Search Results

Search found 16054 results on 643 pages for 'reference architecture'.

Page 63/643 | < Previous Page | 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70  | Next Page >

• "Time Control" in a 2d Platformer

  - by Woody Zantzinger

  I am making a 2d platformer where the player can press a button, and restart the level, only their previous character will also run the level at the same time, like they are traveling back in time. I know other games have done this before, and the way I have thought of doing it is to make the game character have a set of actions (Idle, Jumping, Walking Left etc.) and then detect changes in those actions and log them into a list along with the game time. So then when I need the character to run the level again on its own, I can just go through the list changing its actions at the right time. Is this the best way to do it? Does anyone have any experience in this? Thanks.

  Read the article

• 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!

  Read the article

• Looking for a 24 Hour project for multiple languages [closed]

  - by Daan Timmer

  Right two friends and I came up with this idea of having a 24h programming competition. Where we are going to meet at one place and program away for 24hours long. Though we need a 'project'. Something that needs to be made within 24h. Doesn't have to be a real thing, just a nice learning 'thing'. The rules that we setup for ourselves is that the project can be programmed in any language of our own choice. What I know is that one guy is a PHP enthousiastic, we've got a C#/.NET person. And I am quite easy in languages and speak quite a few (PHP/C#.net/C++STL/Python/JavaScript/Java). Anything really language specific is out of the question. Is there anyone who happens to have a great idea for this?

  Read the article

• Abstract skill/talent system implementation

  - by kiliki

  I've been making small 2D games for about 3 years now (XNA and more recently LWJGL/Slick2D). My latest idea would involve some form of "talent tree" system in a real time game. I've been wracking my brain but can't think of a structure to hold a talent. Something like "Your melee attack is an instant kill if behind the target" I'd like to come up with an abstract object rather than putting random conditionals into other methods. I've solved some relatively complex problems before but I don't even know where to begin with this one. Any help would be appreciated - Java, pseudocode or general concepts are all great.

  Read the article

• Interaction of a GUI-based App and Windows Service

  - by psubsee2003

  I am working on personal project that will be designed to help manage my media library, specifically recordings created by Windows Media Center. So I am going to have the following parts to this application: A Windows Service that monitors the recording folder. Once a new recording is completed that meets specific criteria, it will call several 3rd party CLI Applications to remove the commercials and re-encode the video into a more hard-drive friendly format. A controller GUI to be able to modify settings of the service, specifically add new shows to watch for, and to modify parameters for the CLI Applications A standalone (GUI-based) desktop application that can perform many of the same functions as the windows service, expect manually on specific files instead of automatically based on specific criteria. (It should be mentioned that I have limited experience with an application of this complexity, and I have absolutely zero experience with Windows Services) Since the 1st and 3rd bullet share similar functionality, my design plan is to pull the common functionality into a separate library shared by both parts applications, but these 2 components do not need to interact otherwise. The 2nd and 3rd bullets seem to share some common functionality, both will have a GUI, both will have to help define similar parameters (one to send to the service and the other to send directly to the CLI applications), so I can see some advantage to combining them into the same application. On the other hand, the standalone application (bullet #3) really does not need to interact with the service at all, except for possibly sharing a few common default parameters that can easily be put into an XML in a common location, so it seems to make more sense to just keep everything separate. The controller GUI (2nd bullet) is where I am stuck at the moment. Do I just roll this functionality (allow for user interaction with the service to update settings and criteria) into the standalone application? Or would it be a better design decision to keep them separate? Specifically, I'm worried about adding the complexity of communicating with the Windows Service to the standalone application when it doesn't need it. Is WCF the right approach to allow the controller GUI to interact with the Windows Service? Or is there a better alternative? At the moment, I don't envision a need for a significant amount of interaction, maybe just adding a new task once in a while and occasionally tweaking a parameter, but when something is changed, I do expect the windows service to immediately use the new settings.

  Read the article

• When should code favour optimization over readability and ease-of-use?

  - by jmlane

  I am in the process of designing a small library, where one of my design goals is that the API should be as close to the domain language as possible. While working on the design, I've noticed that there are some cases in the code where a more intuitive, readable attribute/method call requires some functionally unnecessary encapsulation. Since the final product will not necessarily require high performance, I am unconcerned about making the decision to favour ease-of-use in my current project over the most efficient implementation of the code in question. I know not to assume readability and ease-of-use are paramount in all expected use-cases, such as when performance is required. I would like to know if there are more general reasons that argue for a design preferring more efficient implementations—even if only marginally so?

  Read the article

• how to architect this to make it unit testable

  - by SOfanatic

  I'm currently working on a project where I'm receiving an object via web service (WSDL). The overall process is the following: Receive object - add/delete/update parts (or all) of it - and return the object with the changes made. The thing is that sometimes these changes are complicated and there is some logic involved, other databases, other web services, etc. so to facilitate this I'm creating a custom object that mimics the original one but has some enhanced functionality to make some things easier. So I'm trying to have this process: Receive original object - convert/copy it to custom object - add/delete/update - convert/copy it back to original object - return original object. Example: public class Row { public List<Field> Fields { get; set; } public string RowId { get; set; } public Row() { this.Fields = new List<Field>(); } } public class Field { public string Number { get; set; } public string Value { get; set; } } So for example, one of the "actions" to perform on this would be to find all Fields in a Row that match a Value equal to something, and update them with some other value. I have a CustomRow class that represents the Row class, how can I make this class unit testable? Do I have to create an interface ICustomRow to mock it in the unit test? If one of the actions is to sum all of the Values in the Fields that have a Number equal to 10, like this function, how can design the custom class to facilitate unit tests. Sample function: public int Sum(FieldNumber number) { return row.Fields.Where(x => x.FieldNumber.Equals(number)).Sum(x => x.FieldValue); } Am I approaching this the wrong way?

  Read the article

• Business Forces: SOA Adoption

  The only constant in today’s business environment is change. Businesses that continuously foresee change and adapt quickly will gain market share and increased growth. In our ever growing global business environment change is driven by data in regards to collecting, maintaining, verifying and distributing data.  Companies today are made and broken over data. Would anyone still use Google if they did not have one of the most accurate search indexes on the internet? No, because their value is in their data and the quality of their data. Due to the increasing focus on data, companies have been adopting new methodologies for gaining more control over their data while attempting to reduce the costs of maintaining it. In addition, companies are also trying to reduce the time it takes to analyze data in regards to various market forces to foresee changes prior to them actually occurring.   Benefits of Adopting SOA Services can be maintained separately from other services and applications so that a change in one service will only affect itself and client services or applications. The advent of services allows for system functionality to be distributed across a network or multiple networks. The costs associated with maintain business functionality is much higher in standard application development over SOA due to the fact that one Services can be maintained and shared to other applications instead of multiple instances of business functionality being duplicated via hard coding in to several applications. When multiple applications use a single service for a specific business function then the all of the data being processed will be consistent in terms of quality and accuracy through the applications. Disadvantages of Adopting SOA Increased initial costs and timelines are associated with SOA due to the fact that services need to be created as well as applications need to be modified to call the services In order for an SOA project to be successful the project must obtain company and management support in order to gain the proper exposure, funding, and attention. If SOA is new to a company they must also support the proper training in order for the project to be designed, and implemented correctly. References: Tews, R. (2007). Beyond IT: Exploring the Business Value of SOA. SOA Magazine Issue XI.

  Read the article

• A better alternative to incompatible implementations for the same interface?

  - by glenatron

  I am working on a piece of code which performs a set task in several parallel environments where the behaviour of the different components in the task are similar but quite different. This means that my implementations are quite different but they are all based on the relationships between the same interfaces, something like this: IDataReader -> ContinuousDataReader -> ChunkedDataReader IDataProcessor -> ContinuousDataProcessor -> ChunkedDataProcessor IDataWriter -> ContinuousDataWriter -> ChunkedDataWriter So that in either environment we have an IDataReader, IDataProcessor and IDataWriter and then we can use Dependency Injection to ensure that we have the correct one of each for the current environment, so if we are working with data in chunks we use the ChunkedDataReader, ChunkedDataProcessor and ChunkedDataWriter and if we have continuous data we have the continuous versions. However the behaviour of these classes is quite different internally and one could certainly not go from a ContinuousDataReader to the ChunkedDataReader even though they are both IDataProcessors. This feels to me as though it is incorrect ( possibly an LSP violation? ) and certainly not a theoretically correct way of working. It is almost as though the "real" interface here is the combination of all three classes. Unfortunately in the project I am working on with the deadlines we are working to, we're pretty much stuck with this design, but if we had a little more elbow room, what would be a better design approach in this kind of scenario?

  Read the article

• Any frameworks or library allow me to run large amount of concurrent jobs schedully?

  - by Yoga

  Are there any high level programming frameworks that allow me to run large amount of concurrent jobs schedully? e.g. I have 100K of urls need to check their uptime every 5 minutes Definitely I can write a program to handle this, but then I need to handle concurrency, queuing, error handling, system throttling, job distribution etc. Will there be a framework that I only focus on a particular job (i.e. the ping task) and the system will take care of the scaling and error handling for me? I am open to any language.

  Read the article

• Entiity System with C++

  - by Dono

  I'm working on a game engine using the Entity System and I have some questions. How i see Entity System : Components : A class with attributs, set and get. Sprite Physicbody SpaceShip ... System : A class with a list of components. (Component logic) EntityManager Renderer Input Camera ... Entity : Just a empty class with a list of components. What i've done : Currently, i've got a program who allow me to do that : // Create a new entity/ Entity* entity = game.createEntity(); // Add some components. entity->addComponent( new TransformableComponent() ) ->setPosition( 15, 50 ) ->setRotation( 90 ) ->addComponent( new PhysicComponent() ) ->setMass( 70 ) ->addComponent( new SpriteComponent() ) ->setTexture( "name.png" ) ->addToSystem( new RendererSystem() ); My questions Did the system stock a list of components or a list of entities ? In the case where I stock a list of entities, I need to get the component of this entities on each frame, that's probably heavy isn't it ? Did the system stock a list of components or a list of entities ? In the case where I stock a list of entities, I need to get the component of this entities on each frame, that's probably heavy isn't it ?

  Read the article

• Triggering Data Changes in N-Tier

  - by Ryan Kinal

  I've been studying n-tier architectures as of late, particularly in VB.NET with Entity Framework and/or LINQ to SQL. I understand the basic concepts, but have been wondering about best practices in regard to triggering CRUD-type operations from user input/action. So, the arcitecture looks something like the following: [presentation layer] - [business layer] - [data layer] - (database) Getting information from the database into the presentation layer is simple and abstracted. It's just a matter of instantiating a new object from the business layer, which in turn uses the data layer to get at the correct information. However, saving (updating and inserting), and deleting seem to require particular APIs on the relevant business objects. I have to assume this is standard practice, unless a business object will save itself on various operations (which seems inefficient), or on disposal (which seems like it just wouldn't work, or may be unwieldy and unreliable). Should my "savable" business objects all implement a particular "ISavable" or "IDatabaseObject" interface? Is this a recognized (anti-)pattern? Are there other, better patterns I should be using that I'm just unaware of? The TLDR question, I suppose, is How does the presentation layer trigger database changes?

  Read the article

• Architectural approaches to creating a game menu/shell overlay on PC/Linux?

  - by Ghopper21

  I'm am working on a collection of games for a custom digital tabletop installation (similar to Microsoft Surface tables). Each game will be an individual executable that runs full-screen. In addition, there needs to be a menu/shell overlay program running simultaneously. The menu/shell will allow users to pause games, switch to other games, check their game history, etc. Some key requirements of the shell: it intercepts all user input (mainly multitouch) first before passing it on to the currently running game (so that it can, for instance, know to pop-up at a "pause" command); can reveal on arbitrary portions of the screen, with the currently running (but presumably paused) game still showing underneath, ideally with its shape/size being dynamic, to allow for creation of an animated in/out drawer effect over the game. I'm currently looking into different architectural approaches to this problem, including Fraps and DirectX overlays, but I'm sure I'm missing some ways to think about this. What are the main approaches I should be considering? (Note the table is currently being run by Windows PC, but it could potentially be a Linux box instead.)

  Read the article

• How should I model an economy-based game in code?

  - by Matthew G.

  I'd like to create an economy game based on an ancient civilization. I'm not sure how to design it. If I were working on a smaller game, like a copy of "Space Invaders," I'd have no problem structuring it like this: Main Control Class Graphics Class Player Class Enemy class I don't understand how I'd do this for larger projects like my economy game. Do I create a country class that contains a bunch of towns? Do the towns contain a lot building class, most contain classes of people? Do I make a path finding class that the player can access to get around?

  Read the article

• How to design a game engine in an object-oriented language?

  - by chuzzum

  Whenever I try and write a game in any object-oriented language, the first problem I always face (after thinking about what kind of game to write) is how to design the engine. Even if I'm using existing libraries or frameworks like SDL, I still find myself having to make certain decisions for every game, like whether to use a state machine to manage menus, what kind of class to use for resource loading, etc. What is a good design and how would it be implemented? What are some tradeoffs that have to be made and their pros/cons?

  Read the article

• Level Representation in a 2D Game

  - by meszar.imola

  I would like to create a 2D game, where a character should move on a stage/level. My stage would be static, constructed some little cubes, similar to the well-known Mario game: some of the elements should represent an element of the way where the character can step, but if the element is missing, the character should fall. My problem is, how to represent this programmatically? My first thought was to represent the stage with a vector, which should contain boolean elements, depending on the state of the element on the stage - if it's missing or not. But this means, I have to verify at my character's x or y position change if it has a stage element under or not (if not, to simulate the falling of the character) - I think it is not the best practice, it's not the beautiful solution. Can you help me with some advice, how to represent the stage?

  Read the article

• Tester/Doer pattern: Assume the caller conforms to the pattern or be defensive and repeat the check?

  - by Daniel Hilgarth

  Assume a simple class that implements the Tester/Doer pattern: public class FooCommandHandler : ICommandHandler { public bool CanHandle(object command) { return command is FooCommand; } public void Handle(object command) { var fooCommand = (FooCommand)command; // Do something with fooCommand } } Now, if someone doesn't conform to the pattern and calls Handle without verifying the command via CanHandle, the code in Handle throws an exception. However, depending on the actual implementation of Handle this can be a whole range of different exceptions. The following implementation would check CanHandle again in Handle and throw a descriptive exception: public void Handle(object command) { if(!CanHandle(command)) throw new TesterDoerPatternUsageViolationException("Please call CanHandle first"); // actual implementation of handling the command. } This has the advantage that the exception is very descriptive. It has the disadvantage that CanHandle is called twice for "good" clients. Is there a consensus on which variation should be used?

  Read the article

• How can I create an orthographic display that handles different screen dimensions?

  - by Piku

  I'm trying to create an iPad/iPhone game using GLES2.0 that contains a 3D scene with a heads-up-display/GUI overlaid on the top. However, this problem would also apply if I were to port my game to a computer and run the game in a resizable window, or allow the user to change screen resolutions... When trying to make the 2D GUI/HUD work I've made the assumption that all I'm really doing is drawing a load of 2D textured 'quads' on the screen and am trying to treat the orthographic projection as an old-style 2D display with 0,0 in the upper left and screenWidth,ScreenHeight in the lower right. This causes me all sorts of confusion when I rotate my ipad into Landscape mode since I can't work out what to put into my projection and modelview matrices to turn everything around the right way. It also gets messy if I want to support the iPad's large screen, an iPhone or a Retina display since I have to then draw three sets of textures for everything and work out which ones to use. Should I be trying to map the 2D OpenGL co-ords 1:1 with the screen? While typing out this question it occurs to me that I could keep my origin in the centre, still running -1/+1 along the axes. This would let me scale my 2D content appropriately on the different screen sizes, but wouldn't I end up with the textures being scaled and possibly losing quality? I'm using OpenGLES 2.0 and have a matrix library that has equivalents to the GLES1.1 glOrthof() and glFrustrum() calls.

  Read the article

• Writing a dynamic achievement system without hardcoding rules into the application

  - by imaginative

  I really enjoyed the solution provided here for groundwork on writing an achievement framework. The problem I have is I have game designers that would like to be able to insert achievements into a CMS at runtime. In a way, it sounds insane and complex to do this, but is it really? I think the concept of having to do a hard push of the application for every new achievement is cumbersome. I would love to be able to give our designers the capability to put together new achievements by entering them into a database. It shouldn't matter what tool I'm using, but for those interested, my backend is being written in JRuby (Ruby on top of the JVM). What are some possible ways of going about abstracting the logic in the aforementioned link even further so that rules can be interpreted at runtime?

  Read the article

• Should package structure closely resemble class hierarchy?

  - by Panzercrisis

  Pretty simple question. Should package structure closely resemble class hierarchy? If so, how closely? Why or why not? For instance, let's say you've got class A and class B, plus class AFactory and class BFactory. You put class A and class B in the package com.something.elements, and you put AFactory and BFactory in com.something.elements.factories. AFactory and BFactory would be further down the hierarchy package-wise, but they'd be further up class-wise. Is this sort of thing a good idea or a bad idea?

  Read the article

• Keeping a domain model consistent with actual data

  - by fstuijt

  Recently domain driven design got my attention, and while thinking about how this approach could help us I came across the following problem. In DDD the common approach is to retrieve entities (or better, aggregate roots) from a repository which acts as a in-memory collection of these entities. After these entities have been retrieved, they can be updated or deleted by the user, however after retrieval they are essentially disconnected from the data source and one must actively inform the repository to update the data source and make is consistent again with our in-memory representation. What is the DDD approach to retrieving entities that should remain connected to the data source? For example, in our situation we retrieve a series of sensors that have a specific measurement during retrieval. Over time, these measurement values may change and our business logic in the domain model should respond to these changes properly. E.g., domain events may be raised if a sensor value exceeds a predefined threshold. However, using the repository approach, these sensor values are just snapshots, and are disconnected from the data source. Does any of you have an idea on how to solve this following the DDD approach?

  Read the article

• Are separate business objects needed when persistent data can be stored in a usable format?

  - by Kylotan

  I have a system where data is stored in a persistent store and read by a server application. Some of this data is only ever seen by the server, but some of it is passed through unaltered to clients. So, there is a big temptation to persist data - whether whole rows/documents or individual fields/sub-documents - in the exact form that the client can use (eg. JSON), as this removes various layers of boilerplate, whether in the form of procedural SQL, an ORM, or any proxy structure which exists just to hold the values before having to re-encode them into a client-suitable form. This form can usually be used on the server too, though business logic may have to live outside of the object, On the other hand, this approach ends up leaking implementation details everywhere. 9 times out of 10 I'm happy just to read a JSON structure out of the DB and send it to the client, but 1 in every 10 times I have to know the details of that implicit structure (and be able to refactor access to it if the stored data ever changes). And this makes me think that maybe I should be pulling this data into separate business objects, so that business logic doesn't have to change when the data schema does. (Though you could argue this just moves the problem rather than solves it.) There is a complicating factor in that our data schema is constantly changing rapidly, to the point where we dropped our previous ORM/RDBMS system in favour of MongoDB and an implicit schema which was much easier to work with. So far I've not decided whether the rapid schema changes make me wish for separate business objects (so that server-side calculations need less refactoring, since all changes are restricted to the persistence layer) or for no separate business objects (because every change to the schema requires the business objects to change to stay in sync, even if the new sub-object or field is never used on the server except to pass verbatim to a client). So my question is whether it is sensible to store objects in the form they are usually going to be used, or if it's better to copy them into intermediate business objects to insulate both sides from each other (even when that isn't strictly necessary)? And I'd like to hear from anybody else who has had experience of a similar situation, perhaps choosing to persist XML or JSON instead of having an explicit schema which has to be assembled into a client format each time.

  Read the article

• Futures/Monads vs Events

  - by c69

  So, the question is quite simple: in an application framework, when performance impact can be ignored (10-20 events per second at max), what is more maintainable and flexible to use as a preferred medium for communication between modules - Events or Futures/Promices/Monads ? Its often being said, that Events (pub/sub, mediator) allow loose-coupling and thus - more maintainable app... My experience deny this: once you have more that 20+ events - debugging becomes hard, and so is refactoring - because it is very hard to see: who, when and why uses what. Promices (i'm coding in javascript) are much uglier and dumber, than Events. But: you can clearly see connections between function calls, so application logic becomes more straight-forward. What i'm afraid. though, is that Promices will bring more hard-coupling with them... p.s: the answer does not have to be based on JS, experience from other functional languages is much welcome.

  Read the article

• De-facto standards for customer information record

  - by maasg

  I'm currently evaluating a potential new project that involves creating a DB for typical customer information (userid, pwd, first & last name, email, adress, telfnr ...). At this point, requirements are only roughly defined. The customer DB is expected in the O(millions) of records. In order to calculate some back-of-the-envelope numbers for DB sizing and evaluate potential DB options & architectures, I'm looking for some de-facto standards for these kind of records. In particular, the std size of every field (first name, last name, address,...) or typical avg for a simple customer record would be great info. With so many e-commerce websites out there, there should be some kind of typical config that can be reused and avoid re-inventing the wheel. Any ideas?

  Read the article

• Pure functional programming and game state

  - by Fu86

  Is there a common technique to handle state (in general) in a functional programming language? There are solutions in every (functional) programming language to handle global state, but I want to avoid this as far as I could. All state in a pure functional manner are function parameters. So I need to put the whole game state (a gigantic hashmap with the world, players, positions, score, assets, enemies, ...)) as a parameter to all functions which wants to manipulate the world on a given input or trigger. The function itself picks the relevant information from the gamestate blob, do something with it, manipulate the gamestate and return the gamestate. But this looks like a poor mans solution for the problem. If I put the whole gamestate into all functions, there is no benefit for me in contrast to global variables or the imperative approach. I could put just the relevant information into the functions and return the actions which will be taken for the given input. And one single function apply all the actions to the gamestate. But most functions need a lot of "relevant" information. move() need the object position, the velocity, the map for collision, position of all enemys, current health, ... So this approach does not seem to work either. So my question is how do I handle the massive amount of state in a functional programming language -- especially for game development?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70  | Next Page >