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• Add Artistic Effects to Your Pictures in Office 2010

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Do you ever wish you could add cool effects to images in your Office document pictures, but don’t have access to a graphics editor? Today we take a look at the Artistic Effects featire which is a new feature in Office 2010. Note: We will show you examples in Excel, but the Artistic Effect are available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. To insert a picture into your Office document, click the Picture button on the Insert tab. Once you import your picture, the Picture Tools format ribbon should be active. If not, click on the image.     In the Adjust group, click on Artistic Effects. You will see a selection of effects previews images in the dropdown list. Hover your cursor over the effects to use Live Preview to see what your picture will look like if that effect is applied.   When you find an effect you like, just click to apply it to the image. There are also some additional Artistic Effect Options. Each effect will have a it’s own set of available options that can be adjusted by moving the sliders left or right. If you find you want to undo an effect after it has been applied, simply select the None option from the previews under Artistic Effects. Conclusion Artistic Effects provides a really easy way to add professional looking effects to images in Office 2010 without the need to access graphics editing software. Check out some of our other Office 2010 articles like how to use advanced font ligatures, add video from the web to PowerPoint 2010, and preview before you paste in Office 2010. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Effects To Your Pictures in Word 2007Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010Tools to Help Post Content On Your WordPress BlogAdd Classic Polaroid Look to Your Digital picturesGive Your Desktop Artistic Flair with FotoSketcher TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox)

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• Control Sysinternals Suite & NirSoft Utilities with a Single Interface

  - by Asian Angel

  Sysinternals and NirSoft both provide helpful utilities for your Windows system but may not be very convenient to access. Using the Windows System Control Center you can easily access everything through a single UI front end. Setup The first thing to do is set up three new folders in Program Files (or Program Files (x86) if you are using a 64bit system) with the following names (the first two need to exactly match what is shown here): Sysinternals Suite NirSoft Utilities (create this folder only if you have any of these apps downloaded) Windows System Control Center (or WSCC depending on your preferences) Unzip the contents of the Sysinternals Suite into its’ folder. Then unzip any individual NirSoft Utilities programs that you have downloaded into the NirSoft folder. All that is left to do is to unzip the WSCC software into its’ folder and create a shortcut. WSCC in Action When you start WSCC up for the first time you will see the following message with a brief explanation about the software. Next the options window will appear providing you an opportunity to look around and make any desired changes. WSCC can access utilities for both suites using a live connection if needed (utilities accessed live are not downloaded). Note: This occurs on the first run only. This is the main WSCC window…you can choose the utility that you want to use by sorting through an all items list or based on category. Note: WSCC may occasionally experience a problem downloading a particular utility if using the live service. We conducted a quick test by accessing two Sysinternals apps. First PsInfo… Followed by DiskView. Both opened quickly and were ready to go. There were no NirSoft Utilities installed on our test system in order to provide a live access example. Within moments WSCC accessed the CurrProcess utility and had it running on our system. Our recommendation is to download your favorite utilities from both suites (in order to always have easy access to them). Conclusion WSCC provides an easy way to access all of the apps in the Sysinternals Suite and NirSoft Utilities in one place. Note: A PortableApps version is also available. Links Download Windows System Control Center (WSCC) Download Windows Sysinternals Suite Download individual NirSoft Utilities programs Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Get Detailed Information About Your PCAccess and Launch Windows Utilities the Easy WayWhat is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running?How to Clean Up Your Messy Windows Context MenuRemove NVIDIA Control Panel from Desktop Right-Click Menu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox)

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• Chuck Norris Be Thy Name

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Chuck Norris doesn’t program with a keyboard. He stares the computer down until it does what he wants. All things need a name. We’ve tossed around a bunch of names for the framework of tools we’ve been working on, but one we kept coming back to was Chuck Norris. Why did we choose Chuck Norris? Well Chuck Norris sort of chose us. Everything we talked about, the name kept drawing us closer to it. We couldn’t escape Chuck Norris, no matter how hard we tried. So we gave in. Chuck Norris can divide by zero. What is the Chuck Norris Framework? @drusellers and I have been working on a variety of tools: WarmuP - http://github.com/chucknorris/warmup (Template your entire project/solution and create projects ready to code - From Zero to a Solution with everything in seconds. Your templates, your choices.) UppercuT - http://projectuppercut.org (Build with Conventions - Professional Builds in Moments, Not Days!) | Code also at http://github.com/chucknorris/uppercut DropkicK - http://github.com/chucknorris/dropkick (Deploy Fluently) RoundhousE - http://projectroundhouse.org (Professional Database Management with Versioning) | Code also at http://github.com/chucknorris/roundhouse SidePOP - http://sidepop.googlecode.com (Does your application need to check email?) HeadlocK - http://github.com/chucknorris/headlock (Hash a directory so you can later know if anything has changed) Others – still in concept or vaporware People ask why we choose such violent names for each tool of our framework? At first it was about whipping your code into shape, but after awhile the naming became, “How can we relate this to Chuck Norris?” People also ask why we uppercase the last letter of each name. Well, that’s more about making you ask questions…but there are a few reasons for it. Project managers never ask Chuck Norris for estimations…ever. The class object inherits from Chuck Norris Chuck Norris doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick() So what are you waiting for? Join the Google group today, download and play with the tools. And lastly, welcome to Chuck Norris. Or should I say Chuck Norris welcomes you…

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• O the Agony - Merging Scrum and Waterfall

  - by John K. Hines

  If there's nothing else to know about Scrum (and Agile in general), it's this: You can't force a team to adopt Agile methods.  In all cases, the team must want to change. Well, sure, you could force a team.  But it's going to be a horrible, painful process with a huge learning curve made even steeper by the lack of training and motivation on behalf of the team.  On a completely unrelated note, I've spent the past three months working on a team that was formed by merging three separate teams.  One of these teams has been adopting and using Agile practices like Scrum since 2007, the other was in continuous bug fix mode, releasing on average one new piece of software per year using semi-Waterfall methods.  In particular, one senior developer on the Waterfall team didn't see anything in Agile but overhead. Fast forward through three months of tension, passive resistance, process pushback, and you have seven people who want to change and one who explicitly doesn't.  It took two things to make Scrum happen: The team manager took a class called "Agile Software Development using Scrum". The team lead explained the point of Agile was to reduce the workload of the senior developer, with another senior developer and the manager present. It's incredible to me how a single person can strongly influence the direction of an entire team.  Let alone if Scrum comes down as some managerial decree onto a functioning team who have no idea what it is.  Pity the fool. On the bright side, I am now an expert at drawing Visio process flows.  And I have some gentle advice for any first-level managers: If you preside over a team process change, it's beneficial to start the discussion on how the team will work as early as possible.  You should have a vision for this and guide the discussion, even if decisions are weeks away.  Don't always root for the underdog.  It's been my experience that managers who see themselves as compassionate and caring spend a great deal of time understanding and advocating for the one person on the team who feels left out.  Remember that by focusing on this one person you risk alienating the rest of the team, allow tension to build, and delay the resolution of the problem. My way would have been to decree Scrum, force all of my processes on everyone else, and use the past three months ironing out the kinks.  Which takes us all the way back to point number one. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process Scrum and Waterfall

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• Simple tips to design a Customer Journey Map

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  “A model can abstract to a level that is comprehensible to humans, without getting lost in details.” -The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Inception using Post-it, StoryBoards, Lego or Mindmaping Techniques The first step in a Customer Experience project is to describe customer interactions creating a customer journey map. Modeling is never easy, so to succeed on this effort, it is very convenient that your CX´s team have some “abstract thinking” skills. Besides is very helpful to consult a Business Service Design offered by an Interactive Agency to lead your inception process. Initially, you may start by a free discussion using post-it cards; storyboards; even lego or any other brainstorming technique you like. This will help you to get your mind into the path followed by the customer to purchase your product or to consume any business service you actually offer to your customers, or plan to offer in the near future. (from www.servicedesigntools.org) Colorful Mind Maps are very useful to document and share meeting ideas. Some Mind Maps software providers as ThinkBuzzan provide trial versions, and you will find more mindmapping options on this post by Mashable. Finally to produce a quick one, I do recommend Wise, an entirely online mindmaping service. On my view the best results in terms of communication will always come for an artistic hand-made drawing. Customer Experience Mind Map Example Making your first Customer Journey Map To add some more formalization to your thoughts, there is a wide offering for designing Customer Journey Maps. A Customer Map can be represented as an oriented graph in which another follows each step. The one below is the most simple Customer Journey you can draw. Nothing more than a couple of pictures, numbers and lines to design the customer steps sequence in the purchase process. Very simple Customer Journey for Social Mobile Shopping There are a lot of Customer Journey templates much more sophisticated available  in the Web using a variety of styles, as per example this one with a focus on underlining emotional experience, or this other worksheet template. Representing different interaction devices on the vertical axis, and touchpoints / requirements and existing gaps horizontally  is today´s most common format for Customer Journeys. From Customer Journey Maps to CX Technology Adoption Plans Once you have your map ready, you can start to identify the IT infrastructure requirements for your CXProject. By analyzing customer problems and improvement opportunities with maps, you will then identify the technology gaps and the new investment requirements in your IT infrastructure. Deeping step by step from the more abstract to the more concrete is the best guarantee to take the right IT investment decisions.  ¡Remember to keep your initial customer journey safe on your pocket in every one of your CX´s project meetings- that´s you map to success!

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• What does your Python development workbench look like?

  - by Fabian Fagerholm

  First, a scene-setter to this question: Several questions on this site have to do with selection and comparison of Python IDEs. (The top one currently is What IDE to use for Python). In the answers you can see that many Python programmers use simple text editors, many use sophisticated text editors, and many use a variety of what I would call "actual" integrated development environments – a single program in which all development is done: managing project files, interfacing with a version control system, writing code, refactoring code, making build configurations, writing and executing tests, "drawing" GUIs, and so on. Through its GUI, an IDE supports different kinds of workflows to accomplish different tasks during the journey of writing a program or making changes to an existing one. The exact features vary, but a good IDE has sensible workflows and automates things to let the programmer concentrate on the creative parts of writing software. The non-IDE way of writing large programs relies on a collection of tools that are typically single-purpose; they do "one thing well" as per the Unix philosophy. This "non-integrated development environment" can be thought of as a workbench, supported by the OS and generic interaction through a text or graphical shell. The programmer creates workflows in their mind (or in a wiki?), automates parts and builds a personal workbench, often gradually and as experience accumulates. The learning curve is often steeper than with an IDE, but those who have taken the time to do this can often claim deeper understanding of their tools. (Whether they are better programmers is not part of this question.) With advanced editor-platforms like Emacs, the pieces can be integrated into a whole, while with simpler editors like gedit or TextMate, the shell/terminal is typically the "command center" to drive the workbench. Sometimes people extend an existing IDE to suit their needs. What does your Python development workbench look like? What workflows have you developed and how do they work? For the first question, please give the main "driving" program – the one that you use to control the rest (Emacs, shell, etc.) the "small tools" -- the programs you reach for when doing different tasks For the second question, please describe what the goal of the workflow is (eg. "set up a new project" or "doing initial code design" or "adding a feature" or "executing tests") what steps are in the workflow and what commands you run for each step (eg. in the shell or in Emacs) Also, please describe the context of your work: do you write small one-off scripts, do you do web development (with what framework?), do you write data-munching applications (what kind of data and for what purpose), do you do scientific computing, desktop apps, or something else? Note: A good answer addresses the perspectives above – it doesn't just list a bunch of tools. It will typically be a long answer, not a short one, and will take some thinking to produce; maybe even observing yourself working.

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• C# XNA Normals Question

  - by Wade

  Hello all! I have been working on some simple XNA proof of concept for a game idea I have as well as just to further my learning in XNA. However, i seem to be stuck on these dreaded normals, and using the BasicEffect with default lighting i can't seem to tell if my normals are being calculated correctly, hence the question. I'm mainly drawing cubes at the moment, I'm using a triangle list and a VertexBuffer to get the job done. The north face of my cube has two polygons and 6 vectors: Vector3 startPosition = new Vector3(0,0,0); corners[0] = startPosition; // This is the start position. Block size is 5. corners[1] = new Vector3(startPosition.X, startPosition.Y + BLOCK_SIZE, startPosition.Z); corners[2] = new Vector3(startPosition.X + BLOCK_SIZE, startPosition.Y, startPosition.Z); corners[3] = new Vector3(startPosition.X + BLOCK_SIZE, startPosition.Y + BLOCK_SIZE, startPosition.Z); verts[0] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[0], normals[0], textCoordBR); verts[1] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[1], normals[0], textCoordTR); verts[2] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[2], normals[0], textCoordBL); verts[3] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[3], normals[0], textCoordTL); verts[4] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[2], normals[0], textCoordBL); verts[5] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[1], normals[0], textCoordTR); Using those coordinates I want to generate the normal for the north face, I have no clue how to get the average of all those vectors and create a normal for the two polygons that it makes. Here is what i tried: normals[0] = Vector3.Cross(corners[1], corners[2]); normals[0].Normalize(); It seems like its correct, but then using the same thing for other sides of the cube the lighting effect seems weird, and not cohesive with where i think the light source is coming from, not really sure with the BasicEffect. Am I doing this right? Can anyone explain in lay mans terms how normals are calculated. Any help is much appreciated. Note: I tried going through Riemers and such to figure it out with no luck, it seems no one really goes over the math well enough. Thanks!

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• Interleaving Arrays in OpenGL

  - by Benjamin Danger Johnson

  In my pursuit to write code that matches todays OpenGL standards I have found that I am completely clueless about interleaving arrays. I've tried and debugged just about everywhere I can think of but I can't get my model to render using interleaved arrays (It worked when it was configuered to use multiple arrays) Now I know that all the data is properly being parsed from an obj file and information is being copied properly copied into the Vertex object array, but I still can't seem to get anything to render. Below is the code for initializing a model and drawing it (along with the Vertex struct for reference.) Vertex: struct Vertex { glm::vec3 position; glm::vec3 normal; glm::vec2 uv; glm::vec3 tangent; glm::vec3 bitangent; }; Model Constructor: Model::Model(const char* filename) { bool result = loadObj(filename, vertices, indices); glGenVertexArrays(1, &vertexArrayID); glBindVertexArray(vertexArrayID); glGenBuffers(1, &vertexbuffer); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertices.size() * sizeof(Vertex), &vertices[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); glGenBuffers(1, &elementbuffer); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, elementbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, indices.size() * sizeof(unsigned short), &indices[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); } Draw Model: Model::Draw(ICamera camera) { GLuint matrixID = glGetUniformLocation(programID, "mvp"); GLuint positionID = glGetAttribLocation(programID, "position_modelspace"); GLuint uvID = glGetAttribLocation(programID, "uv"); GLuint normalID = glGetAttribLocation(programID, "normal_modelspace"); GLuint tangentID = glGetAttribLocation(programID, "tangent_modelspace"); GLuint bitangentID = glGetAttribLocation(programID, "bitangent_modelspace"); glm::mat4 projection = camera->GetProjectionMatrix(); glm::mat4 view = camera->GetViewMatrix(); glm::mat4 model = glm::mat4(1.0f); glm::mat4 mvp = projection * view * model; glUniformMatrix4fv(matrixID, 1, GL_FALSE, &mvp[0][0]); glBindVertexArray(vertexArrayID); glEnableVertexAttribArray(positionID); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexbuffer); glVertexAttribPointer(positionID, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), &vertices[0].position); glEnableVertexAttribArray(uvID); glVertexAttribPointer(uvID, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), &vertices[0].uv); glEnableVertexAttribArray(normalID); glVertexAttribPointer(normalID, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), &vertices[0].normal); glEnableVertexAttribArray(tangentID); glVertexAttribPointer(tangentID, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), &vertices[0].tangent); glEnableVertexAttribArray(bitangentID); glVertexAttribPointer(bitangentID, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(Vertex), &vertices[0].bitangent); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, elementbuffer); glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, indices.size(), GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, (void*)0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(positionID); glDisableVertexAttribArray(uvID); glDisableVertexAttribArray(normalID); glDisableVertexAttribArray(tangentID); glDisableVertexAttribArray(bitangentID); }

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• Create Image Maps with GIMP

  - by SGWellens

  Having a clickable image in a web page is not a big deal. Having an image in a web page with clickable hotspots is a big deal. The powerful GIMP editor has a tool to make creating clickable hotspots much easier. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Its home page and download links are here: http://www.gimp.org/ (it is completely free). Beware: GIMP is an extraordinarily advanced and powerful image editor. If you wish to use it for general image editing tasks, you have a steep learning curve to climb. FYI: I used it to create the shadows you see on the images below. Fortunately, the tool to make Image Maps is separate from the main program. To start, open an image with GIMP or, drag and drop an image onto the GIMP main window. I'm using the image of a bar graph. Next, we have to find the Image Map tool and launch it (Filters->Web->Image Map…): Why is the Image Map tool under Filters and not Tools? I don't know. It's mystery—much like the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, or why my socks keep disappearing when I do laundry. I swear I've got twenty single unmatched socks. But I digress… Here is what the Image Map tool looks like: If we click the blue 'I' button, we can add information to the Image Map: Now we'll use the rectangle tool to create some clickable hotspots. Select the Blue Rectangle tool, drag a rectangle, click when done and you'll get something like this: You can also make circle/oval and polygon areas. You can edit all the parameters of an image map area after drawing it. Rectangle settings (for fine tweaking): JavaScript functions (it's up to you to write them): Here is a setup with two rectangles and one polygon area: When you hit save a map file is generated that looks something like this: Paste the contents into a web page and you are almost there. I made some tweaks before it became usable: Replaced &apos; with apostrophes in the javascript functions. Changed the image path so it would find the image in my images directory Tweaked the href urls. Added Title="Some Text" to get tool tips. Cleaned out the comments. Result: The final markup (with JavaScript function): function ImageMapMouseHover(Msg) { $("#Label1").html(Msg); } It may seem like a lot of bother but, the tool does the heavy lifting: i.e. the coordinates. Getting the regions positioned and sized is easy using a visual tool…much better than doing it by hand. This, of course, isn't a full treatise on the tool but it should give you enough information to decide if it's helpful. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens

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• How to implement line of sight restriction in actionscript?

  - by Michiel Standaert

  I have a problem with a game i am programming. I am making some sort of security game and i would like to have some visual line of sight. The problem is that i can't restrict my line of sight so my cops can't see through the walls. Below you find the design, in which they can look through windows, but not walls. Further below you find an illustration of what my problem is exactly. this is what it looks like now. As you can see, the cops can see through walls. This is the map i would want to use to restrict the line of sight. So the way i am programming the line of sight now is just by calculating some points and drawing the sight accordingly, as shown below. Note that i also check for a hittest using bitmapdata to check whether or not my player has been spotted by any of the cops. private function setSight(e:Event=null):Boolean { g = copCanvas.graphics; g.clear(); for each(var cop:Cop in copCanvas.getChildren()) { var _angle:Number = cop.angle; var _radians:Number = (_angle * Math.PI) / 180; var _radius:Number = 50; var _x1:Number = cop.x + (cop.width/2); var _y1:Number = cop.y + (cop.height/2); var _baseX:Number = _x1 + (Math.cos(_radians) * _radius); var _baseY:Number = _y1 - (Math.sin(_radians) * _radius); var _x2:Number = _baseX + (25 * Math.sin(_radians)); var _y2:Number = _baseY + (25 * Math.cos(_radians)); var _x3:Number = _baseX - (25 * Math.sin(_radians)); var _y3:Number = _baseY - (25 * Math.cos(_radians)); g.beginFill(0xff0000, 0.3); g.moveTo(_x1, _y1); g.lineTo(_x2, _y2); g.lineTo(_x3, _y3); g.endFill(); } var _cops:BitmapData = new BitmapData(width, height, true, 0); _cops.draw(copCanvas); var _bmpd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(10, 10, true, 0); _bmpd.draw(me); if(_cops.hitTest(new Point(0, 0), 10, _bmpd, new Point(me.x, me.y), 255)) { gameover.alpha = 1; setTimeout(function():void{ gameover.alpha = 0; }, 5000); stop(); return true; } return false; } So now my question is: Is there someone who knows how to restrict the view so that the cops can't look through the walls? Thanks a lot in advance. ps: i have already looked at this tutorial by emanuele feronato, but i can't use the code to restric the visual line of sight.

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• Java Slick2d Animation not working

  - by user3558075

  Hello everyone I am trying to make a simple 2d game using java and the slick2d library. this is my first time doing it and i need some help. right now I am trying to make the Animations for the character, so that when you go right he turns right and when you go left he turns left... but I keep getting an error when im drawing the character, ive try'd re-downloading slick but that didnt work. when i get rid of the player.draw(x,y); line of code it dosen't crash but the character isnt there. heres my code, can anyone help? package enteties; import input.Keyinput; import org.newdawn.slick.Animation; import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer; import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics; import org.newdawn.slick.Image; import org.newdawn.slick.Input; import org.newdawn.slick.SlickException; import org.newdawn.slick.state.BasicGameState; import org.newdawn.slick.state.StateBasedGame; import playerinfo.Playerinfo; public class Player extends BasicGameState{ Playerinfo pi = new Playerinfo(); Keyinput ki = new Keyinput(); Animation player,up,down,left,right; public void init(GameContainer gc, StateBasedGame sbg) throws SlickException { Image[] goingUp = {new Image("res/buckysBack.png") , new Image("res/charBack.png")}; Image[] goingDown = {new Image("res/buckysFront.png") , new Image("res/charFront.png")}; Image[] goingLeft = {new Image("res/buckysLeft.png") , new Image("res/charLeft.png")}; Image[] goingRight = {new Image("res/buckysRight.png") , new Image("res/charRight.png")}; int[] duration = {200,200}; Animation up = new Animation(goingUp,duration,false); Animation down = new Animation(goingDown,duration,false); Animation left = new Animation(goingLeft,duration,false); Animation right = new Animation(goingRight,duration,false); player = up; } public void render(GameContainer gc, StateBasedGame sbg, Graphics g) throws SlickException { //error happens here, when i remove this line it dosent crash player.draw(720,450); } public void update(GameContainer gc, StateBasedGame sbg, int delta) throws SlickException { } public int getID() { return 0; } }

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• Rendering another screen on top of main game screen in fullscreen mode

  - by wolf

  my game runs in fullscreen mode and uses active rendering. The graphics are drawn on the fullscreen window in each game loop: public void render() { Window w = screen.getFullScreenWindow(); Graphics2D g = screen.getGraphics(); renderer.render(g, level, w.getWidth(), w.getHeight()); g.dispose(); screen.update(); } This is the screen.update() method: public void update(){ Window w = device.getFullScreenWindow(); if(w != null){ BufferStrategy s = w.getBufferStrategy(); if(!s.contentsLost()){ s.show(); } } } I want to display another screen on my main game screen (menu, inventory etc). Lets say I have a JPanel inventory, which has a grid of inventory cells (manually drawn) and some Swing components like JPopupMenu. So i tried adding that to my window and repainting it in the game loop, which worked okay most of the time... but sometimes the panel wouldn't get displayed. Blindly moving things around in the inventory worked, but it just didn't display. When i alt-tabbed out and back again, it displayed properly. I also tried drawing the rest of the inventory on my full screen window and using a JPanel to display only the buttons and popupmenus. The inventory displayed properly, but the Swing components keep flickering. I'm guessing this is because I don't know how to combine active and passive rendering. public void render() { Graphics2D g = screen.getGraphics(); invManager.render(g); g.dispose(); screen.update(); invPanel.repaint(); } Should i use something else instead of a JPanel? I don't really need active rendering for these screens, but I don't understand why they sometimes just don't display. Or maybe I should just make my own custom components instead of using Swing? I also read somewhere that using multiple panels/frames in a game is bad practice so should I draw everything on one window/frame/panel? If I CAN use JPanels for this, should I add and remove them every time the inventory is toggled? Or just change their visibility?

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• Scan Your Thumb Drive for Viruses from the AutoPlay Dialog

  - by Mysticgeek

  It’s always a good idea to scan someone’s flash drive for viruses when you use it on your PC. Today we look at how to use Microsoft Security Essentials to scan thumb drives via the AutoPlay dialog. Editor Note: This technique was created by our friend Ramesh Srinivasan from the winhelponline tech blog. If you haven’t done so already, download and install Microsoft Security Essentials (link below), which has earned the How-To Geek official endorsement. Next download the mseautoplay.zip (link below). Unzip the file to view its contents. Then move the msescan.vbs script file into the Windows directory. Next double-click on the mseautoplay.reg file… Click Yes to the warning dialog window asking if you’re sure you want to add to the registry. After it’s added you’ll get a confirmation message…click OK. Now when you pop in a thumb drive, when AutoPlay comes up you will have the options to scan it with MSE first. MSE starts the scan of the thumb drive…   You can use this to scan any removable media. Here is an example of the ability to scan a DVD with MSE before opening any files. You can also go into Control Panel and set it as a default option of AutoPlay. Open Control Panel, View by Large icons, and click on AutoPlay. Notice that now when you go to change the default options for different types of media, Scanning with MSE is now included in the dropdown lists. Remove Settings If you want to remove the MSE AutoPlay Handler, Ramesh was kind enough to create an undo registry file. Double-click on undo.reg from the original MSE AutoPlay folder and click yes to the message to remove the setting.   Then you will need to go into the Windows directory and manually delete the msescan.vbs script file. This is an awesome trick which will allow you to scan your thumb drives and other removable media from the AutoPlay dialog. We tested it out on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 and it works perfectly on each one. Download mseautoplay.zip Download Microsoft Security Essentials Read Our Review of MSE Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable AutoPlay in Windows VistaFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XPDisable Autoplay of Audio CDs and USB DrivesHow To Remove Antivirus Live and Other Rogue/Fake Antivirus MalwareScan Files for Viruses Before You Download With Dr.Web TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010 Daily Motivator (Firefox)

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• Slow Firefox Javascript Canvas Performance?

  - by jujumbura

  As a followup from a previous post, I have been trying to track down some slowdown I am having when drawing a scene using Javascript and the canvas element. I decided to narrow down my focus to a REALLY barebones animation that only clears the canvas and draws a single image, once per-frame. This of course runs silky smooth in Chrome, but it still stutters in Firefox. I added a simple FPS calculator, and indeed it appears that my page is typically getting an FPS in the 50's when running Firefox. This doesn't seem right to me, I must be doing something wrong here. Can anybody see anything I might be doing that is causing this drop in FPS? <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> </head> <body bgcolor=silver> <canvas id="myCanvas" width="600" height="400"></canvas> <img id="myHexagon" src="Images/Hexagon.png" style="display: none;"> <script> window.requestAnimFrame = (function(callback) { return window.requestAnimationFrame || window.webkitRequestAnimationFrame || window.mozRequestAnimationFrame || window.oRequestAnimationFrame || window.msRequestAnimationFrame || function(callback) { window.setTimeout(callback, 1000 / 60); }; })(); var animX = 0; var frameCounter = 0; var fps = 0; var time = new Date(); function animate() { var canvas = document.getElementById("myCanvas"); var context = canvas.getContext("2d"); context.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height); animX += 1; if (animX == canvas.width) { animX = 0; } var image = document.getElementById("myHexagon"); context.drawImage(image, animX, 128); context.lineWidth=1; context.fillStyle="#000000"; context.lineStyle="#ffffff"; context.font="18px sans-serif"; context.fillText("fps: " + fps, 20, 20); ++frameCounter; var currentTime = new Date(); var elapsedTimeMS = currentTime - time; if (elapsedTimeMS >= 1000) { fps = frameCounter; frameCounter = 0; time = currentTime; } // request new frame requestAnimFrame(function() { animate(); }); } window.onload = function() { animate(); }; </script> </body> </html>

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• Why do I get this file loading exception when trying to draw sprites with libgdx?

  - by BluFire

  I'm having trouble with the "Drawing Images" section on the libgdx tutorial. I set up the documents completely and I typed the code as follows: public class Game implements ApplicationListener { public static final String LOG = Game.class.getSimpleName(); private FPSLogger fpsLogger; private SpriteBatch batch; private Texture texture; private Sprite sprite; private TextureRegion region; //removed irrelevant code for this question... @Override public void render() { texture = new Texture(Gdx.files.internal("android.png")); region = new TextureRegion(texture, 20, 20, 50, 50); sprite = new Sprite(texture, 20, 20, 50, 50); sprite.setPosition(10, 10); sprite.setRotation(45); Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0f, 1f, 0f, 1f); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); batch.begin(); batch.draw(texture,10,10); batch.draw(region,10,10); sprite.draw(batch); batch.end(); // output the current FPS fpsLogger.log(); } } I went through the tutorial on the website but when I run the code I get errors: Exception in thread "LWJGL Application" com.badlogic.gdx.utils.GdxRuntimeException: Couldn't load file: android.png at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Pixmap.<init>(Pixmap.java:137) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.glutils.FileTextureData.prepare(FileTextureData.java:55) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture.load(Texture.java:175) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture.create(Texture.java:159) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture.<init>(Texture.java:133) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture.<init>(Texture.java:122) at com.game.Game.render(Game.java:46) at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication.mainLoop (LwjglApplication.java:163) at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication$1.run(LwjglApplication.java:113) Caused by: com.badlogic.gdx.utils.GdxRuntimeException: File not found: android.png (Internal) at com.badlogic.gdx.files.FileHandle.read(FileHandle.java:108) at com.badlogic.gdx.files.FileHandle.length(FileHandle.java:364) at com.badlogic.gdx.files.FileHandle.readBytes(FileHandle.java:156) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Pixmap.<init>(Pixmap.java:134) ... 8 more I set the android.png in my assests folder in my android project linking it to the desktop one, I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. What is making these errors? FIX. Weird ending.this was the plus where the sprite is suppose to look like. The top right corner of the next image should look like, the bottom left is what turned out in the code. I'm think it was because of the texture region but I'm not 100%. Can somebody explain why it is really warped? I thought the changes I made in the coding will just change position/rotation, rather then a change in the image.

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• Best pathfinding for a 2D world made by CPU Perlin Noise, with random start- and destinationpoints?

  - by Mathias Lykkegaard Lorenzen

  I have a world made by Perlin Noise. It's created on the CPU for consistency between several devices (yes, I know it takes time - I have my techniques that make it fast enough). Now, in my game you play as a fighter-ship-thingy-blob or whatever it's going to be. What matters is that this "thing" that you play as, is placed in the middle of the screen, and moves along with the camera. The white stuff in my world are walls. The black stuff is freely movable. Now, as the player moves around he will constantly see "monsters" spawning around him in a circle (a circle that's larger than the screen though). These monsters move inwards and try to collide with the player. This is the part that's tricky. I want these monsters to constantly spawn, moving towards the player, but avoid walls entirely. I've added a screenshot below that kind of makes it easier to understand (excuse me for my bad drawing - I was using Paint for this). In the image above, the following rules apply. The red dot in the middle is the player itself. The light-green rectangle is the boundaries of the screen (in other words, what the player sees). These boundaries move with the player. The blue circle is the spawning circle. At the circumference of this circle, monsters will spawn constantly. This spawncircle moves with the player and the boundaries of the screen. Each monster spawned (shown as yellow triangles) wants to collide with the player. The pink lines shows the path that I want the monsters to move along (or something similar). What matters is that they reach the player without colliding with the walls. The map itself (the one that is Perlin Noise generated on the CPU) is saved in memory as two-dimensional bit-arrays. A 1 means a wall, and a 0 means an open walkable space. The current tile size is pretty small. I could easily make it a lot larger for increased performance. I've done some path algorithms before such as A*. I don't think that's entirely optimal here though.

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• Set a Video as Your Desktop Wallpaper with VLC

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you tired of static desktop wallpapers and want something a bit more entertaining? Today we’ll take a look at setting a video as wallpaper in VLC media player. Download and install VLC player. You’ll find the download link below. Open VLC and select Tools > Preferences. On the Preferences windows, select the Video button on the left. Under Video Settings, select DirectX video output from the Output dropdown list. Click Save before exiting and then restart VLC. Next, select a video and begin playing it with VLC. Right-click on the screen, select Video, then DirectX Wallpaper.   You can achieve the same result by selecting Video from the Menu and clicking DirectX Wallpaper.   If you’re using Windows Aero Themes, you may get the warning message below and your theme will switch automatically to a basic theme.   After the Wallpaper is enabled, minimize VLC player and enjoy the show as you work.     When you are ready to switch back to your normal wallpaper, click Video, and then close out of VLC.   Occasionally we had to manually change our wallpaper back to normal. You can do that by right clicking on the desktop and selecting your theme.   Conclusion This might not make the most productive desktop environment, but it is pretty cool. It’s definitely not the same old boring wallpaper! Download VLC Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Dual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each Desktop in Windows 7, Vista or XPDual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each DesktopDesktop Fun: Video Game Icon PacksDesktop Fun: Starship Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Mountains Theme Wallpapers TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app

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• Simple Mouse Move Event in F# with Winforms

  - by MarkPearl

  This evening I had the pleasure of reading one of ThomasP’s blog posts on first class events. It was an excellent read, and I thought I would make a brief derivative of his post to explore some of the basics. In Thomas’s post he has a form with an ellipse on it that when he clicks on the ellipse it pops up a message box with the button clicked… awesome. Something that got me on the post though was the code similar to the one below… // React to Mouse Move events on the form let evtMessages = frm.MouseMove |> Event.map (fun mi -> mi.Location.ToString()) |> Event.map (sprintf "Hey, you clicked on the ellipse.\nUsing: %s") |> Event.add (MessageBox.Show >> ignore) The MessageBox is a function with a string passed into it. What if I wanted to rather change a mutable value holder instead, how would the syntax go for that? Immediately the thought came to me of anonymous functions. I’ve used them before to do something like this… let HelloPerson personName = "Hello " + personName |> fun(x) -> Console.WriteLine(x) So using the same approach I adapted the event code to instead of showing a Message Box with a string passed in to it, to rather change the forms header. |> Event.map (sprintf "Your mouse position is %s") |> Event.add(fun(x) -> frm.Text <- x) Okay… it looks a bit weird with the –> x <- syntax, but makes sense and works… The next thing I wanted to do was change Thomas’s code sample from having an ellipse, and reacting to the position of the mouse and click, to rather trigger the event whenever the mouse moved. This simple involved removing some filtering code. Finally I wanted the code to work as a FSharp Project without having to run through the F# interactive. To achieve this I just needed to find out how to trigger the window event loop. This can be achieved with the code below… // Program eventloop while frm.Created do Application.DoEvents()   So lets look at the complete code sample… #light open System open System.Drawing open System.Windows.Forms // Create the main form let frm = new Form(ClientSize=Size(600,400)) // React to Mouse Move events on the form let evtMessages = frm.MouseMove |> Event.map (fun mi -> mi.Location.ToString()) |> Event.map (sprintf "Your mouse position is %s") |> Event.add(fun(x) -> frm.Text <- x) // Show the form frm.Show() // Program eventloop while frm.Created do Application.DoEvents()

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• Voxel terrain rendering with marching cubes

  - by JavaJosh94

  I was working on making procedurally generated terrain using normal cubish voxels (like minecraft) But then I read about marching cubes and decided to convert to using those. I managed to create a working marching cubes class and cycle through the densities and everything in it seemed to be working so I went on to work on actual terrain generation. I'm using XNA (C#) and a ported libnoise library to generate noise for the terrain generator. But instead of rendering smooth terrain I get a 64x64 chunk (I specified 64 but can change it) of seemingly random marching cubes using different triangles. This is the code I'm using to generate a "chunk": public MarchingCube[, ,] getTerrainChunk(int size, float dMultiplyer, int stepsize) { MarchingCube[, ,] temp = new MarchingCube[size / stepsize, size / stepsize, size / stepsize]; for (int x = 0; x < size; x += stepsize) { for (int y = 0; y <size; y += stepsize) { for (int z = 0; z < size; z += stepsize) { float[] densities = {(float)terrain.GetValue(x, y, z)*dMultiplyer, (float)terrain.GetValue(x, y+stepsize, z)*dMultiplyer, (float)terrain.GetValue(x+stepsize, y+stepsize, z)*dMultiplyer, (float)terrain.GetValue(x+stepsize, y, z)*dMultiplyer, (float)terrain.GetValue(x,y,z+stepsize)*dMultiplyer,(float)terrain.GetValue(x,y+stepsize,z+stepsize)*dMultiplyer,(float)terrain.GetValue(x+stepsize,y+stepsize,z+stepsize)*dMultiplyer,(float)terrain.GetValue(x+stepsize,y,z+stepsize)*dMultiplyer }; Vector3[] corners = { new Vector3(x,y,z), new Vector3(x,y+stepsize,z),new Vector3(x+stepsize,y+stepsize,z),new Vector3(x+stepsize,y,z), new Vector3(x,y,z+stepsize), new Vector3(x,y+stepsize,z+stepsize), new Vector3(x+stepsize,y+stepsize,z+stepsize), new Vector3(x+stepsize,y,z+stepsize)}; if (x == 0 && y == 0 && z == 0) { temp[x / stepsize, y / stepsize, z / stepsize] = new MarchingCube(densities, corners, device); } temp[x / stepsize, y / stepsize, z / stepsize] = new MarchingCube(densities, corners); } } } (terrain is a Perlin Noise generated using libnoise) I'm sure there's probably an easy solution to this but I've been drawing a blank for the past hour. I'm just wondering if the problem is how I'm reading in the data from the noise or if I may be generating the noise wrong? Or maybe the noise is just not good for this kind of generation? If I'm reading it wrong does anyone know the right way? the answers on google were somewhat ambiguous but I'm going to keep searching. Thanks in advance!

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• Viewing at Impossible Angles

  - by kemer

  The picture of the little screwdriver with the Allen wrench head to the right is bound to invoke a little nostalgia for those readers who were Sun customers in the late 80s. This tool was a very popular give-away: it was essential for installing and removing Multibus (you youngsters will have to look that up on Wikipedia…) cards in our systems. Back then our mid-sized systems were gargantuan: it was routine for us to schlep around a 200 lb. desk side box and 90 lb. monitor to demo a piece of software your smart phone will run better today. We were very close to the hardware, and the first thing a new field sales systems engineer had to learn was how put together a system. If you were lucky, a grizzled service engineer might run you through the process once, then threaten your health and existence should you ever screw it up so that he had to fix it. Nowadays we make it much easier to learn the ins and outs of our hardware with simulations–3D animations–that take you through the process of putting together or replacing pieces of a system. Most recently, we have posted three sophisticated PDFs that take advantage of Acrobat 9 features to provide a really intelligent approach to documenting hardware installation and repair: Sun Fire X4800/X4800 M2 Animations for Chassis Components Sun Fire X4800/X4800 M2 Animations for Sub Assembly Module (SAM) Sun Fire X4800/X4800 M2 Animations for CMOD Download one of these documents and take a close look at it. You can view the hardware from any angle, including impossible ones. Each document has a number of procedures, that break down into steps. Click on a procedure, then a step and you will see it animated in the drawing. Of course hardware design has generally eliminated the need for things like our old giveaway tools: components snap and lock in. Often you can replace redundant units while the system is hot, but for heaven’s sake, you’ll want to verify that you can do that before you try it! Meanwhile, we can all look forward to a growing portfolio of these intelligent documents. We would love to hear what you think about them. –Kemer

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• Simple heart container script for 2D game (Unity)?

  - by N1ghtshade3

  I'm attempting to create a simple mobile game (C#) that involves a simple three-heart life system. After searching for hours online, many of the solutions use OnGUI (which is apparently horrible for performance) and the rest are too complicated for me to understand and add to my code. The other solutions involve using a single texture and just hiding part of it when damage is taken. In my game, however, the player should be able to go over three hearts (for example, every 100 points). Sebastian Lague's Zelda-Style Health is what I'm looking for, but even though it's a tutorial there is way too much going on that I don't need or can't customize to fit in mine. What I have so far is a script called HealthScript.cs which contains a variable lives. I have another script, PlayerPhysics.cs which calls HealthScript and subtracts a life when an enemy is hit. The part I don't get is actually drawing the hearts. I think I understand what needs to happen, I just am not experienced enough with Unity to know how. The Start function should draw three (or whatever lives is set to) hearts in the top right corner. Since the game should be resolution-independent to accommodate the various sizes of Android devices, I'd rather use scaling rather than PixelInset. When the player hits an enemy as detected by PlayerPhysics.cs, it should subtract from lives. I think that I have this working using this.GetComponent<HealthScript>().lives -= 1 but I'm not sure if it actually works. This should trigger a redraw of the hearts so that there are now two hearts. The same principle would apply for adding hearts when a score is reached, except when lives > maxHeartsPerRow, the new hearts should be drawn below the old ones. I realise I don't have much code to show but believe me; I've tried for quite some time to figure this out and have little to show for it. Any help at all would be welcome; it seems like it shouldn't take that much code to put an image on the screen for each life there is, but I haven't found anything yet. Thanks!

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• WinAPI window taking 50% of CPU when idle

  - by henryprescott

  I'm currently working on a game that creates a window using WindowsAPI. However, at the moment the process is taking up 50% of my CPU. All I am doing is creating the window and looping using the code found below: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nShowCmd) { MSG message = {0}; WNDCLASSEX wcl = {0}; wcl.cbSize = sizeof(wcl); wcl.style = CS_OWNDC | CS_HREDRAW | CS_VREDRAW; wcl.lpfnWndProc = WindowProc; wcl.cbClsExtra = 0; wcl.cbWndExtra = 0; wcl.hInstance = hInstance = hInstance; wcl.hIcon = LoadIcon(0, IDI_APPLICATION); wcl.hCursor = LoadCursor(0, IDC_ARROW); wcl.hbrBackground = 0; wcl.lpszMenuName = 0; wcl.lpszClassName = "GL2WindowClass"; wcl.hIconSm = 0; if (!RegisterClassEx(&wcl)) return 0; hWnd = CreateAppWindow(wcl, "Application"); if (hWnd) { if (Init()) { ShowWindow(hWnd, nShowCmd); UpdateWindow(hWnd); while (true) { while (PeekMessage(&message, 0, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE)) { if (message.message == WM_QUIT) break; TranslateMessage(&message); DispatchMessage(&message); } if (message.message == WM_QUIT) break; if (hasFocus) { elapsedTime = GetElapsedTimeInSeconds(); lastEarth += elapsedTime; lastUpdate += elapsedTime; lastFrame += elapsedTime; lastParticle += elapsedTime; if(lastUpdate >= (1.0f / 100.0f)) { Update(lastUpdate); lastUpdate = 0; } if(lastFrame >= (1.0f / 60.0f)) { UpdateFrameRate(lastFrame); lastFrame = 0; Render(); SwapBuffers(hDC); } if(lastEarth >= (1.0f / 10.0f)) { UpdateEarthAnimation(); lastEarth = 0; } if(lastParticle >= (1.0f / 30.0f)) { particleManager->rightBooster->Update(); particleManager->rightBoosterSmoke->Update(); particleManager->leftBooster->Update(); particleManager->leftBoosterSmoke->Update(); particleManager->breakUp->Update(); lastParticle = 0; } } else { WaitMessage(); } } } Cleanup(); UnregisterClass(wcl.lpszClassName, hInstance); } return static_cast<int>(message.wParam); } So even when I am not drawing anything when the window has focus it still takes up 50%. I don't understand how this is taking up so much system resources. Am I doing something wrong? Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!

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• Per-vertex position/normal and per-index texture coordinate

  - by Boreal

  In my game, I have a mesh with a vertex buffer and index buffer up and running. The vertex buffer stores a Vector3 for the position and a Vector2 for the UV coordinate for each vertex. The index buffer is a list of ushorts. It works well, but I want to be able to use 3 discrete texture coordinates per triangle. I assume I have to create another vertex buffer, but how do I even use it? Here is my vertex/index buffer creation code: // vertices is a Vertex[] // indices is a ushort[] // VertexDefs stores the vertex size (sizeof(float) * 5) // vertex data numVertices = vertices.Length; DataStream data = new DataStream(VertexDefs.size * numVertices, true, true); data.WriteRange<Vertex>(vertices); data.Position = 0; // vertex buffer parameters BufferDescription vbDesc = new BufferDescription() { BindFlags = BindFlags.VertexBuffer, CpuAccessFlags = CpuAccessFlags.None, OptionFlags = ResourceOptionFlags.None, SizeInBytes = VertexDefs.size * numVertices, StructureByteStride = VertexDefs.size, Usage = ResourceUsage.Default }; // create vertex buffer vertexBuffer = new Buffer(Graphics.device, data, vbDesc); vertexBufferBinding = new VertexBufferBinding(vertexBuffer, VertexDefs.size, 0); data.Dispose(); // index data numIndices = indices.Length; data = new DataStream(sizeof(ushort) * numIndices, true, true); data.WriteRange<ushort>(indices); data.Position = 0; // index buffer parameters BufferDescription ibDesc = new BufferDescription() { BindFlags = BindFlags.IndexBuffer, CpuAccessFlags = CpuAccessFlags.None, OptionFlags = ResourceOptionFlags.None, SizeInBytes = sizeof(ushort) * numIndices, StructureByteStride = sizeof(ushort), Usage = ResourceUsage.Default }; // create index buffer indexBuffer = new Buffer(Graphics.device, data, ibDesc); data.Dispose(); Engine.Log(MessageType.Success, string.Format("Mesh created with {0} vertices and {1} indices", numVertices, numIndices)); And my drawing code: // ShaderEffect, ShaderTechnique, and ShaderPass all store effect data // e is of type ShaderEffect // get the technique ShaderTechnique t; if(!e.techniques.TryGetValue(techniqueName, out t)) return; // effect variables e.SetMatrix("worldView", worldView); e.SetMatrix("projection", projection); e.SetResource("diffuseMap", texture); e.SetSampler("textureSampler", sampler); // set per-mesh/technique settings Graphics.context.InputAssembler.SetVertexBuffers(0, vertexBufferBinding); Graphics.context.InputAssembler.SetIndexBuffer(indexBuffer, SlimDX.DXGI.Format.R16_UInt, 0); Graphics.context.PixelShader.SetSampler(sampler, 0); // render for each pass foreach(ShaderPass p in t.passes) { Graphics.context.InputAssembler.InputLayout = p.layout; p.pass.Apply(Graphics.context); Graphics.context.DrawIndexed(numIndices, 0, 0); } How can I do this?

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• Draw a never-ending line in XNA

  - by user2236165

  I am drawing a line in XNA which I want to never end. I also have a tool that moves forward in X-direction and a camera which is centered at this tool. However, when I reach the end of the viewport the lines are not drawn anymore. Here are some pictures to illustrate my problem: At the start the line goes across the whole screen, but as my tool moves forward, we reach the end of the line. Here are the method which draws the lines: private void DrawEvenlySpacedSprites (Texture2D texture, Vector2 point1, Vector2 point2, float increment) { var distance = Vector2.Distance (point1, point2); // the distance between two points var iterations = (int)(distance / increment); // how many sprites with be drawn var normalizedIncrement = 1.0f / iterations; // the Lerp method needs values between 0.0 and 1.0 var amount = 0.0f; if (iterations == 0) iterations = 1; for (int i = 0; i < iterations; i++) { var drawPoint = Vector2.Lerp (point1, point2, amount); spriteBatch.Draw (texture, drawPoint, Color.White); amount += normalizedIncrement; } } Here are the draw method in Game. The dots are my lines: protected override void Draw (GameTime gameTime) { graphics.GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black); nyVector = nextVector (gammelVector); GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget (renderTarget); spriteBatch.Begin (); DrawEvenlySpacedSprites (dot, gammelVector, nyVector, 0.9F); spriteBatch.End (); GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget (null); spriteBatch.Begin (SpriteSortMode.Deferred, BlendState.AlphaBlend, null, null, null, null, camera.transform); spriteBatch.Draw (renderTarget, new Vector2 (), Color.White); spriteBatch.Draw (tool, new Vector2(toolPos.X - (tool.Width/2), toolPos.Y - (tool.Height/2)), Color.White); spriteBatch.End (); gammelVector = new Vector2 (nyVector.X, nyVector.Y); base.Draw (gameTime); } Here's the next vector-method, It just finds me a new point where the line should be drawn with a new X-coordinate between 100 and 200 pixels and a random Y-coordinate between the old vector Y-coordinate and the height of the viewport: Vector2 nextVector (Vector2 vector) { return new Vector2 (vector.X + r.Next(100, 200), r.Next ((int)(vector.Y - 100), viewport.Height)); } Can anyone point me in the right direction here? I'm guessing it has to do with the viewport.width, but I'm not quite sure how to solve it. Thank you for reading!

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• CRM vs VRM

  - by David Dorf

  In a previous post, I discussed the potential power of combining social, interest, and location graphs in order to personalize marketing and shopping experiences for consumers.  Marketing companies have been trying to collect detailed information for that very purpose, a large majority of which comes from tracking people on the internet.  But their approaches stem from the one-way nature of traditional advertising.  With TV, radio, and magazines there is no opportunity to truly connect to customers, which has trained marketing companies to [covertly] collect data and segment customers into easily identifiable groups.  To a large extent, we think of this as CRM. But what if we turned this viewpoint upside-down to accommodate for the two-way nature of social media?  The notion of marketing as conversations was the basis for the Cluetrain, an early attempt at drawing attention to the fact that customers are actually unique humans.  A more practical implementation is Project VRM, which is a reverse CRM of sorts.  Instead of vendors managing their relationships with customers, customers manage their relationships with vendors. Your shopping experience is not really controlled by you; rather, its controlled by the retailer and advertisers.  And unfortunately, they typically don't give you a say in the matter.  Yes, they might tailor the content for "female age 25-35 interested in shoes" but that's not really the essence of you, is it?  A better approach is to the let consumers volunteer information about themselves.  And why wouldn't they if it means a better, more relevant shopping experience?  I'd gladly list out my likes and dislikes in exchange for getting rid of all those annoying cookies on my harddrive. I really like this diagram from Beyond SocialCRM as it captures the differences between CRM and VRM. The closest thing to VRM I can find is Buyosphere, a start-up that allows consumers to track their shopping history across many vendors, then share it appropriately.  Also, Amazon does a pretty good job allowing its customers to edit their profile, which includes everything you've ever purchased from Amazon.  You can mark items as gifts, or explicitly exclude them from their recommendation engine.  This is a win-win for both the consumer and retailer. So here is my plea to retailers: Instead of trying to infer my interests from snapshots of my day, please just ask me.  We'll both have a better experience in the long-run.

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