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• Is Linq having a mind-numbing effect on .NET programmers?

  - by Aaronaught

  A lot of us started seeing this phenomenon with jQuery about a year ago when people started asking how to do absolutely insane things like retrieve the query string with jQuery. The difference between the library (jQuery) and the language (JavaScript) is apparently lost on many programmers, and results in a lot of inappropriate, convoluted code being written where it is not necessary. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I swear I'm starting to see an uptick in the number of questions where people are asking to do similarly insane things with Linq, like find ranges in a sorted array. I can't get over how thoroughly inappropriate the Linq extensions are for solving that problem, but more importantly the fact that the author just assumed that the ideal solution would involve Linq without actually thinking about it (as far as I can tell). It seems that we are repeating history, breeding a new generation of .NET programmers who can't tell the difference between the language (C#/VB.NET) and the library (Linq). What is responsible for this phenomenon? Is it just hype? Magpie tendencies? Has Linq picked up a reputation as a form of magic, where instead of actually writing code you just have to utter the right incantation? I'm hardly satisfied with those explanations but I can't really think of anything else. More importantly, is it really a problem, and if so, what's the best way to help enlighten these people?

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• Multiplayer mobile games and coping with high latency

  - by liortal

  I'm currently researching regarding a design for an online (realtime) mobile multiplayer game. As such, i'm taking into consideration that latencies (lag) is going to be high (perhaps higher than PC/consoles). I'd like to know if there are ways to overcome this or minimize the issues of high latency? The model i'll be using is peer-to-peer (using Photon cloud to broadcast messages to all other players). How do i deal with a scenario where a message about a local object's state at time t will only get to other players at *t + HUGE_LAG* ?

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• Languages on embedded systems in aeronautic and spatial sector

  - by Niels

  I know that my question is very broad but a general answer would be nice. I would like to know which are the main languages used in aeronautic and spatial sector. I know that the OS which run on embedded systems are RTOS (Real time OS) and I think that, this languages must be checked correctly by different methods (formal methods, unit tests) and must permit a sure verification of whole process of a program.

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• Why do some people hate Dart? [closed]

  - by Hassan

  First, I'd like to note that this question is not intended to compare two languages or technologies, but is only asking about criticisms aimed at a language. I've always thought it a good idea to somehow get rid of Javascript. It works, but it's just so messy. I think many will agree with me there. And that's how I interpreted Google's release of Dart. It seems to me like a very good alternative to Javascript. Now, it looks like some are not very happy that Google has released this new language. Take a look at this Wikipedia page to see what I'm talking about. If you don't feel like reading it, I'll tell you now that some seem to think that Dart is similar to Microsoft's VBScript, in that it only works on Microsoft's browsers. This goes against the web's openness. But it's my understanding that Dart can be compiled to Javascript, which will allow it to be run on any modern browser (as the Wikipedia article also states). So my question is: are these criticisms valid? Is there a real fear that Google is trying to control the web's front-end to be more compatible with its browser?

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• Collision Resolution

  - by ultifinitus

  Hey all, I'm making a simple side-scrolling game, and I would appreciate some input! My collision detection system is a simple bounding box detection, so it's really easy to implement. However my collision resolution is ridiculous! Currently I have a little formula like this: if (colliding(firstObject,secondObject)) firstObject.resolve_collision(yAxisOffset); if (colliding(firstObject,secondObject)) firstObject.resolve_collision(xAxisOffset); where yAxisOffset is only set if the first object's previous y position was outside the second object's collision frame, respectively xAxisOffset as well. Now this is working great, in general. However there is a single problem. When I have a stack of objects and I push the first object against that stack, the first object get's "stuck," on the stack. What's I think is happening is the object's collision system checks and resolves for collisions based on creation time, so If I check one axis, then the other, the object will "sink" object directly along the checking axis. This sinking action causes the collision detection routine to think there's a gap between our position and the other object's position, and when I finally check the object that I've already sunk into, my object's position is resolved to it's original position... All this is great, and I'm sure if I bang my head against a wall long enough i'll come up with a working algorithm, but I'd rather not =). So what in the heck do you think I should do? How could I change my collision resolution system to fix this? Here's the program (temporary link, not sure how long it'll last) (notes: arrow keys to navigate, click to drop block, x to jump) I'd appreciate any help you can offer!

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• Why Adobe Air is so underrated for building mobile apps?

  - by Marcelo de Assis

  I worked with Adobe Flash related technologies for the last 5 years, although not being a big fan of Adobe. I see some little bugs happening in some apps, but I cannot imagine why a lot of big companies do not even think to use use Adobe Air as a good technology for their mobile apps. I see a lot of mobile developer positions asking for experts in Android or iOS , but very much less positions asking for Adobe Air, even when Adobe Air apps have the advantage of being multi-plataform, with the same app working in Blackberry, iOS and Android. Is so much easier to develop a game using Flash, than using Android SDK, for example. It really have flaws (that I never saw) or it is just some kind of mass prejudgement? I also would like to hear what a project manager or a indie developer takes when choosing a plataform for building apps.

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• How to begin in Game Development? [closed]

  - by Bladimir Ruiz

  It's been a while since I decide to get into game dev, but, there are so many ways to make a game, that i dont know where to begin, I got unity 3d license for PC/Android/Ios for free, but i Also got XNA dev tool, ALSO have CoronaSDK.. But I dont Know wich one to use. Till' now all i want is to make a Sidecroller lime Super Mario Bros, Just for start later on, i will like to make diferent games. In the future i would like to work in the game industry which tools will be the best to Start in that "Dream"?

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• How are bullets simulated in video games?

  - by mahen23

  I have been playing games like MW2 recently and, as a programmer, I tend to ask myself how do they make the game so immersive. For example, how to they simulate bullet speed. When an NPC fires a bullet from his gun, does the bullet really travel from his gun to the given target or do they they completely ignore this part and just put a bullet hole on the target? If the bullet is really travelling from the gun to the target, at what speed is it actually travelling?

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• if/else statements or exceptions

  - by Thaven

  I don't know, that this question fit better on this board, or stackoverflow, but because my question is connected rather to practices, that some specified problem. So, consider an object that does something. And this something can (but should not!) can go wrong. So, this situation can be resolved in two way: first, with exceptions: DoSomethingClass exampleObject = new DoSomethingClass(); try { exampleObject.DoSomething(); } catch (ThisCanGoWrongException ex) { [...] } And second, with if statement: DoSomethingClass exampleObject = new DoSomethingClass(); if(!exampleObject.DoSomething()) { [...] } Second case in more sophisticated way: DoSomethingClass exampleObject = new DoSomethingClass(); ErrorHandler error = exampleObject.DoSomething(); if (error.HasError) { if(error.ErrorType == ErrorType.DivideByPotato) { [...] } } which way is better? In one hand, I heard that exception should be used only for real unexpected situations, and if programist know, that something may happen, he should used if/else. In second hand, Robert C. Martin in his book Clean Code Wrote, that exception are far more object oriented, and more simple to keep clean.

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• developers-designers-testers interaction [closed]

  - by user29124

  Sorry for my bad English, and also you may not read this and waste your time, because it is just a lament of layman developer... Seems no one want to learn anything at my workplace. We have Mantis bug tracker, but our testers use google-docs for reports and only developers and team lead report bugs in Mantis. We have SVN for version control and use Smarty as template system, but our designers give us pure HTML (sometimes it's ugly for programmers, but mostly it's OK) in archives, and changes to design made by programmers go nowhere (I mean designers use their own obsolete HTML and CSS most of the time). We have a testing environment but designers don't have access with restricted accounts to it. So we can only ask them where to look for the problem and then investigate the problem by ourselves (and made changes to CSS by ourselves (that go nowhere most of the time...)). I will not mention legacy code without documentation, tests, or any requirements, just an absence of real interaction in triangle programmers-designers-testers. I'm not talking about using HAML, SASS, continuous integration, or something else, just about using basic tools by all participants of the development process. Maybe the absence of communication is not a problem in short-time projects, which will finish up in 2 months time but rather on the types of projects that lasts for years. Any comments please...

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• Triangle Strips and Tangent Space Normal Mapping

  - by Koarl

  Short: Do triangle strips and Tangent Space Normal mapping go together? According to quite a lot of tutorials on bump mapping, it seems common practice to derive tangent space matrices in a vertex program and transform the light direction vector(s) to tangent space and then pass them on to a fragment program. However, if one was using triangle strips or index buffers, it is a given that the vertex buffer contains vertices that sit at border edges and would thus require more than one normal to derive tangent space matrices to interpolate between in fragment programs. Is there any reasonable way to not have duplicate vertices in your buffer and still use tangent space normal mapping? Which one do you think is better: Having normal and tangent encoded in the assets and just optimize the geometry handling to alleviate the cost of duplicate vertices or using triangle strips and computing normals/tangents completely at run time? Thinking about it, the more reasonable answer seems to be the first one, but why might my professor still be fussing about triangle strips when it seems so obvious?

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• Someone tell me why people writing GNU code use { like that?

  - by Deus Deceit

  I saw the rules on how to type code for UNITY project or GNU software in general. Why do they write code in such an ugly form? Is there a particular reason why they don't put brackets the way (from what I know) most people do? Why like this: for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) { //do something } and not like this: for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) { //Do something } or this: for(i = 0; i < 5l i++) { //Do Something } ???

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• How to handle a player's level and its consequent privileges?

  - by Songo

  I'm building a game similar to Mafia Wars where a player can do tasks for his gang and gain experience and thus advancing his level. The game is built using PHP and a Mysql database. In the game I want to limit the resources allowed to player based on his level. For example: ________| (Max gold) | (Max army size) | (Max moves) | ... Level 1 | 1000 | 100 | 10 | ... Level 2 | 1500 | 200 | 20 | ... Level 3 | 3000 | 300 | 25 | ... . . . In addition certain features of the game won't be allowed until a certain level is reached such as players under Level 10 can't trade in the game market, players under Level 20 can't create alliances,...etc. The way I have modeled it is by implementing a very loooong ACL (Access Control List) with about 100 entries (an entry for each level). However, I think there may be a simpler approach to this seeing that this feature have been implemented in many games before.

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• Achieving certain rendering styles

  - by milesmeow

  I'm trying to assess the difficulty of creating a rendering style that is more like the game Okami and the Quake mods (as shown on this page...search for 'okami','quake npr'). Here's a better page describing the Quake rendering mod. Can a game engine such as Unity be used and programmed to achieve these kind of rendering styles? I'm doing research and am totally new to this so any insight into this would help tremendously.

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• Exploring your database schema with SQL

  In the second part of Phil's series of articles on finding stuff (such as objects, scripts, entities, metadata) in SQL Server, he offers some scripts that should be handy for the developer faced with tracking down problem areas and potential weaknesses in a database.

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• Why are people using C instead of C++? [closed]

  - by Darth

  Possible Duplicate: When to use C over C++, and C++ over C? Many times I've stumbled upon people saying that C++ is not always better than C. Great example here would be the Linux kernel, where they simply decided to use C instead of C++ because it had better compilers at the time. But that's many years ago and a lot has changed. So the question is, why are people still using C over C++? I gues there are probably some cases (like embedded devices), where there simply isn't a good C++ compiler, or am I wrong here? What are the other cases when it is better to go with C instead of C++?

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• Overloading interface buttons, what are the best practices?

  - by XMLforDummies

  Imagine you'll have always a button labeled "Continue" in the same position in your app's GUI. Would you rather make a single button instance that takes different actions depending on the current state? private State currentState = State.Step1; private ContinueButton_Click() { switch(currentState) { case State.Step1: DoThis(); currentState = State.Step2; break; case State.Step2: DoThat(); break; } } Or would you rather have something like this? public Form() { this.ContinueStep2Button.Visible = false; } private ContinueStep1Button_Click() { DoThis(); this.ContinueStep1Button.Visible = false; this.ContinueStep2Button.Visible = true; } private ContinueStep2Button_Click() { DoThat(); }

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• Skyrim Creation Kit with Xbox 360

  - by funseiki

  I posted this on stackoverflow but was advised to post here (here is a link to the stackoverflow question). I'm hoping for constructive feedback on its plausibility. Update on progress: It looks like there are ways to stuff files back onto the console (horizon, modio, xplorer360, etc) and they do require some form of signing. As of now, though, I've had no luck. I was hoping I could get away with just placing the ".esp" into the directory containing marketplace downloads for Skyrim, along with the signed ".bsa" file (basically a zipped up file containing any extra content the .esp will need to refer that doesn't exist in the basic game). This doesn't work, at least not in the ways I've tried, so next I'm going to try install the entire game to my flash drive (if possible) and attempt to traverse through the game's directory (this is probably unlikely). If anyone else has suggestions or luck or wants more detail on my failures comment/answer away. Here is the question: I'm thinking about buying the PC version of Skyrim to get the Creation Kit (I already own a copy for the Xbox). I have read the faq and scoured plenty of forums to see if there was some way to mod Skyrim for a console (Xbox 360, in particular), but they are generally coming up negative. I realize the CreationKit is on the PC, but I was wondering if there was a way to set up the '.esp' (hopefully I'm interpreting this correctly) files to be placed on the Xbox 360 file system in a similar manner to how game add-ons are downloaded from the Xbox Live Marketplace. I believe it is possible to transfer saves between the console and the PC (e.g. google: 'skyrim mod xbox360'), but these are referencing items that already exist in the game (e.g. a console command for maximum carry weight does not require reference to new animations or models). It would probably be easier if one could navigate through the xbox's file system to see where the games' files are placed, but with the current setup, the file system is abstracted away. Any help or insight on the matter would be much appreciated. I would love to work on a project that would make it possible to let console gamers experience and enjoy all the great mods available to the PC community.

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• Does a mature agile team requires any management?

  - by ashy_32bit

  After a recent heated debate over Scrum, I realized my problem is that I think of management as a quite unnecessary and redundant activity in a fully agile team. I believe a mature Agile team does not require management or any non-technical decision making process whatsoever. To my (apparently erring) eyes it is more than obvious that the only one suitable and capable of managing a mature development team is their coach (who is the most technically competent colleague with proper communication skills). I can't imagine how a Scrum master can contribute to such a team. I am having great difficulty realizing and understanding the value of such things in Scrum and the manager as someone who is not a veteran developer but is well skilled in planning the production cycles when a coach exists in the team. What does that even mean? How on earth can someone with no edge-skills of development manage a highly technical team? Perhaps management here means something else? I see management as a total waste of time and a by-product of immaturity. In my understanding a mature team is fully self-managing. Apparently I'm mistaken since many great people say the contrary but I can't convince myself.

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• How do I implement a score database in Android?

  - by Michael Seun Araromi

  I making a 2D game for Android using OpenGL-ES technology. It is a space shooting game where the player shoots enemy ships. I want to keep a track of score for the amount of enemy ships destroyed and a record of a local highscore. The score should be incremented whenever an enemy is destroyed. I also want a way of displaying both the current score and highscore on the game screen. I am not familiar with databases at all and I will appreciate a clear answer or a link to a good tutorial for my cause. Thanks.

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• What does "context-free" mean in the term "context-free grammar"?

  - by rick

  Given the amount of material that tries to explain what a context-free grammar (CFG) is, I found it surprising that very few (in my sample, less than 1 in 20) give an explanation on why such grammars are called "context-free". And, to my mind, none succeeds in doing so. My question is, why are context-free grammars called context-free? What is "the context"? I had an intuition that the context could be other language constructs surrounding the currently analyzed construct, but that seems not to be the case. Could anyone provide a precise explanation?

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• Vertex Array Object (OpenGL)

  - by Shin

  I've just started out with OpenGL I still haven't really understood what Vertex Array Objects are and how they can be employed. If Vertex Buffer Object are used to store vertex data (such as their positions and texture coordinates) and the VAOs only contain status flags, where can they be used? What's their purpose? As far as I understood from the (very incomplete and unclear) GL Wiki, VAOs are used to set the flags/status for every vertex, following the order described in the Element Array Buffer, but the wiki was really ambiguous about it and I'm not really sure about what VAOs really do and how I could employ them.

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• What's a nice explanation for pointers?

  - by Macneil

  In your own studies (on your own, or for a class) did you have an "ah ha" moment when you finally, really understood pointers? Do you have an explanation you use for beginner programmers that seems particularly effective? For example, when beginners first encounter pointers in C, they might just add &s and *s until it compiles (as I myself once did). Maybe it was a picture, or a really well motivated example, that made pointers "click" for you or your student. What was it, and what did you try before that didn't seem to work? Were any topics prerequisites (e.g. structs, or arrays)? In other words, what was necessary to understand the meaning of &s and *, when you could use them with confidence? Learning the syntax and terminology or the use cases isn't enough, at some point the idea needs to be internalized. Update: I really like the answers so far; please keep them coming. There are a lot of great perspectives here, but I think many are good explanations/slogans for ourselves after we've internalized the concept. I'm looking for the detailed contexts and circumstances when it dawned on you. For example: I only somewhat understood pointers syntactically in C. I heard two of my friends explaining pointers to another friend, who asked why a struct was passed with a pointer. The first friend talked about how it needed to be referenced and modified, but it was just a short comment from the other friend where it hit me: "It's also more efficient." Passing 4 bytes instead of 16 bytes was the final conceptual shift I needed.

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• Would you use UML if it kept stakeholders from requesting changes frequently?

  - by Huperniketes

  As much as programmers hate to document their code/system and draw UML (especially, Sequencing, Activity and State machine diagrams) or other diagramming notation, would you agree to do it if it kept managers from requesting a "minor change" every couple of weeks? IOW, would you put together visual models to document the system if it helped you demonstrate to managers what the effect of changes are and why it takes so long to implement them? (Edited to help programmers understand what type of answer I'm looking for.) 2nd edit: Restating my question again, "Would you be willing to use some diagramming notation, against your better nature as a programmer, if it helped you manage change requests?" This question isn't asking if there might be something wrong with the process. It's a given that there's something wrong with the process. Would you be willing to do more work to improve it?

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• Appropriate level of granularity for component-based architecture

  - by Jon Purdy

  I'm working on a game with a component-based architecture. An Entity owns a set of Component instances, each of which has a set of Slot instances with which to store, send, and receive values. Factory functions such as Player produce entities with the required components and slot connections. I'm trying to determine the best level of granularity for components. For example, right now Position, Velocity, and Acceleration are all separate components, connected in series. Velocity and Acceleration could easily be rewritten into a uniform Delta component, or Position, Velocity, and Acceleration could be combined alongside such components as Friction and Gravity into a monolithic Physics component. Should a component have the smallest responsibility possible (at the cost of lots of interconnectivity) or should related components be combined into monolithic ones (at the cost of flexibility)? I'm leaning toward the former, but I could use a second opinion.

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