracks in both directions and I can detect the distances, direction and speed of these cars. Depending on this information I can decide whether I should slow down, speed up and calculate the correct timing to overtake.

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• Animations / OpenGL (ES 2) in game menu

  - by user16547

  (I am specifically asking for Android) If you look at Angry Birds (and in fact many other games), you can already see a lot of animations & effects going in the main menu and in other places even before starting to play. I assume they are done with OpenGL, more precisely a FrameLayout is used and inside it a GLSurfaceView is somewhere at the bottom of the hierarchy; above the GLSurfaceView you have regular Android buttons and texts. Is this how it's done*? Also would you reuse the same GLSurfaceView when running the actual game or should another one be created? *I am aware an alternative approach would be to make absolutely everything in OpenGL. Of these two I prefer the FrameLayout one, but I don't know whether other developers agree.

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• How do I drag my widgets without dragging other widgets?

  - by Cypher

  I have a bunch of drag-able widgets on screen. When I am dragging one of the widgets around, if I drag the mouse over another widget, that widget then gets "snagged" and is also dragged around. While this is kind of a neat thing and I can think of a few game ideas based on that alone, that was not intended. :-P Background Info I have a Widget class that is the basis for my user interface controls. It has a bunch of properties that define it's size, position, image information, etc. It also defines some events, OnMouseOver, OnMouseOut, OnMouseClick, etc. All of the event handler functions are virtual, so that child objects can override them and make use of their implementation without duplicating code. Widgets are not aware of each other. They cannot tell each other, "Hey, I'm dragging so bugger off!" Source Code Here's where the widget gets updated (every frame): public virtual void Update( MouseComponent mouse, KeyboardComponent keyboard ) { // update position if the widget is being dragged if ( this.IsDragging ) { this.Left -= (int)( mouse.LastPosition.X - mouse.Position.X ); this.Top -= (int)( mouse.LastPosition.Y - mouse.Position.Y ); } ... // define and throw other events if ( !this.WasMouseOver && this.IsMouseOver && mouse.IsButtonDown( MouseButton.Left ) ) { this.IsMouseDown = true; this.MouseDown( mouse, new EventArgs() ); } ... // define and throw other events } And here's the OnMouseDown event where the IsDraggable property gets set: public virtual void OnMouseDown( object sender, EventArgs args ) { if ( this.IsDraggable ) { this.IsDragging = true; } } Problem Looking at the source code, it's obvious why this is happening. The OnMouseDown event gets fired whenever the mouse is hovered over the Widget and when the left mouse button is "down" (but not necessarily in that order!). That means that even if I hold the mouse down somewhere else on screen, and simply move it over anything that IsDraggable, it will "hook" onto the mouse and go for a ride. So, now that it's obvious that I'm Doing It Wrong™, how do I do this correctly?

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• Good practices in screen states management?

  - by DevilWithin

  I wonder what are the best ways to organize different screens in a game? I am thinking of it like this: Inheriting a base State class, and overriding update and render methods, to handle the current screen. Then, under certain events a StateManager is able to activate another Screen State, and the game screen changes as only the current State is rendered. On the activation of a new screen, effects like fading could be added, and also the same goes for its deactivation. This way a flow of screen could be made. By saying when A ends, B starts, allowing for complex animations etc. Toughts?

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• How to avoid circular dependencies between Player and World?

  - by futlib

  I'm working on a 2D game where you can move up, down, left and right. I have essentially two game logic objects: Player: Has a position relative to the world World: Draws the map and the player So far, World depends on Player (i.e. has a reference to it), needing its position to figure out where to draw the player character, and which portion of the map to draw. Now I want to add collision detection to make it impossible for the player to move through walls. The simplest way I can think of is to have the Player ask the World if the intended movement is possible. But that would introduce a circular dependency between Player and World (i.e. each holds a reference to the other), which seems worth avoiding. The only way I came up with is to have the World move the Player, but I find that somewhat unintuitive. What is my best option? Or is avoiding a circular dependency not worth it?

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• Whole continent simulation [on hold]

  - by user2309021

  Let's suppose I am planning to create a simulation of an entire continent at some point in the past (let's say, around 0 A.D). Is it feasible to spawn a hundred million actors that interact with each other and their environments? Having them reproduce, extract resources, etc? The fact is that I actually want to create a simulation that allows me to zoom in from a view of the entire continent up to a single village, and interact with it. (Think as if you could keep zooming in the campaign map of any Total War game and the transition to the battle map was seamless, not a change of the "game mode"). By the way, I have never made a game in my entire life (I have programmed normal desktop applications, though), so I am really having trouble wrapping my head around how to implement such a thing. Even while thinking about how to implement a simple population simulator, without a graphical interface, I think that the O(n) complexity of traversing an array and telling all people to get one year older each time the program ticks is kind of stupid. Any kind help would be greatly appreciated :) EDIT: After being put on hold, I shall specify a question. How would you implement a simulation of all basic human dynamics (reproduction, resource consumption) in an entire continent (with millions of people)?

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• Material usage, one per model or per object?

  - by WSkid

  Is it better (memory, time (of developer), space) to use single model that is unwrapped and uses a single material or to break a model down into appropriate bits, each with their own smaller texture/material? Or does it depend on the target platform as to what is acceptable - ie PC vs tablet? An example: Say you have a typical house with a tiled roof. Model it, make sure everything is attached, unwrap the walls/roof so in your UV template the walls and roof would be in one texture file, side-by-side in say a 512x512 file. Model the roof/walls as separate objects, unwrap them individually and have two UV templates. You could then have a 256x256 file for each one.

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• How can I get textures on edge of walls like in Super Metroid and Aquaria?

  - by meds

  Games like Super Metroid and Aquaria present the terrain with the other facing parts having rocks and stuff while deeper behind them (i.e. underground) there's different detail or just black. I would like to do something similar using polygons. Terrain is created in my current level as a set of overlapping square boxes. I'm not sure if this rendering method will work such a system for creating terrain but if anyone has ideas I'd love to hear them. Otherwise I'd like to know how I should re-write the terrain rendering system so it actually works to draw terrain in this manner...

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• Question on methods in Object Oriented Programming

  - by mal

  I’m learning Java at the minute (first language), and as a project I’m looking at developing a simple puzzle game. My question relates to the methods within a class. I have my Block type class; it has its many attributes, set methods, get methods and just plain methods. There are quite a few. Then I have my main board class. At the moment it does most of the logic, positioning of sprites collision detection and then draws the sprites etc... As I am learning to program as much as I’m learning to program games I’m curious to know how much code is typically acceptable within a given method. Is there such thing as having too many methods? All my draw functionality happens in one method, should I break this into a few ‘sub’ methods? My thinking is if I find at a later stage that the for loop I’m using to cycle through the array of sprites searching for collisions in the spriteCollision() method is inefficient I code a new method and just replace the old method calls with the new one, leaving the old code intact. Is it bad practice to have a method that contains one if statement, and place the call for that method in the for loop? I’m very much in the early stages of coding/designing and I need all the help I can get! I find it a little intimidating when people are talking about throwing together a prototype in a day too! Can’t wait until I’m that good!

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• Implement Fast Inverse Square Root in Javascript?

  - by BBz

  The Fast Inverse Square Root from Quake III seems to use a floating-point trick. As I understand, floating-point representation can have some different implementations. So is it possible to implement the Fast Inverse Square Root in Javascript? Would it return the same result? float Q_rsqrt(float number) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); return y; }

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• Creating shooting arrow class [on hold]

  - by I.Hristov

  OK I am trying to write an XNA game with one controllable by the player entity, while the rest are bots (enemy and friendly) wondering around and... shooting each other from range. Now the shooting I suppose should be done with a separate class Arrow (for example). The resulting object would be the arrow appearing on screen moving from shooting entity to target entity. When target is reached arrow is no longer active, probably removed from the list. I plan to make a class with fields: Vector2 shootingEntity; Vector2 targetEntity; float arrowSpeed; float arrowAttackSpeed; int damageDone; bool isActive; Then when enemy entities get closer than a int rangeToShoot (which each entity will have as a field/prop) I plan to make a list of arrows emerging from each entity and going to the closest opposite one. I wonder if that logic will enable me later to make possible many entities to be able to shoot independently at different enemy entities at the same time. I know the question is broad but it would be wise to ask if the foundations of the idea are correct.

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• Nice function for "rolling score up"?

  - by bobobobo

  I'm adding to the player's score, and I'm using a per-frame formula like: int score, displayedScore ;// score is ACTUAL score player has, // displayedScore is what is shown this frame to the player // (the creeping/"rolling" number) float disparity = score - displayedScore ; int d = disparity * .1f ; // add 1/10 of the difference, if( !d ) d = signum( disparity ) ; // last 10 go by 1's score += d ; Where inline int signum( float val ){ if( val > 0 ) return 1 ; else if( val < 0 ) return -1 ; else return 0 ; } So, it kind of works where it makes big changes rapidly, then it creeps in the last few one at a time. But I'm looking for better (or possibly well known?) score-creeping functions. Any one?

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• How to render a retro-like pixel graphics from 3d models?

  - by momijigari

  I was wondering if there's a possibility to render a retro-pixel-like graphics from 3d model in real time? I'm talking about the Starfarer-like graphics. I know it's hand drawn, and it's 2d. But if I need a 3d objects with the same aesthetics? I'm currently working with Flash. But I don't need any ready-solutions, I just want to understand the principle from any other platform if there is one. So if anybody met anything like this I would appreciate your help. (If it's not possible to do in real time, I could at least pre-render a sequence of sprites. It would be much better than creating hundreds of hand-drawn ones)

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• OpenGL Application displays only 1 frame

  - by Avi

  EDIT: I have verified that the problem is not the VBO class or the vertex array class, but rather something else. I have a problem where my vertex buffer class works the first time its called, but displays nothing any other time its called. I don't know why this is, and it's also the same in my vertex array class. I'm calling the functions in this order to set up the buffers: enable client states bind buffers set buffer / array data unbind buffers disable client states Then in the draw function, that's called every frame: enable client states bind buffers set pointers unbind buffers bind index buffer draw elements unbind index buffer disable client states Is there something wrong with the order in which I'm calling the functions, or is it a more specific code error? EDIT: here's some of the code Code for setting pointers: //element is the vertex attribute being drawn (e.g. normals, colors, etc.) static void makeElementPointer(VertexBufferElements::VBOElement element, Shader *shade, void *elementLocation) { //elementLocation is BUFFER_OFFSET(n) if a buffer is bound switch (element) { .... glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, elementLocation); //changes based on element .... //but I'm only dealing with } //vertices for now } And that's basically all the code that isn't just a straight OpenGL function call.

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• Who should respond to collision: Unit or projectile?

  - by aleguna

  In an RTS if a projectile hits a unit. Who should handle the collision? If projectile handles the collision, it must be aware of all possible types of units, to know what damage to inflict. For example a bullet will likely kill a human, but it will do nothing to a tank. The same goes if unit handles a collision. So either way one of them should be aware of all possible types of the other. Of course the 'true' way would be to do full physics simulation, but that's not an option for an RTS with 1000s of units and projectiles... So what are the common practicies in this regards?

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• Animations not accepted in animator

  - by Lautaro

  In the official Unity Animator State Machine tutorial video animation clips are dragged out from the assets folder into the animator and dropped. I have a 3D model that i bought online to experiment with that comes with animations. I added a custom made animation as well. These all work well in my demo project. But when i add a animator to the assets and try to drag and drop animations onto it it doesnt work. I get a forbidden-sign as a mouse pointer. I try to add animations through the inspector but that does not work either. The tutorials makes it seem so easy and does not talk anything about what animations can be used. What am i doing wrong?

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• Faster 2D Collision detection

  - by eShredder

  Recently I've been working on a fast-paced 2d shooter and I came across a mighty problem. Collision detection. Sure, it is working, but it is very slow. My goal is: Have lots of enemies on screen and have them to not touch each other. All of the enemies are chasing the player entity. Most of them have the same speed so sooner or later they all end up taking the same space while chasing the player. This really drops the fun factor since, for the player, it looks like you are being chased by one enemy only. To prevent them to take the same space I added a collision detection (a very basic 2D detection, the only method I know of) which is. Enemy class update method Loop through all enemies (continue; if the loop points at this object) If enemy object intersects with this object Push enemy object away from this enemy object This works fine. As long as I only have <200 enemy entities that is. When I get closer to 300-350 enemy entities my frame rate begins to drop heavily. First I thought it was bad rendering so I removed their draw call. This did not help at all so of course I realised it was the update method. The only heavy part in their update method is this each-enemy-loops-through-every-enemy part. When I get closer to 300 enemies the game does a 90000 (300x300) step itteration. My my~ I'm sure there must be another way to aproach this collision detection. Though I have no idea how. The pages I find is about how to actually do the collision between two objects or how to check collision between an object and a tile. I already know those two things. tl;dr? How do I aproach collision detection between LOTS of entities? Quick edit: If it is to any help, I'm using C# XNA.

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• First frame has a much longer delta time than other frames

  - by Kipras

  I had a problem where my AI moved extreme at the first frame and then normal after that. I then figured out it was my delta. It's about 0.016 seconds (60 fps), but the first frame was about 19000 seconds, which is obviously impossible. Does anybody know what might be happening? Also the delta later on likes to oscillate from 0.01 to 0.03, which is, again, crazy. long time = Sys.getTime() * 1000 / Sys.getTimerResolution(); float delta = (time - lastFrame) / 1000f; lastFrame = time; return delta; That's the delta code.

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• How to apply a filter to the screen of a running program?

  - by Shahbaz

  The idea is to take old games without modifying them, but have the graphics card apply a series of filters to their output before sending them to the monitor. A very crude example would be to take a game that has a resolution of 640x480 and do: Increase the resolution to 1280x960 Apply a blur (low pass filter) Apply a sharpen (1 + high pass filter) These steps may not necessarily be the best to improve the visuals of an old game, but there are a lot of techniques that are well-known in image processing for this purpose. The question is, do the (NVidia) graphics cards give the ability to load a program that modifies the screen before sending it to the monitor? If so, how are they called and what terminology should I use to search? I would be comfortable with doing the programming myself if this ability is part of a library. Also, would the solution be different between Windows and Linux? If so, either is fine, since most of the games are probably runnable by wine.

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