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• How to protect your real time online shooter from potential bots

  - by Zaky German

  I'm looking to create a multiplayer top down shooter. While i've read about different topics, i can see them i've got some real challenges ahead, but i'm all up for it. One thing i can't understand is how am i supposed to be protecting the game from people who try to create bots? What i mean is, as far as i understand, it's impossible to protect the network traffic in a way that players won't be able to create programs that listen to what's going on and understand it. So what worries me is that people can create bots that listen to the current location of rival players, and send communication that mimic as if the player is shooting in the exact "perfect" location to win that match. So what kind of techniques are used to protect real time games from such bots? Also i'd like to mention that i've tried searching for discussions (as this sounds like something many people struggle with), but couldn't find anything about it specifically, only as a part of broader questions about networking in real time games. If i should have looked harder feel free to put me in my place :) Thanks alot!

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• E3 Booth Babes Display a Painful Lack of Video Game Knowledge [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you thought a prerequisite for manning a booth at an electronics expo was a passing knowledge of the electronics and games you were promoting, you were wrong. In the above video Chloe Dykstra puts a set of “booth babes” from the E3 2011 conference to the test by asking them simple questions about video games both new and old. If you’re a gaming fan and you can watch this video without laughing out loud you’ve got an iron will (or you’re shaking your head in disbelief that someone could work a gaming convention and not know the answers to these questions). We won’t lie, we were shaking our head when the one model admitted that she’d worked at GameStop for a year and still didn’t know any of the answers. What questions would you put on list? How about “Finish this sentence: ‘Your Princess is in another…’”, “Dimension?”. 5HP: Booth Babe Edition – E3 2011 [YouTube via Kotaku] How To Encrypt Your Cloud-Based Drive with BoxcryptorHTG Explains: Photography with Film-Based CamerasHow to Clean Your Dirty Smartphone (Without Breaking Something)

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• Examples of 2D side-scrollers that achieve open non-linear feel?

  - by Milosz Falinski

  I'm working on a 2.5D platformer prototype that aims for an open feel while maintaining familiar core mechanics. Now, there's some obvious challenges with creating a non constricted feel in a spatially constricted environment. What I'm interested in, is examples of how game designers deal with the "here's a level, beat the bad guys/puzzles to get to the next level" design that seems so natural to most platformers (eg. Mario/Braid/Pid/Meat Boy to name a few). Some ideas for achieving openness I've come across include: One obvious successful example is Terraria, which achieves openness simply through complexity and flexibility of the game-system Another example that comes to mind is Cave Story. Game is non-linear, offers multiple choices and side-stories Mario, Rayman and some other 'classics' with a top-down level selection. I actually really dislike this as it never did anything for me emotionally and just seems like a bit of a lazy way to do things. Note: I've not actually had much experience with most of the 'classical' console platformers, apart from the obvious Marios/Zeldas/Metroids, since I've grown up on adventure games. By that I mean, it's entirely possible that I simply missed some games that solve the problem really well and are by some considered obvious 'classics'.

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• Is there any simple game that involves psychological factors?

  - by Roman

  I need to find a simple game in which several people need to interact with each other. The game should be simple for an analysis (it should be simple to describe what happens in the game, what players did). Because of the last reason, the video games are not appropriate for my purposes. I am thinking of a simple, schematic, strategic game where people can make a limited set of simple moves. Moreover, the moves of the game should be conditioned not only by a pure logic (like in chess or go). The behavior in the game should depend on psychological factors, on relations between people. In more details, I think it should be a cooperation game where people make their decisions based on mutual trust. It would be nice if players can express punishment and forgiveness in the game. Does anybody knows a game that is close to what I have described above? ADDED I need to add that I need a game where actions of players are simple and easy to formalize. Because of that I cannot use verbal games (where communication between players is important). By simple actions I understand, for example, moves on the board from one position to another one, or passing chips from one player to another one and so on.

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• In the days of modern computing, in 'typical business apps' - why does performance matter?

  - by Prog

  This may seem like an odd question to some of you. I'm a hobbyist Java programmer. I have developed several games, an AI program that creates music, another program for painting, and similar stuff. This is to tell you that I have an experience in programming, but not in professional development of business applications. I see a lot of talk on this site about performance. People often debate what would be the most efficient algorithm in C# to perform a task, or why Python is slow and Java is faster, etc. What I'm trying to understand is: why does this matter? There are specific areas of computing where I see why performance matters: games, where tens of thousands of computations are happening every second in a constant-update loop, or low level systems which other programs rely on, such as OSs and VMs, etc. But for the normal, typical high-level business app, why does performance matter? I can understand why it used to matter, decades ago. Computers were much slower and had much less memory, so you had to think carefully about these things. But today, we have so much memory to spare and computers are so fast: does it actually matter if a particular Java algorithm is O(n^2)? Will it actually make a difference for the end users of this typical business app? When you press a GUI button in a typical business app, and behind the scenes it invokes an O(n^2) algorithm, in these days of modern computing - do you actually feel the inefficiency? My question is split in two: In practice, today does performance matter in a typical normal business program? If it does, please give me real-world examples of places in such an application, where performance and optimizations are important.

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• Using unordered_multimap as entity and component storage

  - by natebot13

  The Setup I've made a few games (more like animations) using the Object Oriented method with base classes for objects that extend them, and objects that extend those, and found I couldn't wrap my head around expanding that system to larger game ideas. So I did some research and discovered the Entity-Component system of designing games. I really like the idea, and thoroughly understood the usefulness of it after reading Byte54's perfect answer here: Role of systems in entity systems architecture. With that said, I have decided to create my current game idea using the described Entity-Component system. Having basic knowledge of C++, and SFML, I would like to implement the backbone of this entity component system using an unordered_multimap without classes for the entities themselves. Here's the idea: An unordered_mulitmap stores entity IDs as the lookup term, while the value is an inherited Component object. Examlpe: ____________________________ |ID |Component | ---------------------------- |0 |Movable | |0 |Accelable | |0 |Renderable | |1 |Movable | |1 |Renderable | |2 |Renderable | ---------------------------- So, according to this map of objects, the entity with ID 0 has three components: Movable, Accelable, and Renderable. These component objects store the entity specific data, such as the location, the acceleration, and render flags. The entity is simply and ID, with the components attached to that ID describing its attributes. Problem I want to store the component objects within the map, allowing the map have full ownership of the components. The problem I'm having, is I don't quite understand enough about pointers, shared pointers, and references in order to get that set up. How can I go about initializing these components, with their various member variables, within the unordered_multimap? Can the base component class take on the member variables of its child classes, when defining the map as unordered_multimap<int, component>? Requirements I need a system to be able to grab an entity, with all of its' attached components, and access members from the components in order to do the necessary calculations and reassignments for position, velocity, etc. Need a clarification? Post a comment with your concerns and I will gladly edit or comment back! Thanks in advance! natebot13

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• The best way to structure/design game code

  - by Edward

  My question is quite broad and related to the 2D game code design/architecture/structure. Usually the main game consists of the main loop where you update & render your world states. However, it's recommended for many purposes to separate rendering from the game-logic and so on. I am kinda confused about the whole situation. Many game engines/libs/sdks don't follow separation schema. They propagate a way where you define some scenes/stages and they contain some objects and the scene/stage controls the user input and so on. For example, in cocos2d(-x) and libgdx (stage2d) the games are usually done the way that the update logic happens at the same time/place as rendering. Also, the propagated way is to have a structure where an object knows how to draw itself - which is not a separation of updating & rendering. The same with Flash based games, they are usually done the way when an object (class) contains a swf or a texture and some data and holds some update logic itself, or updated from main Scene. And again this object already knows how to draw itself via "addChild". Also, some people recommend to use MVC pattern, which will require to completely obey the structure of those engines/libs/sdks. Maybe I am overthinking everything, but I am totally confused. I would be grateful if somebody could point me to a correct direction with the game code structures. What is your way of doing things in libgdx/cocos2d/flash?

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• Broad topics needed for teaching game development

  - by livingtech

  I am going to be doing a presentation on game development to an iPhone user group in the near(ish) future. My audience are iPhone developers, but not necessarily very experienced ones, and this is meant to be an introduction. My question is, what broad topics are needed to understand game development? I acknowledge that this is fairly subjective, but I really am hoping for a comprehensive list of high-level topics that apply to a broad enough swath of games that anyone interested in the topic SHOULD know about them. I would be ecstatic with some pointers to any resources that attempt to make a list such as this this. (I have looked, but my google-fu is failing me tonight.) Here's what I have so far: The Game Loop a sub-note about event driven games 2D Animation sprites/texture maps 3D Animation importance of frameworks modeling software Particles and particle effects hit detection AI Obviously I will not be covering all these topics with any depth, more like simply defining them so that after my talk, the audience will (hopefully) be able to wrap their heads around how any given game might be developed. What am I missing?

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• One Does Like To Code: DevoxxUK

  - by Tori Wieldt

  What's happening at Devoxx UK? I'll be talking to Rock Star speakers, Community leaders, authors, JSR leads and more.  This video is a short introduction.   Check out these great sessions: Thursday, June 12Perchance to Stream with Java 8by Paul Sandoz13:40 - 14:30 | Room 1 Making the Internet-of-Things a Reality with Embedded Javaby Simon Ritter11:50 - 12:40 | Room 4 Java SE 8 Lambdas and Streams Labby Simon Ritter17:00 - 20:00 | Room Mezzanine Safety Not Guaranteed: Sun. Misc. Unsafe and the Quest for Safe Alternativesby Paul Sandoz18:45 - 19:45 | Room 3 Join the Java EvolutionHeather VanCuraPatrick Curran19:45 – 20:45 | Room 2  Glassfish is Here to StayDavid DelabasseeAntonio Goncalves19:45 – 20:45 | Room Expo Here is the full line-up of sessions. Devoxx UK includes a Hackergarten, where can devs work an Open Source project of their choice. The Adopt OpenJDK and Adopt a JSR Program folks will be there to help attendees contribute back to Java SE and Java EE itself!   Saturday includes a special Devoxx4Kids event in conjunction with the London Java Community. It's design to teach 10-16 year-olds simple programming concepts, robotics, electronics, and games making. Workshops include LEGO Mindstorms (robotic engineering), Greenfoot (programming), Arduino (electronics), Scratch (games making), Minecraft Modding (game hacking) and NAO (robotic programming). Small fee, you must register. If you can't attend Devoxx UK in person, stay tuned to the YouTube/Java channel. I'll be doing plenty of interviews so you can join the fun from around the world. 

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• Compiz slow under proprietary nvidia driver

  - by gsedej

  Hi! I am using Ubuntu 10.10 and have problem with proprietary nvidia driver for my GeForce GTS 250. I have issue with poor Compiz performance. And there is also open-source "noueau" driver. Proprietary: I tried many versions but neither works fast on desktop. This means 30 FPS without heavy effects. Currently I am using version 270.18. Even normal desktop use feels bad (moving windows) In games (and 3D benchmark) it is really good! (Unigine Heaven works good!) Open-source "nouveau": Very fast on desktop with heavy effects (blur, ...). I have 300 FPS and more, even in Expo mode. Games were good but not as good as prop. And driver causes xorg to crash even the latest (ppa:xorg-edgers/nouveau), so I switched back to proprietary. I also have computer with Ubuntu 10.04, GeForce 8600GT and drivers around 185.x and Compiz works great there. There is similar question Nvidia proprietary driver performance in 10.10 Which version of nvidia (prop) driver is fast in Compiz in Ubuntu 10.10? How do you install a specific version of nvidia driver? Is it the case that each newer driver works slower on compiz?

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• Why isn't there a culture of paying for frameworks?

  - by Marty Pitt

  One of the side effects of the recent trend of "Lean" startups, and the app store era, is that consumers are more acclimatised to paying small prices for small games / products. Eg.: Online SAAS that charges ~$5 / month (the basecamp style of product) Games which are short, fun, and cheap ($0.99 from the app store This market has been defined by "doing one thing well, and charging people for it." DHH of Rails / 37 Signals fame argues that if your website isn't going to make money, don't bother making it. Why doesn't the same rule apply to frameworks? There are lots of software framework projects out there - many which are mature and feature-rich, which offer developers significant value, yet there doesn't seem to be a market or culture of paying for these. It seems that the projects which do charge money are often things like UI component toolsets, and are often marginalized in favour of free alternatives. Why is this? Surely programmers / businesses see the value in contributing back to projects such as Ruby, Rails, Hibernate, Spring, Ant, Groovy, Gradle, (the list goes on). I'm not suggesting that these frameworks should start charging for anyone who wants to use them, but that there must be a meaningful business model that would allow the developers to earn money from the time they invest developing the framework. Any thoughts as to why this model hasn't emerged / succeeded?

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• I am afraid that my University is not going to teach me enough information [closed]

  - by Muhklayne

  I attend a University and am a Computer Science major. I have barely entered into the major, as I am a sophomore. However, the coursework I am doing is extremely easy already and I feel as though this degree is going to lead me to a path of knowledge without knowing how to bring it all together. Therefore, I am coming to you to ask where I should begin learning on my own! I am willing to dedicate hours upon hours of learning to code outside of class, as it is truly my passion. I will begin by completing all work on http://www.codecademy.com, however I feel this will not be enough either. I would love to learn to integrate visual languages for video games such as NXA and C# combining it with C++ (as I understand video games can be created in this manner). I would also like to look into LUA and Python scripting. I am asking for advice as to where I should begin my personal studies of learning to program, as with my research it has become quite apparent that simply attaining a degree in Computer Science is quite frankly not enough. Thank you for your time!

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• Real life example of an agile game development process outputs

  - by Ken

  I'm trying to learn about applying agile methodologies to game development. But seems to be impossible to find real life examples. There seems to be plenty of material discussing how 'in principle' agile is applied to a game. But that is NOT what I am looking for. I have the Keith book. What I AMlooking for are real EXAMPLES of things like; Initial user stories Final user stories (complete, covering the entire game requirements) Acceptance criteria Task list Sprint backlogs (before and after each sprint) The agile books seem to have some limited examples, many of which seem contrived or limited. In this era of open source software, there must be a publicly available documented example of the process applied to a real game. I am asking specifically about games because they are so different from normal applications. Regular applications are built to all users to complete specific tasks in order to get stuff done(book a room, print a report etc). People play games for much less tangible reasons, so I think the process is significantly different. [it doesn't have to be scrum, it could be any process, just needs to be a real life example game and be reasonably complete]

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• How to cover the widest range of computers when publishing?

  - by DevilWithin

  When you plan a game, or even when you already made a game, and its time to publish, you wonder how much of your audience is covered by the game technology demands. I'm directing this essentialy to casual games, as I constantly see people having old laptops and being unable to replace them. Laptops with integrated cards whose OpenGL version doesn't even support textures larger than 1024x1024. These people may be avid gamers as well, and a reasonable share of the audience to consider giving them the chance to play casual games, once they cannot play any blockbusters. As I've seen happening, a very "noticeable" example is Angry Birds. It's gameplay is merely casual (I think nobody disagrees here) and still, it uses so high resolution textures that at least OpenGL 2.0 or around is needed, which blocks away a lot of people. So, the actual question is: what is a good tradeoff for this issue? Would it be better to just sacrifice the texture resolution for everyone, but have more supported hardware? Would it be better to keep the high quality and just slice the textures into smaller ones, sacrificing the performance a little bit? What else? Any ideas about this topic are welcome for discussion.

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• Scene graphs and spatial partitioning structures: What do you really need?

  - by tapirath

  I've been fiddling with 2D games for awhile and I'm trying to go into 3D game development. I thought I should get my basics right first. From what I read scene graphs hold your game objects/entities and their relation to each other like 'a tire' would be the child of 'a vehicle'. It's mainly used for frustum/occlusion culling and minimizing the collision checks between the objects. Spatial partitioning structures on the other hand are used to divide a big game object (like the map) to smaller parts so that you can gain performance by only drawing the relevant polygons and again minimizing the collision checks to those polygons only. Also a spatial partitioning data structure can be used as a node in a scene graph. But... I've been reading about both subjects and I've seen a lot of "scene graphs are useless" and "BSP performance gain is irrelevant with modern hardware" kind of articles. Also some of the game engines I've checked like gameplay3d and jmonkeyengine are only using a scene graph (That also may be because they don't want to limit the developers). Whereas games like Quake and Half-Life only use spatial partitioning. I'm aware that the usage of these structures very much depend on the type of the game you're developing so for the sake of clarity let's assume the game is a FPS like Counter-Strike with some better outdoor environment capabilities (like a terrain). The obvious question is which one is needed and why (considering the modern hardware capabilities). Thank you.

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• Is there an open source clone of a game in the Total War Series?

  - by sinekonata

  I loved Shogun:Total War gameplay and then later on spent weeks re-enacting historical wars and battles with Europa Barbarorum. It's a mod for Rome:TW that focuses on historical accuracy in the peoples, units, sounds, visuals, everything from macro mechanics to actual battles (e.g. a lot more missiles). Since that time I kind of turned my back on Windows cause it sucks and use Linux cause Mac sucks even worse. So as I miss that game (Eur. Barb.) and consider it the most realistic RTS to date, I'd like to know if there are any free and open source alternatives to it because ever since I'm under linux, I became addicted to FOSS so I also turned my back on paying (even kickstarters) for closed source, pay to play games. I have found a clone/alternative for everyone of the best games like Minecraft, CSS, Natural Selection, TA/SupCom etc... It's kind of the last one I need. The Spring engine is amazing for example, is there another open source project of the source in current development? Or would Spring itself be enough (it certainly looks capable) to make it? Thanks in advance guys...

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• How can Highscores be more meaningful and engaging?

  - by Anselm Eickhoff

  I'm developing a casual Android game in which the player's success can very easily be represented by a number (I'm not more specific because I'm interested in the topic in general). Although I myself am not a highscore person at all, I was thinking of implementing a highscore for that game, but I see at least 2 problems in the classical leaderboard approach: very soon the highscore will be dominated by hardcore players, leaving no chance for beginners, who are then frustrated. This is very severe especially in casual games. there is no direct reward for being a loyal player who plays the game over and over again My current idea is to "reset" the highscore every 24 hours (for example) and each day nominate the "player of the day" who then gets a "star". Then there would be some kind of meta-highscore of players with the most stars. That way even beginners might have a chance to be "player of the day" once and continued or repeated play is rewarded much more. The idea is still very rough and there are many problems in the details and the technical implementation but I have a feeling it is a step in the right direction. Do you have creative and new ideas on how to implement highscores? Which games are doing this well / what types of highscores do you find most engaging?

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• Dynamic model interactions

  - by Richard

  I am just curious as to how in many games (namely games like arkham asylum/city, manhunt, hitman) do they make it so that your character can "grab" a character in front of you and do stuff to them. I know this may sound very confusing but for an example go to youtube and search "hitman executions", and the first video is an example of what i'm asking. Basically I'm wondering how they make your model dynamically interact with whatever other model you come across, so in hitman when you come up behind some one with the fibre wire you strangle the other character or if you have the anesthetic you come up behind some person and put your hand over there mouth while they struggle and slowly go to the floor where you lay them down. I am confused as to whether it was animated to use two models using specific bone/skeletal identifiers, if it is just two completely separate animations that are played at the correct time to make it look like they are actually interacting or something else all together. I am not an animator so i assume most of what i just said is not right but i hope that some one can understand what i mean and provide an answer. PS) I am a programmer and I am in the process of building a hitmanesque game, just because i love that style of game and I want to increase my skills on something fun, so if you do know what i'm talking about have some examples with involving both models and programming (i use c++ and mainly Ogre3D at the moment but i am getting into unity and XNA) i would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

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• Why doesn't it seem to be any development in the field of 3D VR gear, especially with regard to gaming?

  - by neuviemeporte

  I remember that way back around 1995, there was this big craze with VR in the media, a whole bunch of (mostly mediocre) games labeled as "virtual-reality-interactive-movie (...)" were published. If I recall correctly, the first 3D VR helmet was called VFX-1 and was sold bundled with Descent and some dedicated joystick. I never owned one, and I read just one review which was mostly enthusiastic, but pointed to some weak points, like the eyes getting tired after an hour or so of playing. Then the whole thing basically flickered down and died. I suppose the main reason it wasn't successful was that the hardware of the day was not powerful enough, the VR gear's design wasn't perfected to make it comfortable and natural to use, and the companies that made it failed to market it successfully. What I can't understand is why isn't there any development in the field today. There is some vr-ish hardware mostly targeted at the consoles (Kinect, Wii remote, TrackIR), but all projects of creating some 3d head-mounted display system seem to be in early infancy, appear once in a trade show somewhere and aren't heard of again. I think it could work great with head tracking and some of today's shooters, flight sims (trackIR is nice but the movement scale translation is awkward) and other games with an FPP POV. Is there any technological reason why decent vr headgear can't be made today, or is it just that nobody really cares/everyone is scared to repeat the '90s failure?

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• Is there an alternative to SDL 1.3 for a C++ game that should run on iOS and Android?

  - by futlib

  I've used SDL for many desktop games, always as the cross-platform glue for: Creating a window Processing input Rendering images Rendering fonts Playing sounds/music It has never disappointed me at those tasks. But when it comes to graphics, I prefer to work with the OpenGL API directly, even though all of our games are 2D. In the project I'm currently working on, I've made sure to only use the API subset supported by both OpenGL 1.3 and OpenGL 1.0, so making the thing run on Android should be easy, I thought. Turns out there is no official Android or iOS port of SDL yet. However, there's one in SDL 1.3, which is still in development. SDL 1.3 doesn't seem very appealing to me for three reasons: It's been in development for at least 4 years, and I have no idea when it will be done, not to mention stable. It's not ported to as many platforms as SDL 1.2. From what I've seen, it uses OpenGL for drawing, so I suppose the community will move away from directly using OpenGL. So I'm wondering if I should use a different library for our current project - it doesn't matter much if I need to port my existing code from SDL 1.2 to SDL 1.3 or to some other library. We're planning to release on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS and Android, so good support for these platforms is essential. Is there anything stable that does what I want?

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• How bad would be to focus on iOS/Android development for an indie developer?

  - by kender

  After some time developing games for others I'm thinking of moving towards my own productions. My background is 10+ years of software development, with last 2 years spent on the iOS development (Objective-C and CoronaSDK). With my current experience in Corona I can quickly develop for iOS and Android systems. And this is something that I'm probably gonna do with several of the game ideas I have, at least for the prototype part. But - I'm wondering if it's not a bad idea to focus on those 2 systems only. After all there are other mobile platforms, there are PCs, Macs and Linux boxes... All of them having gamers using them. I was wondering if it wasn't a good idea to try some other SDK, giving me more flexibility when it comes to platform-independance. There's Unity3D (I think I can develop a 2D game in it though), there's MoAI from what I checked. I see a few options, not sure which one is best as I have little experience in this field (publishing own games): Stick with CoronaSDK for the whole time, release for iOS and Android platforms, screw other mobile devices and PCs, Use Corona for prototyping, then when the idea goes more into the "production" phase rewrite it in MoAI or Unity3D for more platforms support, Start with one of those 2 SDKs right now (which means the prototype phase will be delayed a bit, but after that I can jump right into real coding). Any clues here, what to do?

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• Solution for lightweight LAN peer discovering?

  - by DevilWithin

  I built a library for purely cross-platform programming. My games made with it run fine in Android , Pc, Linux, Mac etc. The networking capabilities are provided by ENET library, therefore all communication between my apps is not TCP or UDP compatible, but only in the custom protocol, even tough its based on the UDP ultimately. I don't think its possible to do what i want with ENET, thats why I ask here for help! Lets say I have the same game running in my Android phone, my laptop and my pc. They are all in the same wifi network, and therefore in a LAN, whether its Wifi hotspot(?) or the household router. I need each of those 3 peers to discover the other two in the network. This is meant only to find the IP of alive apps in the LAN network, to be able to host multiplayer games between them. I can only think of one effective way to do this, UDP broadcast, wait responses, but if that is the solution, i need something small, since its the only purpose of the implementation. Other way could be to try to connect to all IPs in the LAN address subrange, but I don't think the OS would be with me on this one :p Sorry for the long question!

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• GeForce and Radeon: what is present condition of opensource and proprietary drivers?

  - by Septagram

  So, it'm about to buy a fresh videocard. Since I do most of my stuff on Linux, I wonder how well will either videocard perform. I recently had a good experience with GeForce 6600 with proprietary drivers and a less than satisfactory experience with Radeon 9000 a while ago. From my experience, proprietary drivers for GeForce used to work very well, while proprietary drivers for Radeon failed miserably. And opensource drivers were sloooow. A few months ago I found out that ATI opened their specifications, and a work on fully featured opensource driver is in progress. I prefer to use free software whenever possible, with the exception of games, so, if that driver is fast enough, feature-rich enough and reliable enough I'd very much like to try it out. I wish I could say that if I can just to basic things, like watch video, heavily use compiz and work with simple applications, this may be enough. I do most of my gaming under Windows anyway. However, there is a good chance I'll go into indie game development in a few months fulltime, so it should also be able to run not-so-very-demanding games (say Nexuiz). But if it isn't, I'd like to know, what to expect from proprietary drivers. Do recent proprietary drivers from NVIDIA and ATI work well? Are ATI drivers just as easy to install on Ubuntu as are NVIDIA drivers?

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• What is a "Technical Programmer"? [closed]

  - by Mike E

  I've noticed in job posting boards a few postings, all from European companies in the games industry, for a "Technical Programmer". The job description in both was similar, having to do with tools development, 3d graphics programming, etc. It seems to be somewhere between a Technical Artist who's more technical than artist or who can code, and a Technical Director but perhaps without the seniority/experience. Information elsewhere on the position is sparse. The title seems redundant and I haven't seen any American companies post jobs by that name exactly. One example is this job posting on gamedev.net which isn't exactly thorough. In case the link dies: Subject: Technical Programmer Frictional Games, the creators of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the Penumbra series, are looking for a talented programmer to join the company! You will be working for a small team with a big focus on finding new and innovating solutions. We want you who are not afraid to explore uncharted territory and constantly learn new things. Self-discipline and independence are also important traits as all work will be done from home. Some the things you will work with include: 3D math, rendering, shaders and everything else related. Console development (most likely Xbox 360). Hardware implementations (support for motion controls, etc). All coding is in C++, so great skills in that is imperative. As I mentioned, the job title has appeared from European companies so maybe it goes by another title in America. What other titles might this specialization of programmer go by?

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• Partition Alignment Confusion

  - by user170757

  I have a new Samsung 840 250GB SSD on the way, and I want to make sure that everything is running optimally after install. I've spent many frustrating hours on the internet trying to understand how I should align the partitions of the SSD when it arrives (and even how to partition everything; my other drive is a 1TB HDD with files already on it). I'd like to know a foolproof way of setting everything up. Now, the only place I could find the erase block size of the 840 is here: http://thessdreview.com/Forums/ssd-beginners-guide-discussion/3630.htm I simply can't understand why such information isn't made freely accessible by manufacturers! But, anyway, this would suggest the EBS is 1536kb, which seems odd to me. It is to my understanding that you should now align by MiB (usually set at 1MiB). I assume that the figure above should actually be 1536k B=1.5MiB? This seems to suggest the partition alignment will be somewhat non-standard. So my question is: How do I align my partitions given this information? Please bear in mind that I have never used linux before; I'm doing my best to get everything set up so that I can begin to learn but am finding this process incredibly opaque and time consuming. If possible, a step by step guide through GParted would be great; at the moment I'm considering an NTFS partition ~20GB for Windows (playing games), an EXT4 ~20GB for ubuntu (for doing everything else) and a shared documents+games partition for everything else in NTFS file format. I'm not going to have any swap partition and use swap files instead.

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